Basic concepts of critical psychology

Klaus Holzkamp

pp. 19-27

in: Klaus Holzkamp, Psychology from the standpoint of the subject, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

When it comes to individuality or the human psyche, society cannot be ignored. Surely, no one doubts this. The question, however, is how society is taken into account. It is a current and widely held view that society is merely an environment that has effects upon people. This is, first of all, the case in the conditioning model of traditional psychology that, as you know, works with independent and dependent variables, conducting experiments in which conditions are set up in order to study their effects upon the individual's behaviour. Society appears here, if at all, as an independent variable, as, for example, in studies of the effects of socioeconomic status on individuals. Yet similar notions of society can be found, for instance, in sociological role theory, in which society appears as a network of expectations to which individuals are exposed, and into which they then have to integrate. There are even Marxist theorists who understand society in this way, mistakenly interpreting the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach to mean that the individual is the ensemble of societal relations. Thus, here too the individual's behaviour is assumed to be determined by societal conditions. However, this stands in stark contradiction to the basics of Marx's theory, according to which human beings are distinguished from all other species as they produce the means and conditions of their own lives, i.e. they do not simply live under conditions, but produce the conditions under which they live.

Cited authors

Marx Karl