Ignoring Psychology

I've just finished "The Act of Living – what the great psychologists can teach us about surviving discomfort in an Age of Anxiety" by Frank Tallis (2021) which is a lovely overview of key figures in that discipline. It also gives me an opportunity to correct an interesting mistake I made a few years back when one of my famous tables - purporting to show how each of the social sciences tried to make sense of the world - completely forgot to include psychology. Some, indeed, might call the mistake “Freudian”!!

The core assumptions of academic subjects (amended table)

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, J Schumpeter, JM Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, Thomas Pikety, Ho-Joon Chang
Geography	the interaction of physical and cultural influences	Alexander von Humboldt, H Mackinder, David Harvey, Danny Dorling
Political economy	explores the role of political factors in economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Psychology	Maslow’s basic ones of survival	Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm. Bruno Bettelheim, Maslow, Howard Gardner,
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Gerald Caiden, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, B Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills, Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf

And, indeed, there is something in my Presbyterian soul which probably disapproves of the idea of someone doing a quasi-Confessional on another human being. The intercession of a priest (or psychologist) is somehow not right!

And, yet, I have read psychology books with some pleasure and, indeed, edification – I thoroughly enjoyed the wry humour of Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it hard to be happy (2010) and learned much from "Life and how to survive it" by Robin Skynner and John Cleese (1993) - one of the clearest expositions I know of how the different stages of human development - at individual, organisational and societal levels and still in print after some 30 years. 

Such titles may focus on us as individuals rather than political creatures but I am a great believer in in the injunction to "Know Thyself”- if a bit slow in the actual practice. But psychological matters seem to have been pressing in on me recently – with posts last year such as Know Thyself, then one about the Johari Window and one actually entitled Mind Matters which brought together several books with a psychological perrspective