Psychology in the social imaginary of neoliberalism: Critique and beyond

In the last third of the 20th century, much of the world’s political economy underwent a shift from a state-centered regulatory framework to a neoliberal orientation that continues to the present. Begun as an economic theory to counter Keynesian economics, the impact of neoliberalism has been felt in politics, policy, and sociality. Many of its ideas are implicit in capitalism, but one could argue that the line of descent began much earlier with the establishment of human settlement for agriculture and the social, economic, and political hierarchies, with attendant inequities, that emerged in those settings (see Scott, 2017; cf. Suzman, 2017).

The articles in this special issue primarily deal with the impact of neoliberalism on sociality, though the reader is urged to be mindful that sociality is not truly separable from the whole of economic and political life. In light of that, the term “social imaginary” is the best expression for understanding the pervasiveness of the state we are all living in. The social imaginary of any time and place is the default sense of order and social arrangement. As Taylor wrote, “once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one, the only one that makes sense” (2002, p. 99). In any era and society, it is the tacit, primarily practical (non-theoretical), sense of how things are, what our society is about, how we should act, and what defines and guides human relationships (Anderson, 1991; Hall & Lamont, 2013; Taylor, 2002). If we view the 18th century as the starting point for what is now our contemporary social imaginary, we see that it was the emergence of the view of society as an economy, with its notions of internally regulated laws and a focus on consumption, that created the eventuality of neoliberalism.

The social imaginary that has emerged in this regime defines personhood as self-reliant individualism which achieves success through an entrepreneurialism of the self. Flexible and protean in its deployment of markets as determinant of value, neoliberalism creates spaces in which people reconfigure relationships, reorder their sense of what it means to be a citizen, and reimagine the self (Greenhouse, 2009). Sequelae vary, but under neoliberal governance the reconfiguration of sociality leads to a reduced sense of communal solidarity as each person is expected to act in their own self-interest.

The psychology that arose in Western societies generally, but especially in the United States, since the late 19th century accords with this view and holds a reflexive relationship with neoliberalism. One could make the case that the ascendance of American psychology since World War II facilitated neoliberal thinking, but even more that it prepared individuals to think and act neoliberally, if I may coin a term (see Pickren & Rutherford, 2010, Chapter 10). Regardless, it is now the case that psychology is embedded in and reflective of—perhaps even a driver of—the neoliberal imaginary.

In this special issue, each of our authors illustrate aspects of psychology’s role in shaping and participating in our current social imaginary. The articles are based on papers presented in a symposium of the same title at the 2017 convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), with an added discussion by Michael Arfken (2018). The authors provide a historical/theoretical précis of the enmeshment of psychology in neoliberalism.

Teo (2018) proposes that our social imaginary is best characterized by analyzing the society–individual nexus via what he labels a neoliberal form of subjectivity (NLFS), that was embryonic in capitalism from the beginning. Other scholars also have argued that it is the implications of neoliberalism’s impact on human subjectivities that are most worrisome (e.g., Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001; Hall & Lamont, 2013). Teo argues that the psy-disciplines are complicit in the creation and maintenance of the NLFS, with consequences for cognition and feeling. Finally, he posits that the manner in which neoliberalism has hollowed out the concept of individual agency makes it appear that resistance to the neoliberal agenda is an exercise in futility.

Winston (2018) provides a historical framework to show how ideas about innate intelligence revealed by intelligence tests have come to be used by neoliberal pundits and policy makers. In contrast to the conclusions drawn by some psychologists, including eugenicists, of the earlier era (such as Lewis Terman, 1916; see also Carson, 2007) that there was a role for government to play in planning interventions with regard to variations in intelligence, post-WWII, some prominent neoliberals valorized the IQ as being due to genetics and thus differences were naturalized. There was no need for the state to intervene; neoliberals argued against state support of educational programs to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. In fact, all attempts by governments to create equity, such as through affirmative action, violate the natural order that only the market could produce. When markets are conceptualized as free, race and class are irrelevant as discriminatory behavior will exact a price in lowered returns to those who discriminate. Thus, there is no compelling need for efforts by the state to ensure equity and equality of opportunity.

Rutherford (2018) takes up the argument made by several scholars that women, especially young women, have been conceptualized as ideal neoliberal subjects who have embraced the myth of empowerment and responsibilization in pursuing self-transformation via consumption, self-help, and the continual “making over” of the self. The convergence of neoliberal views of the entrepreneurial self with postfeminist views that assume a broad achievement of gender equality (thus making further feminist activism unnecessary) has created the demand/expectation that women both see themselves and express to others that they lead free and autonomous lives. Like Teo (2018), Rutherford argues that the psy-disciplines and some forms of liberal feminism are complicit in the embrace of these views. She articulates a counter psychology capable of disrupting neoliberal/postfeminist appeals in regard to gender through a focus on radical inclusion. Such a psychology would rethink human subjectivity, perhaps in terms of distributed subjectivity, and would require an intersectional analysis. This counter psychology would engage the power structures that create and maintain oppression based on social categories. Rutherford argues for a critical history of psychology that allows us to think against the current givens of society and urges the use of conjunctural analyses that would make it possible to see how hegemonies are constructed and to construct counter-hegemonies. She ends by calling psychological scholars, theorists, and practitioners to an engagement with the insights and truths of indigenous and decolonial thinkers, which will lead us to activism for change (see Escobar, 2017; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; for a more comprehensive approach to indigenous and critical methods, see Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008).

