Social Materialist Psychology
Description
The Midlands Psychology Group:
"We are a group of psychologists: clinical, counselling and academic. We have been meeting regularly since 2003. We call ourselves social materialist psychologists. This is not necessarily a formally worked-out philosophical stance. Most psychology is individual and idealist. It takes the individual as a given unit of analysis, and treats the social as a somewhat optional and often uniform context. And, in what is still at root a Cartesian move, it treats the material world as straightforwardly present, but simultaneously subordinate to the immaterial cognitions by which we reflect upon it.
It is by contrast to this that our psychology is social materialist. Social because we affirm the primacy of the social, of collectivity, relationality and community, because we acknowledge that individuals are thoroughly social: ontogenetically, in their origins, and continuously and non-optionally during their existence. And material because we acknowledge that the cognitions by which we reflect upon the world do not simply float free of its affordances, character and properties. Cognition is both social and material, rooted in the ring-fenced metacognitive resources we have acquired, the embodied capacities it recruits, and the resources and subjective possibilities our world supplies (Johnson, 2007; Tolman, 1994; Vygotsky, 1962).
By social materialist psychology, then, we do not mean to imply a mere inverse reflection of the mainstream, a negation, a futile rush to its polar opposite. Individuals exist, but their experiences are thoroughly social, at the very same time as they are singular and personal. And cognitions occur, but their relation to the material world is neither determinate nor arbitrary. Our social materialist psychology is therefore aligned – in sentiment, if not content – with other contemporary initiatives that similarly refuse the naïve separations of individual and social, experience and materiality: psychosocial studies, studies of subjectivity, process philosophy, the turns to language and to affect. In each of these perspectives (and more besides) we find resources, echoes and inspirations.
We write as we act: collectively. In this, we align ourselves with a tradition of psychologists (Curt, 1994), political theorists and activists (The Free Association, 2011), writers and artists (Home, 1991) who reject in practice the notion that ideas are simply the achievement of individuals. At a moment when collectivity, solidarity and mutual trust are so sorely needed, this simple act may take on significances beyond the pages within which it appears." (http://www.midpsy.org/draft_manifesto.htm)