Carl Ratner - Neoliberal Psychology

This book is about the psychology of people living in neoliberal capitalist society. Their psychology is neoliberal psychology. It is infused with neoliberal form and content. These characteristics of neoliberal psychology are derived from the characteristics of neoliberal society and require a deep understanding of the latter. Neoliberal psychology is thus a vital insight into neoliberal society. Neoliberal psychology brings society into psychology, and psychology into society. It breaks down the false, artificial division between society and psychology that is practiced in academia and in everyday life.

This book has been motivated by four concerns: (1) to scientifically understand the cultural psychology of people in the neoliberal era, (2) to develop the academic discipline of cultural psychology to become adequate to comprehending neoliberal psychology, (3) to utilize neoliberal psychology to deepen our understanding of neoliberal society (which is dominant around the world), and (4) to utilize our understanding of neoliberal psychology and neoliberal society to enrich/improve our current psychology and social system. We need a coherent understanding of the present and its dialectical potential for a qualitatively improved future. The current lack of this understanding is responsible for the triple errors of current social trends: (a) ignoring or accepting the true causes of oppression, and electing economic and political oppressors as social leaders, (b) attacking innocent scapegoats such as immigrants, gender, religious groups, and race, and (c) lacking a vision of a viable, comprehensive alternative to neoliberalism. All of these errors intensify the oppression and crises that afflict the populace.

The distinctive contribution of cultural psychology to social emancipation lies in the scientific conceptualization of psychological phenomena as cultural phenomena that are elements of cultural factors and processes. It follows that enriching, fulfilling, and emancipating psychology requires enriching, fulfilling, and emancipating its cultural basis and character. No other psychological approach includes emancipating the social system within its purview because no other approach conceptualizes psychology as elements of the system.

The political, critical, transformative, and emancipatory thrust of cultural psychology is particularly necessary in this era of cascading geopolitical, environmental, economic, and moral disasters. This book elucidates the contribution that cultural psychology can make to salvaging and advancing human civilization.

Neoliberal psychology is not simply certain natural reactions to neoliberal society. It is not simply that neoliberal society galvanizes our anxiety or confusion or hyperactivity or suspiciousness or defensiveness or depression or confidence, or creativity. These abstract, psychobiological reactions to neoliberalism do not capture the neoliberal form and content of our psychology. They would actually reduce neoliberal psychology to a quantitative point on a universal scale. They would reduce culture to a simple, quantitative regulator of universal, specific psychological processes. (This is the methodology of most cross-cultural psychologists who compare diverse cultures on their degree of religiosity, or neuroticism.)

Neoliberal psychology, like all psychology, is a concrete form and content of psychological processese.g., emotions, perception, cognition, motivation, memory, and psychological disturbance. Neoliberal psychology is not how we respond to neoliberalism on the basis of our individual (biological or personal) response mechanisms (which are outside neoliberalism). Neoliberal psychology is how neoliberalism forms our psychological responses to things, events, and people. We do not simply respond to neoliberalism; we are neoliberal responders.

The concrete, neoliberal form and content of psychology are our self, our emotion of love, our sexuality, our attention and perception, our memory, our child development, our femininity, our masculinity, our parenting, our eating, our dressing, our thinking/reasoning, our needs, and our communicating.

Our psychology is not simply situated within a neoliberal context; our psychology is infused with the features of that context.(Vygotsky 1994b, p. 348, said The environment is a factor in the realm of personality development, and its role is to act as the source of this development and not its context.) The neoliberal context is within us as well as outside. We do not simply live in neoliberal capitalism; we live neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism is our life, and we are the life of neoliberal capitalism; we are neoliberal subjects, we are neoliberal agents, and we have neoliberal psychology which is the subjectivity of neoliberal capitalism.