Neuroscience in Psychology Textbooks 29desperately, to look for the psyche. Some statistical evidence from a
typical psychology textbook “Psychology. A concise introduction”
(Griggs, 2010): the word count of terms containing “psych” is 743 (of
which 52 instances referring to “antipsychotic drugs”), whilst the words
containing “neur” or “neuro” amount to 521, to which one can add 684
words containing “brain.” The war on the psyche seems settled. Hence,
learn about the brain in order to not know yourself or the world? Just look
at the current psychology textbooks: the traditional first chapter is one
trying to make the case that psychology is a science while the second
chapter is about neuroscience and the brain.^1 As if the claim that
psychology is a science needs to be backed up with arguments from
biology: turning thus psychology into a mere sub-discipline, if not a mere
sub-science and thus signaling its de facto disappearance?
At the least, we have seen the advent of a hegemonic
neuromonoculture. If once there was a, perhaps modest, panoply of
approaches, visions, models if not ideologies within psychology, then
surely since the 1990’s we are witnessing the “one ring to rule them all”
situation. The 1990’s were proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush,
via a presidential declaration, as “The decade of the brain” to raise both
public awareness and funds. At the very least, this is the message that
should be spread: it’s all in the brain! It is drummed home in the media, at
work, in our schools: everybody up to the teenagers and even toddlers are
told that they have a brain and actually coincide with it. Why is this the
case? Why do psychology and the neurosciences lead to this massive
interpellation: hey you, this is what you are?^2 At least one can observe that
psychology and the neurosciences are inextricably linked to the
phenomena of psychologization and neurologization, which, as I
documented elsewhere (De Vos, 2012, 2013, 2016), are basically about the
neurospsysciences delivering the coercive discursive coordinates for us to
understand ourselves and the world. Could it be that the human species is
the only species that must be told what it is, so that it would not wander off
to other paths? “This is what you are” and “this is what the human is
(^1) This is for example the case in Griggs (2010).
(^2) The reference here is to Louis Althusser’s (1971) concept of interpellation.