Rethinking Resistance as Relational – Resisting Psychologization in Psychology: Lessons from Carrère’s Between Two Worlds

Abstract

Psychology, and in particular mainstream positive psychology, is fuelled by discourses on resistance strategies, understood as the individual capacity to resist and adapt to negative and oppressive thoughts, circumstances, experiences, and social structures. This self-strategy of resistance is evident in positive psychology’s notions of resilience: grit, life-crafting, and job-crafting behaviors, for example. While positive psychology would have us believe these strategies are associated with overcoming hardship and living a good life, they risk imbricating people in their own oppressions. In this paper, we engage in a reading of Carrère’s Between Two Worlds (original title Ouistreham) (2021), a movie featuring multiple examples of resistance. The movie shows how precarious workers enact self-strategies of resistance to fight for a decent and bearable life. They persevere despite ongoing hardships, seek joy amidst tragic life events, and find meaning in menial labor. However, resistance also appears as relational and political, and thus escapes and exceeds self-focused psychological categories of resistance. Resistance appears as the refusal to be understood solely in individual and individualizing ways – as a psychologized and knowable subject – and is characterized by relational, contextual, and political tactics. The movie profanes established positive psychology’s individualist focus on resistance. This profanation of self-strategies of resistance affords an opportunity to rethink resistance beyond the individual and compels us to problematize the tendency to psychologize and individualize social phenomena. In doing so, our paper too resists the determination of psychological language (i.e., psychologization) and advances ideas for alternative resistances in, to, and of psychology.