Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Childhood studies: From participation to the incorporation of their voices.
The present article seeks to reflect on the notion of “children’s voice” and to problematize the way in which childhood social studies have attempted to approach it. The argument draws on the definition of children’s voices as the first-person expression of the relational network of positionings and social echoes that children articulate in a singular way, responding to the words of adults. The limitations of childhood studies of capturing and accounting for the inherent complexity of this phenomenon and of the subjectivity of children’s voices are discussed. A case is made for the contribution of Bakhtin’s language theory and of relational psychoanalysis to account for the relational complexity involved in the notion of children’s voice. We propose that Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and discursive positions of the self can contribute to the understanding and the study of children’s voices, considering the dynamic and changing social framework in which they are produced and that will inevitably influence the research process when studying childhood. We then elaborate on the relational understanding of the human mind proposed by relational psychoanalysis and on the concept of intersubjectivity, pointing out its contribution to understanding the way in which children’s voices are articulated and how they may manifest within the researcher-subject encounter. Finally, we argue in favor of incorporating the understandings about subjectivity and the relationship between subjectivities proposed by these two theoretical models in childhood social studies that seek to account for the voices of children, suggesting some concrete methodological principles and approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Intersectionality: A dialogue with Marxism–Leninism.
The present article contrasts the intersectionality framework, prevalent in the U.S. today, with that of Marxism–Leninism, all within their historical context. Several points of commonality are noted and included: the occurrence of overlapping forms of oppression; intersecting oppressions must be viewed in their totality and interconnection; fighting oppression requires working class unity; and oppressive attitudes among working class individuals must be eradicated. However, intersectionality and Marxism–Leninism are neither fundamentally compatible nor reconcilable. These irreconcilable differences between intersectionality and Marxism–Leninism include an idealist versus materialist philosophical orientation; focus on lived individual experiences of oppression versus a U.S. class analysis; exclusively targeting racist/sexist/heterosexist individual belief systems versus targeting capitalism (or the principal contradiction of labor vs. capital); targeting perceived beneficiaries of oppression and privilege versus building working class unity; and reforming capitalism versus fighting for socialism. The article concludes with a call for intersectionalists and Marxist–Leninists to learn from each other’s conceptual framework in order to work productively together to build an antiracist/sexist/heterosexist, socialist society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Problems of hate and emancipation: Some considerations for liberation psychology.
Hatred, understood as a kind of negative attachment, circulates in different ways within a global capitalist economy premised on the degradation and expropriation of lives, labors, and lands. At the same time, psychoanalysis shows that hateful instincts are often repressed or worked through in an attempt to develop loving identifications and attachments. Thus, love functions together with hate in a conflictual dialectic. Although we cannot trust hatred, hate remains a part of human subjectivity. This somewhat curious position that hate occupies raises important questions for activists committed to building emancipatory political power. On the one hand, hateful annihilation cannot be relied on as a basis for progressive politics, yet on the other hand, piously refusing to engage with hatred in progressive politics is likely to result in the repression of hate, and thus the emboldening of a hateful unconscious. In this article, I interrogate the place of hate in social movements, drawing from the liberation psychology paradigm to do so. Specifically, I consider what hate might mean for psychological work concerned with recovering historiographical fragments, interrogating comradeship, and embracing radical democracy. It is because hate is so dangerous that we must take seriously its influence on emancipatory political programmes committed to opposing—and, indeed, hating—capitalism’s systematised hatred. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Psychology, race, and “the politics of truth”.
In October 2021, the American Psychological Association issued a statement apologizing for its complicity with systemic racism and the coinciding failure in its mission to benefit society (American Psychological Association, 2021a). What accounts for the persistence of racism in the field despite decades of disavowals and stated commitments to work against it? In this article, we describe our analysis of the resilient operations of racism and whiteness within foundational dimensions of contemporary psychological paradigms—dimensions that are so foundational that they represent taken-for-granted tenets of how research in psychology is done. This article presents a critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 1993) of a fourteen-article corpus representing the post-2020 psychological health disparities literature, a subset of psychological scholarship whose focus explicitly concerns race-related dimensions of mental health. Its discursive characteristics were found to include the practice of partial to full decontextualization of historical and present-day systemic injustices, the effective creation of race as an individual-level variable, and the production of ignorance regarding the operations of racism and whiteness. We interpret the operations of this discourse to reproduce racism in psychology via the existence of a Foucauldian truth regime, and we explore the implications for psychological research and authorship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The boundaries of moral responsibility and racially oriented microaggressions.
While microaggressions are a ubiquitous source of study for sociologists, their location at the crux of intentional and unintentional speech makes them an especially viable area of concern for philosophers. My study bridges the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and pragmatics to explore the relationship between microaggressions and moral responsibility. I consider the foundational literature on microaggressions, conversational maxims, and total speech situations, among other concepts, to explore moral responsibility in this context. I argue that people should be held responsible for their own racially motivated microaggressions in the same way that they are for other speech acts because microaggressions reflect a person’s broader beliefs. People should, thus, be held responsible for harmful actions regardless of their intended effects. The implications of the relationship between microaggression usage and moral responsibility are varied. With impacts on the lifeworld, existing discourse in several academic disciplines, and the lived experiences of those on the receiving end of microaggressions, this argument makes it clear that the relationship between microaggressions and moral responsibility is an area worth studying further. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Psychiatry as a medical discipline: Epistemological and theoretical issues.
Psychiatry is concerned with “mental disorders” intended as dysfunctions of the mind; however, as a medical discipline, psychiatry follows the organic medical model, which is concerned with the pathology of functions in the body. This problematic and equivocal positioning has led contemporary psychiatry to implicitly operate in an epistemic void and to perpetuate fundamental theoretical and operational issues that present great ethical implications and create more illness than effective treatment and relief. Nevertheless, the discipline continues to operate worldwide, enjoying a high degree of institutional support and social legitimization. This article illustrates the main epistemological and theoretical issues of psychiatry, the “mind” as its object of study, and psychiatric diagnosis, classification, and treatment. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of abandoning psychiatry’s biological framework in mental health care, and the possibility for psychiatry to find its own specific, unique, and legitimate space of knowledge and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Castrated ontologizing: A Lacanian critique of metaphysical desire.
In this article, I aim to account for the desire at the root of metaphysical/ontological practice by drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s treatment of the formation of desire and language in human subjectivity. In the section, The Fundamental Ontological Proposition, I condense the practice of metaphysics into the actual declaration of a single, highly peculiar “fundamental ontological proposition,” and subsequently analyze its 12 “formally invariant characteristics.” This argumentatively situates the phenomenon of metaphysical practice squarely within the field of desire in its connection to language. In the section, Castration and the Name-of-the-Father, I explicate Lacan’s approach to desire/language through his notions of “castration” and “le nom-du-père,” which he elaborates in detail through his 1957–1958 treatment of the Oedipal dialectic and the writings of this period. I show the close relationship that erotic alienation possesses to the condensation of a subject of language. In the section, Ontologizing as Autoerotic Fantasy, I return to the set of formally invariant characteristics of the fundamental ontological proposition, and interpret them in light of the just-explained Lacanian understanding of languaged subjectivity. I show that the fundamental ontological proposition can be interpreted as a means by which to, in fantasy, deny the structurally constitutive castration of its speaker. I conclude with several suggestions toward further research at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and metaphysical theory and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The cunning of clinical reason in psychoanalysis: How a case makes use of reflective agents to conceptualize itself.
