The Mythology of Psychology

The cognitive and affective dimensions of belief are all-important but often overlooked. In this essay, I discuss belief and suggest that psychology, the study of the mind, bears more than a passing resemblance to mythology.

Persona, 2013

Source: N. Shawaf, used with permission

Part of our self-understanding as moderns is taking the Ancient Greeks to be our cultural ancestors. Indeed, we rely on similar conceptions of responsibility, justice, and motivations for action. Another feature of early Greek epistemology that resembles that of secular modernity is that the ancients did not believe the universe was specifically designed for them. Their notions of supernatural necessity, of the power of the gods over humans and the universe, have something in common with our conception of the inexorable laws of nature as revealed through science.

Furthermore, the ancient notion of possession by the gods is similar to the overwhelming, non-rational, affective role that inspiration and epistemic certainty play in how our beliefs come to be fixed. Transcendent experiences like wonder in the face of power are central to our superstitions. Like the antique moderns, i.e., the Greeks, our sense of awe towards forces greater than ourselves, in our case science, engenders a type of superstitious belief in psychology that resembles a traditional belief in mythology.

Let us first consider Greek terms for the concept of belief. Doxa refers to belief and opinion, to probable knowledge, while episteme refers to justified or true certain knowledge. There are immense consequences to how we categorize a piece of knowledge; a crucial contemporary debate concerns whether climate change fits into the category of doxa or that of episteme.

Meanwhile, how we conceive of differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences highlights the controversial nature of knowledge production. What kind of evidence is necessary for a set of observations to transform an opinion into a fact? In the sciences, there are many forms of evidence and tools to procure the exact data which falsifies or corroborates a hypothesis. In psychology, the sources of evidence to answer any given question about how the mind functions are diverse, and there are very few "facts" about human nature that have been discovered through the empirical study of the mind. The neurosciences seem in good shape to deliver more scientific principles, but debate continues about the best way to interpret this data for answering the hard questions in psychology.

Another Greek term, pistis, means in good faith, in the sense of trustworthy and reliable; this type of knowledge served as a foundation for how to live vis-à-vis ethics and emotions. It seems that each Greek term for belief is a type of argument that suggests a different connection between internal motivation and behavior­. There is also an important role played by emotions and the imagination (eikasia) in our acts of belief. These non-rational factors are involved in conceiving knowledge, in structuring our engagement with reality.

In the absence of incontrovertible evidence, it is our emotional nature that helps us decipher between the options of belief. Our beliefs are forged between hope and imagination and under an emotional drive towards securing explanation to provide a type of order to lived experience. What we seek is episteme, but in light of the limitations of human understanding, what we end up with is doxa and various sources of pistis.

The liberal subject

Between us and the ancient world, the act of belief has been transformed from a form of judgment based on evidence to a type of trust in reason and experience. Belief serves the function of self-grounding, of locating deracinated individuals in the world, in the absence of traditional mythological systems.

Comparing ourselves to the ancients reveals how agency, shame, responsibility, and freedom have developed through monotheism and other cultural shifts. The Reformation, in particular, loosened the partition between Christian belief and secular ways of knowing, such that modern belief has come to be above all else a form of autonomy. A humanist alternative to faith thus develops. That is why rather than expected desiccation in the face of secularization (from saeculum, i.e., ordinary rather than sacred time) and mass society, modernity is characterized by a proliferation of belief. To believe now in a liberal capitalist democracy is to commit to the sense of your own autonomy through self-fashioning, through consciously deciding between options of beliefs. This is especially so when the belief is dialectically paired with the experience of doubt.

Some argue that a disenchantment with the universe and subsequent age of anxiety is part and parcel of these changes. As Charles Taylor wrote,

“Disenchantment dissolved the cosmos, whose levels reflected higher and lower kinds of being, distinctions which had undeniable meaning and relevance for human beings, and which moreover contained spirits and meaningful causal forces, which made things respond to us in their human meanings. In its stead was a universe ruled by causal laws, utterly unresponsive to human meanings, even if one believed that the whole was designed in the general case and the long run for our good. The universe itself was unresponsive, or indifferent, like a machine, even if we held that it was designed as a machine for our benefit” (280).

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Truly, secular modernity thrives on the consistent undermining of ontological platforms, including reconstituting the social order around the individual and demographics of identity.

The Enlightenment project to allow for freedom of judgment by liberating individuals from dogma has engendered a world where the space for belief now structures opinion and taste in political affiliation and consumer taste. An atmosphere where belief has a constitutive role in establishing autonomy allows for exhaustive sets of personal beliefs that take on the tone of ethical judgments. Modernity is tied to the notion of freedom of opinion and belief. In this way, the semiotic system of the human cultural niche during modernity takes up the energy of religious belief and produces immanent substitutes for formerly dominant mythologies. Indeed, enlightenment humanism accepts no goals beyond human flourishing, motivating the term "secular age" to characterize an epoch in which this goal eclipses all others.

On the political and economic fronts, mass revolutions in industrial production (starting in Britain) and political self-rule (as in the French Revolution) were brought forth by changes in technology, trade, and the scientific and economic rationality that seemed inevitably associated with both. This acceleration of growth through the industrious order enabled a discipline of productivity and utility that came to define the modern economic sphere. Britain’s 18th- and 19th-century wars and colonial endeavors subordinated foreign populations and policy to economic ends. The repercussions of these forays into constructing global economic systems, for example, the population shifts of enslaved peoples for the purpose of exploitative agricultural trade, are still with us today. Buoyed by the opening of new markets, surplus profits were invested in rail networks, and the enigma of capital played through the financial economy, as it does in the highly abstracted investment technologies of our day. Social transformations caused by changes in labor practices and mass urbanization provide essential ingredients for the creation of the liberal subject and her pretensions to belief.

The transformation in notions of the loci of authority wrought by the French Revolution redounded to a bourgeois, non-Christian morality in the foundational concepts of Man, Nation, Society, Self-rule, and the Public Sphere. As theorized by romantic philosophers and early scientists, an anthropocentric shift took place in which the deistic order was replaced by the order of a reified notion of Nature, a utilitarian social order, and reformist Christian ethical norms.

Emotional motivation for explanation and away from the anxiety of doubt is an act of expression, of individual invention in which imagination is crucial for conceiving of the future and being altered by visions of reality. These visions are formed in the context of the collective trove of ideas within one's society. Western society is conditioned by the factors I brought up above: secularism, liberalism, population explosion, industrial and political revolutions, and more. The type of belief that is psychology is not certain (episteme), nor is it particularly a type of opinion (doxa); maybe psychology in the West is best captured in its pragmatic guise as pistis? And yet, there is very little explicit ethical information in psychology, so how are we to use the findings of empirical psychology to structure our moral lives and to build norms?

The act of belief is therefore not only about apprehending truth; it also aims to benefit the believer. Believing in well-founded fiction or positive illusions is common. In fact, some truths are produced through the act of believing or making believe: for example, in fairy tales and conspiracy theories. Beliefs about the mind, whether they are made in the laboratory or in popular psychology, rely on well-intentioned fictions. Does that make psychology a type of mythology?