44 Jan De Vos
away subjective knowledge, meanings and stories, but by taking away the
lack of subjective knowledge, meanings and stories. If subjectivity can be
defined as the issue of trying to be the subject of one’s own
desubjectivation,^14 then the neuropsysciences threaten to short-circuit this,
precisely by filling this gap with general knowledge and meanings: the
neuropsycommodities which entice you to become an “informed consumer
of psychology” as it formulated in the Feldman textbook (Feldman, 2015,
p. 81). We should therefore not reclaim our psychology, but rather, reclaim
our non-psychology.
EPILOGUE
If psychology could be said to concern the theories and practices that
negate the human non-psychology, could we then not after all turn to the
neurosciences and its mitigation of “psychological” issues to biological
factors? However as argued, neuroscience cannot escape psychological
theories and models: psychology is the necessary ‘other’ to neuroscience.
Suffice to take a quick look at one of the much used neuroscience
textbook, as we read:
[W]hy some things feel good and others hurt: how we move; how we
reason, learn, remember, and forget; and the nature of anger and madness.
Neuroscience research is unravelling these mysteries. (Bear, Connors, &
Paradiso, 2015, p. 4)Arguably, the main supplier of these mysteries are the psysciences:
they provide the supposedly objective issues for which to neurobiological
base is sought. In this way the neurosciences are the culmination of what
Ignacio Martín-Baró denounced as the combination of positivism with
methodological idealism in psychological research:
(^14) I am borrowing here the words of Giorgio Agamben (2002).