The process of case conceptualization in psychoanalysis has at times been described by those involved as the progressive emergence of a “logic” that can be grasped only retrospectively. However, there has been little effort to frame this phenomenon in a theoretically grounded way. In this article, we suggest that Hegel’s doctrine of the cunning of reason may be used to better understand the process of psychoanalytic case conceptualization. According to Hegel, historical agents unwittingly realize the logic of history by pursuing their passion for self-aggrandizement. Analogously, we propose that reflective agents unwittingly realize the logic of the case by pursuing their passion for understanding. We illustrate this process by means of two case examples drawn from supervision sessions that were subjected to an interpersonal process recall procedure. The examples are used to document the progressive emergence of the logic of the case in a succession of reflective rounds, as evidenced by the unconscious repetition of certain words or clinical acts. However, it is only at the end of the process that the reflective agents can retrospectively become aware of the logic that was there from the beginning. In this sense, reflective agents may be thought of as the “means” through which a case attains the purpose of conceptualizing itself. We highlight five conditions for this purpose to be fulfilled: time, immersion, passion, opposition, and reflection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The failed interventions of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and neuroscience as a proxy intervention to psychoanalysis and philosophy.
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology on Jul 08 2024 (see record 2024-99969-001). The article is being made available open access under the CC-BY license following the University of College London opt-in to the Jisc/APA Read and Publish agreement. The correct copyright is “© 2023 The Author(s)” and the CC-BY license disclaimer is provided in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A strange dialectical reversal characterizes the oppositions which psychoanalysis posits against philosophy and neuroscience: what psychoanalysis intervenes with as a unique and missing quality of these subjects, reveals itself upon enquiry as already having been a feature of said subjects. This article first discusses the failed intervention of psychoanalysis within the perceived totalities and absolutes of German idealism. Psychoanalysis, founded on an ontological division and internal inconsistency with a retroactive logic, finds this internal contradiction already reflected within the supposed totalities of Schelling and Hegel. Schelling’s “blind act,” a decision with no prior foundation that grounds an abstract identity-in-itself, appears as the counterpart to what Badiou calls the strictly “analytic act.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, in which the inconclusive interpenetration of being and nothing presupposes its own conclusion in the transitions to essence, and in which an internal incompleteness and contradiction are retroactively constitutive of the concept, similarly nullifies the intervention of psychoanalysis. Finally, precisely such a reversal is presented in neuroscience, where the constitutive contradiction of contingently functional neuronal formations in the adaptive “multiple demand” model of executive functioning repeats the contingent and self-contradicting psychoanalytic subject as being its own deference within linguistic, discursive formations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Correction to “The failed interventions of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and neuroscience as a proxy intervention to psychoanalysis and philosophy” by Holmberg (2023).
Reports an error in "The failed interventions of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and neuroscience as a proxy intervention to psychoanalysis and philosophy" by Rafael Holmberg (Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Oct 12, 2023, np). The article is being made available open access under the CC-BY license following the University of College London opt-in to the Jisc/APA Read and Publish agreement. The correct copyright is “© 2023 The Author(s)” and the CC-BY license disclaimer is provided in this erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2024-16110-001). A strange dialectical reversal characterizes the oppositions which psychoanalysis posits against philosophy and neuroscience: what psychoanalysis intervenes with as a unique and missing quality of these subjects, reveals itself upon enquiry as already having been a feature of said subjects. This article first discusses the failed intervention of psychoanalysis within the perceived totalities and absolutes of German idealism. Psychoanalysis, founded on an ontological division and internal inconsistency with a retroactive logic, finds this internal contradiction already reflected within the supposed totalities of Schelling and Hegel. Schelling’s “blind act,” a decision with no prior foundation that grounds an abstract identity-in-itself, appears as the counterpart to what Badiou calls the strictly “analytic act.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, in which the inconclusive interpenetration of being and nothing presupposes its own conclusion in the transitions to essence, and in which an internal incompleteness and contradiction are retroactively constitutive of the concept, similarly nullifies the intervention of psychoanalysis. Finally, precisely such a reversal is presented in neuroscience, where the constitutive contradiction of contingently functional neuronal formations in the adaptive “multiple demand” model of executive functioning repeats the contingent and self-contradicting psychoanalytic subject as being its own deference within linguistic, discursive formations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology - Vol 44, Iss 4