Thread by @CiurriaMichelle

A thread on the hegemony of science and its impact on humanistic philosophy:
Psychology and psychiatry have appropriated concepts that used to belong to the purview of philosophy. 1/13

Love, alienation, anxiety, despair - all these and more have been transformed into psychological constructs, susceptible to pathologization and depoliticization. Here is an example from bell hooks' 'All About Love':...2/13

"When I talked of love with my generation, I found it made everyone nervous or scared, especially when I spoke about not feeling loved enough. On several occasions as I talked about love with friends, I was told I should consider seeing a therapist... 3/13

I understood that a few friends were simply weary of my bringing up the topic of love and felt that if I saw a therapist it would give them a break. But most folks were just frightened of what might be revealed in any exploration of the meaning of love in our lives... 4/13

Yet whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is "desperate" for a man. No one thinks she is simply passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter... 5/13

No one thinks she is rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein she is endeavoring to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life. No, she is just seen as on the road to "fatal attraction."' 6/13

If you talk about love, if you feel unloved, you are told to go to a therapist. Philosophy looks at love from multiple perspectives: social, political, phenomenological, etc. Psychology is a small part of philosophy's conceptual repertoire... 7/13

Will a therapist tell you that feeling unloved, or being preoccupied with love, is a natural response to an unloving, violent society structured by white supremacy, heteropatriatchy, & capitalism? Maybe, but only because the person is doing philosophy, not (pure) psychology. 8/13

Will a therapist politicize your feelings and encourage you to participate in collective action as a solution to your (reasonable) emotional alienation? Will a therapist edify you with an anti-colonial critique of capitalism and its impact on human emotions?...9/13

Probably not, but bell hooks will. The hegemony of psychology, and western science in general, is defusing and discrediting philosophical analyses that are far more objective, explanatorily robust, and politically potent...10/13

Sadly, science will continue to monopolize the majority of funding and attention in our society, because corporations and billionaire donors want to pathologize human distress and blame people for their misery rather than taking responsibility for immiserating policies...11/13

Corporations don't want people to reflect on the political dimensions of their emotions and relationships; therefore, they don't want to fund queer, feminist, crip, Marxist critiques, or allow governments to fund them...12/13

Love has a psychological dimension but it's not a psychological kind. People will continue to be mystified and gaslighted about their own experiences if Corporate America is allowed to drag everything into the medical/scientific model and stifle philosophical analysis...13/13

#science #philosophy #psychiatry #psychology #therapy #capitalism #patriarchy #colonialism #love #loveless #distress #alienation #Marxism @JDaviesPhD

@Helenreflects might have thoughts.