Bhatia and Priya (2018) use the influence of Euro-American psychology in India as a case study to explore the creation of Indian selves as happy, productive workers in sync with Western neoliberal values. Their use of a decolonizing framework makes it possible to see how the globalization of neoliberal discourses recreate identities and instantiate entrepreneurial selves that may vary by cultural location, while still embodying neoliberal values. Their examples of the use of Euro-American psychological products, such as personality tests, work formations, and motivational techniques, show how identities can be reshaped and re-colonized through corporate power and the specific implementation of a global corporate cross-cultural psychology. The impact of global neoliberalism goes beyond psychological notions of identity, they argue. They illustrate this with the case study of how the imposition of neoliberal policies in seizing the land and property of villagers in order to enhance corporate power and profits had devastating effects on the mental health of the villagers. The psychology that is at the heart of these events and processes in India has a neo-colonial effect, that is, it perpetuates the coloniality of mind and relationships and makes it imperative that decolonizing methods be used to gain redress from it.

Cosgrove and Karter (2018) address medical neoliberalism, especially in domains of research and practice related to mental health. They argue that in health care, patients have been increasingly responsibilized, while at the same time there has been a move toward increased surveillance of patients. The health care industry has prioritized an ethics of surveillance and commodification over the ethics of care. In this ethics, technology is utilized as a means to screen and monitor individuals with the goal of returning them to a status of productive citizen in the neoliberal marketplace. They argue that where these processes are the most complex and profound is in the movement of Global Mental Health, in which personal, familial, and even collective problems are recast as medical and thus best suited for treatment that draws on norms of intervention that suit the market. This has opened the door for the commercial strategies of the pharmaceutical industry and its embrace of the technologies of surveillance. Cosgrove and Karter use the example of routine screening for depression as a way to illustrate the complexity and depth of medical neoliberalism. For Cosgrove and Karter, there is a “poison in the cure,” however. That is, that the reforms offered for reducing the influence of industry and the marketplace on mental health research and practice, such as the Open Science movement and calls for researcher transparency, may themselves rely on and reify a neoliberal worldview.

In his discussion of the articles, Arfken (2018) challenges us to move to a deeper critique, taking full cognizance of how critique functions within neoliberalism and how it might be made to function. He briefly situates neoliberalism within the longue durée of political economy, especially capitalism and its fiercest critic, Karl Marx. Arfken seeks to show how the implications of each article might be brought into an activist stance, thus helping to bring theory and praxis into more intimate conversation and collaboration. It is clear from the articles and his discussion that our case for alterities must be strengthened through action.

The contents of this special issue may strike the reader as bleak, rendering Euro-American psychology less a success story of the 20th and 21st centuries and more a force for dystopia. If so, then it is worth noting that while Western psychology taken as a whole has had less than an emancipatory effect, a closer look reveals that there are indeed points of resistance and activism in psychology that indicate a move toward a liberatory stance (see Martin-Baro, 1996; Montero & Sonn, 2009, for accounts from multiple countries; see Burton & Kagan, 2005, for a history of Liberation of Social Psychology).

Given the seriousness of our situation in a time of rising nationalism and fascism, the greater wisdom for psychology is to look beyond its own boundaries in order to learn from and collaborate with like-minded scholars and scholar-activists in the human sciences, humanities, and wherever else they might be found. There are multiple voices of resistance and alternative articulations of human life and sociality present in many disciplines and multiple sites around the world. One of the strongest is the collective project that works under the title (in English) of Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality. The collective includes such figures as Arturo Escobar, Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Drawing on their own work and that of allies such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, they have been articulating the pluriverse, a Zapatista concept that means a “world where many worlds fit” (Escobar, 2017, p. xvi), rather than the one-world view that arose out of the Enlightenment and was embodied in 500 years of modernity/coloniality, of which neoliberalism is the latest expression. The body of scholarship, critique, and action developed by Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality ¹ holds immense possibilities for enriching psychology and creating opportunities for meaningful collaboration.

The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality collective argues that the major fault lines and sites of conflict of the 21st century will be the struggle for control of authority and knowledge (Mignolo, 2011); to which I would add subjectivities. The decolonial option expressed by Mignolo and colleagues places knowledge, subjectivity, authority, and economy in the service of pluriversality. In this approach of many worlds co-existing there is an openness and commitment to inter-epistemic relations that creates many potential methodologies for addressing the coloniality of the self engendered by 500 years of the Western matrix of power (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) and liberating subjectivities from classifications based on race, gender, and sexuality that are historically grounded in patriarchical coloniality. This is one of the nodes of connection for psychologists who are working on addressing these and cognate issues. Psychology would be able to contribute methodologies, critiques, and theory, while also learning to recognize the limits of Western Enlightenment rationality. In that recognition, we as psychologists could begin to see our approaches, our knowledge, indeed, our episteme, as being in the pluriverse, a world in which many worlds coexist and in that mutuality becoming richer in thought and practice.

There are other alliances to be made, of course, such as with members of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (https://criticaltheoryconsortium.org). My point is that critique such as that offered in these pages is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must move beyond critique and we must find collaborators in order to have maximum impact. In the words of the Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos, ² “We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together in step with other dignified feet” (as cited in Bardacke, 1995, p. 139).