Subjectivism In Psychology: What It Is And Why It Leads Nowhere
One of the problems that psychology has had to face throughout its history is defining the starting point from which it begins to investigate mental processes. The difficulty of this first step is that, apparently, the object of study of this science is dual: on the one hand there is the objective, and on the other there is the subjective.
Subjectivism is the philosophical position that arises from the way in which some people decide to respond to this “fork in the road.” In psychology, specifically, the implications of analyzing mental processes based on subjectivism lead to very different conclusions than researchers who advocate a perspective focused on what is objective, what can be measured.
In this article we will see the way in which subjectivism affects psychology and what are the characteristic problems of this approach.
In short, subjectivism is the belief that reality, in the first instance, is formed by the ideas and subjective assessments that one makes about what is going on in one’s head. Said like this it sounds complicated, but surely life mottos of the style of “reality is created by our attitude” and other discourses that focus on consciousness and “the mental” to explain the nature of elements of reality that other people try to know from their objective aspects.
Thus, subjectivism is closely related to idealism, which is the belief that ideas exist before matter, and to relativism, according to which there is no pre-established reality that exists beyond our diverse points of view and in many conflicting aspects.
Now, what we have seen so far is subjectivism in its entirety, without considering what its effects are in a specific area of science. It is important to keep in mind that, for example, starting from subjectivism in physics is not the same as doing so, for example, in sociology. These two disciplines study different things, and therefore subjectivism also acts on them in a differentiated way.
But it is in psychology where subjectivism is most likely to wreak havoc. Because? Fundamentally because in this science something is studied that can be confused with the source of subjectivity itself and which is normally known as “the mind.”
Subjectivism in psychology
As we have seen, psychology has the particularity of being the field of knowledge in which what is studied can be considered that from which the intention and action of studying reality begins, something that does not happen in other disciplines. As a consequence, subjectivism can cause psychology to enter a loop that is difficult to get out of and leads nowhere.
For example, one of the methods that subjectivist psychologists have historically defended is the introspective method. In this, It is the person studied himself who pays attention to his mental processes (whether they are cognitive or emotional) and informs about them.
Free association as an example of this philosophy
For example, in the free association used by Sigmund Freud (one of the most prominent subjectivists in history) the patient began to say out loud ideas or words that he thought were related to the idea that the psychoanalyst wanted to investigate. It was up to him to know what information was relevant enough to say, and it was also up to him to “search” through memories and imagination to come up with something that could move the session forward.
From subjectivism, in short, it is believed that the subjectivity of each individual is the best source of data about mental processes, on the one hand, and that mental processes are what drives movement-based actions. For example, someone’s subjective beliefs cause them to ban a person who looks homeless from entering the store, and it is those subjective beliefs that need to be explored.
Is the individual the only one with access to the mind?
Thus, for subjectivists, what one knows about one’s own mind is something separate from one’s environment and the context in which one finds oneself when internally evaluating one’s thoughts and feelings. There is a radical distinction between the mind and objective actions and easy to observe that the person makes, and it is proposed that what is important is in what cannot be directly observed by someone other than the person, because it is those internal and subjective aspects that lead to the movement of the person.
This approach, if we don’t look, the only thing it does is condemn psychology to not being able to answer any of the questions about the human behavior that it proposes to address, since it always attributes the cause of this to an internal and subjective dimension of reality that only one can know. Not only does it not stand up philosophically because it denies the existence of an objective reality, but it is also incapable of proposing useful applications to address psychological problems.
