ABSTRACT
In which we find theories outside psychology that replace the way we talk about individual selves with new descriptions of who we are in different language games. To do this we turn to European traditions of work, including that of Jean Piaget who was adopted by the discipline as its favourite developmental psychologist, and discover something about the way that our fake science works to blot out signs of the human subject. I rail against what psychology as a discipline does to human beings in this book, the way it turns us into objects to be experimented upon, subject to methodologies and social policies concerned with prediction and control. That aspect of the discipline, its power, was what drew me into it. But there is another conceptual theme that started to emerge as I learnt more about psychology, one that I explore in more detail in this chapter, something that became an important focus of my time as a postgraduate. This concerns the nature of the ‘subject’ that psychology works upon, and how we respond as human beings to those images of ourselves that psychological researchers circulate and demand we conform to. European continental philosophy opened up some new ways of thinking about that.
