Abstract
This work aims to analyze the relations between psychology as social engineering and self-reflective citizenship from a historiogenetic point of view. Such a connection was founded during modernity; hence our proposal is to study its operative continuity in the postmodern world, taking into account the mismatches due to the new global, multicultural, and technological conditions. Based both on the theory of activity and the concept of semiosphere, the interaction and discussions of a group of Spanish students of psychology in a virtual forum were analyzed. They were asked to negotiate and co-construct their double condition of citizens and future psychologists in connection with the controversial exhibition of religious symbols in Spanish schools. Results show that students segregate both conditions. On one hand, they agree and consolidate the neutral image of a professional psychologist being respectful with the multicultural world. On the other hand, they argue about the citizen and religious topics from a personal or ideological point of view, establishing limits to multiculturalism. Neither the interchange of ideas nor the writing-reading features of the virtual artefacts improved the reflexivity on the close dependencies and contradictions of the two identity domains. This great resilience is due to a sociocultural context –the Western World- where psychology has been constituted as a neutral, objective Science World, one of whose socio-historical products - reflective citizenship- has evolved until proclaiming his/her autonomous agency, forgetting any root in the social engineering.
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Notes
Rose’s perspective is very well suited for the most progressive versions of the public and private self-reflexivity and self-government of the liberal democracies. But the concept of “governmentality” can become, certainly, very ambitious, inflexible, and standardized from a theoretical and historical point of view (Falby et al. 2007; Thompson, 2006); especially if we do not take into account the specific sociocultural contexts and practices –familiar, religious, legal, etc.- which articulate it. Therefore, self-government seems, effectively, a clue inherent to all process of Westernization, but not all nation-state projects interpreted and solved the self-government of their populations in the same way.
Of course, this is a complex historiogenetic path and it is possible to find some other versions of psychology, like the Skinnerian utopia of Walden 2 –where psychology must monitor everything–, or the historical development –and continuity in the current Cultural Psychology– of Vygotski, George Herbert Mead or Maurice Halbwachs’ theories, which preserve an important sociocultural scope. But we are mostly pointing to the mainstream and the popular and social image of our science.
In order to confirm and conduct a thorough analysis of these issues, we are also collecting data about students in last courses; i.e., after completing the socialization process in the university.
In a Foucaultian sense, literacy has been a liberating and self-reflective technology for the construction of the self, e.g. by writing diaries or letters (Foucault, 1988); but it has been also a powerful device, through state education, for aligning when literacy was used to convince millions of people, unknown to each other, that they belonged to a same collective project –for example, a nation-state–, and they should sacrifice their lives for it (Anderson, 1991). From an identity and self-reflective point of view, the historical singularities and discontinuities of the very new technologies, as a system of sociocultural activity, must be sized up in relation to those classical effects and well analyzed in practical and concrete examples. It is a different sociocultural activity to write a personal diary or a blog than attending an exam –no matter if in a physical or online document. Also, it is a different sociocultural activity to upload a professional CV than to explain your occupations in a gathering with new friends.
By semiosphere we must understand a space of mutual –and necessary– human entailment or symbiosis, which is articulated through signs and meanings (Lotman, 1990; Valsiner, 2013). As a semiosphere, our virtual space promotes the raising, circulation, and negotiation of certain identity meanings –and not others– among students. Logically, the rules and instructions given at the very beginning in the forum play a very important role in the delimitation of the borders of the semiosphere and the kind of intersubjective activity, at least as far as they produce an early demarcation and promotion of certain identity means –more than others.
In addition, no rewards –such as improvements in the exam scores– were offered for participation. This is relatively important because pilot studies showed how rewards stimulate many strategic interventions. These were more oriented to improve exam scores than to elaborate a personal point of view about the issues. Therefore, the main target and meaning of the activity change completely.
As we pointed out in the section devoted to NT, one of the most important mediational elements in a virtual space is its rules and norms. In any case, since the NT are open systems of activity, nobody can control or predicts the way in which instructions will be interpreted or managed, and hence which will be the course of the arguments and interactions. Safely, if we had given other instructions or in other order, the interactions could have been very different from those we got. Actually, as we will show, participants opened themes themselves and used keywords that are not present nor provided at all in the original instructions.
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Acknowledgments
This article was supported by funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project PSI2011-28241: “Psychology of Citizenship: Historical–Genealogical Foundations of the Psychological Construction of Self-Government and Social Coexistence in Spain”). I am very grateful to Elena Battaner, Angy Cohen, Raquel Kohen, and the K-seminar crew for their help and suggestions.
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Castro-Tejerina, J. “Psytizens”: The Co-construction of the Professional Identity of Psychology Students in the Postmodern World. Integr. psych. behav. 48, 393–417 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9279-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9279-x