144 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
obscures and elides alternative understandings of who we might become
and how our relation to the world might be altered outside the logic of the
dominant system of rule.
This is exemplified in the work of Jean Piaget, the father of
developmental psychology. Burman (1994/2016) notes that “the Piagetian
model is ... unable to theorize cultural and historical change in relation to
development” (p. 239). She goes on to argue: “Piaget depicted a subject
who is irrevocably isolated and positioned outside history and society” (p.
239). Such a transcendent understanding of the subject positions the
foundations of developmental psychology as a system of thought that
obscures the role of material relations in composing a heterogeneous field
of living struggle against homogenous systems of social control and
dominance.
In a broader sense but premised in a similar logic, Psychology itself, as
a co-evolutionary element of colonial and capitalist systems of rule, is an
active contributor to the production of our current social system (Burman,
1994/2016; Parker, 2007). As a conceptual framework for understanding
who we are, mainstream psychology has contributed to the dissemination
and proliferation of precisely the kinds of logic and conceptual frameworks
necessary for the expansion of capitalism as a polysemic system of rule.
The impact of psychology as a conceptual form of colonial subjectification
has had immense effects on a global scale with its universal registers of
diagnosis, familialism, neurological hierarchies, teleological imperatives of
personal growth, valorization of individuation, insistence on positivism,
and ongoing propositions on utopic constitutions of the self (Burman,
1994/2016; Parker, 2007). The effect of this ever-shifting yet ostensibly
determinate set of ‘truths’ has had profound implications across multiple
populations of people, reducing a potentially rich and diverse ecology of
subjective formations, and corresponding social alternatives, to a
psychological monoculture of predetermined structural possibilities.
Perhaps no branch of psychology has been more influential as a force
of colonial subjectification than developmental psychology (Burman,
1994/2016). Indeed, Piaget’s work valorizes Western science over
primitive people’s understandings of the world. (Burman (1994/2016).