The Subject as Drop-Out

Abstract

In this paper, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology are treated as exemplars that demonstrate the salience of social factors in the constitution of the discipline of psychology. There have been a number of efforts that have addressed this impertinent social factor that compromises psychology's claim to being a sort of natural science. Within the current climate of alternative positions in the discipline, it is often assumed that psychology can be absorbed into historical formations, as in social constructionist critique, science studies and the endorsement of indigenous psychologies. Within contemporary mainstream psychology, other disciplines (such as biology) seem to give warrant to psychology's cherished claim to objectivity. Drawing on theories in which psychologists addressed subjectivity, the paper examines psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology to see how each attempts to articulate its disciplinary basis. In this paper, I attempt to understand how the respective theories attempt to account for and finesse the inherent sociality of the psychological dimension. In the case of psychoanalysis, the basic reference point is Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the case of humanistic psychology, the concepts of potential and experience are interrogated to better understand their ethical and ontological function within a humanistic understanding of subjectivity. It is asserted that humanistic psychology may need to extend its basic precepts beyond its current appropriation of phenomenology in order to more fully understand the question of the subjective dimension in its relationship to its social foundations.