ABSTRACT

In which we try to make sense of what we are subjected to in the discipline as it functions organisationally, and we are led to reflect on our sense of paranoia in a community structured by an institution we cannot control. We then notice a twist in psychological paradigms that we had not seen coming, in which qualitative research turns into a driver for psychologisation. Psychology in its most traditional quantitative laboratory-experimental mode shuts out personal experience. But it is too easy simply to complain about the way that the discipline treats people like objects instead of human beings. Psychology is also adept at incorporating ideas from qualitative research, and then the problem is not so much that it treats people like objects but that it turns them into subjects of a particular kind; these kinds of subjects are expected to monitor their own activity and to have emotional responses that can be tracked by researchers. This also poses a risk for my auto-ethnographic study of psychology, for that kind of anthropological investigation might itself end up reducing social institutional processes to personal characteristics of those who I describe here, and might end up also filtering the account through my own personal paranoiac responses to what happened. Please bear that risk, that trap, in what follows.