38 Jan De Vos
that reason never coincides with him or herself. As we read in Griggs’s
textbook: “This neuronal chemistry is the source of all of our behavior and
mental processes, but we are only aware of its products (our behavior and
mental processing) and not the intercellular chemistry itself” (Griggs,
2010, p. 50).
This misses the fact that the layperson, as a rule, is informed (through
education, through the media and different other sources) of his or her
intercellular chemistry. One could even argue: if the layperson is aware of
his or her behavior and mental processes, then this is only for the same
reason: his or her being instructed on his or her behavior and mental
processes by the same apparatuses. At the very least, the human is that
strange creature that needs to be told what he or she is (by religion, by
ideology, by science). In times of neuropsychologization this means: the
layperson needs to be brought in contact with his/her “emotions,” his/her
true self, s/he has to be informed on his or her psychology and the
neurological underpinnings of all that.
The neuropsysciences however cannot but negate this paradox of
subjectivity (being in the end nothing more than a promise of itself, of
subjectivity as the very failure of subjectivation). This subject, as ever
receding, as ever taking a distance from itself, would defy the mainstream
scientific aspirations of the psy-sciences to pin down the human being.
Hence the attempts in the textbooks to gloss over the paradoxes and to
negate them with their “check your understanding” boxes, their “study
alerts,” their “engaging stories.” However, as said, this muffling away from
the messy, paradoxical parts of being human cannot but lead that they
return through the cracks of the discursive edifice (for the Freudians
amongst you: the return of the repressed). So we should look for the
symptomatology: look for all the strange twists of (textbook)psychology,
concealed as they are in broad daylight. This is perhaps what a formation
in psychology is about: to make you immune to all these kind of
paradoxical twists, to make you blind to what is ‘hidden in plain sight’. Let
me give yet another example: