Psychology, Europe, and Beyond

Abstract

This paper asks what psychology might tell us about Europe and the way in which we in Britain voted in the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016. I look back at five examples of psychological discourse that claimed to help us understand what we were thinking and feeling as we weighed up how to vote. The key question is how we might refuse where psychology leads us in order to find some alternative ways of thinking for ourselves. I argue that those who argued for Brexit or Brussels both thought they knew well what was good for us. Instead, we need to go well beyond psychology, to psychoanalysis, to discover why they are wrong.I work as a psychoanalyst, and I am an academic psychologist, as well as being a political activist, a Marxist in fact. So I live in three worlds three contradictory worlds which sometimes leak into each other. I hear some things about politics and what they mean and feel like to people in my work, and I can see psychological and psychoanalytic ideas increasingly being mobilised in political debate. Those ideas were mobilised around the question of Britain in Europe and how we would vote in the referendum on 23 June 2016.Much of the psychological speculation related to the referendum was bound up with prediction, with trying to work out how people would behave when they went into the voting booths, with what they might be thinking and, of course, with what they were feeling. And it was usually about other people, not about the people making the predictions. In that respect, psychological discourse is staying true to the way the discipline of psychology has operated since it was formed at the end of the 19th century in Europe, or, more importantly, the way psychology was instituted as an academic discipline and professional practice in the United States and then the rest of the English-speaking world in the 20th century. It was then that it became what we understand psychology to be today. Psychology students are often taught first of all not to think about themselves, not to explore their own feelings, but to focus on the behaviour of others, the nonpsychologists, and they are taught to think of their research or practice as concerned with "prediction and control". That phrase "prediction and control" became the catch-cry for academic and clinical psychology in Britain, for example, in the middle of the 20th century, underpinning what was called the "scientist-practitioner" model.Over the years there have been many attempts by psychology to challenge and unravel that aim of predicting and controlling the behaviour, thoughts, and emotions of others, with some success.