August Meeting – “Work and ‘the crafting of individual identities’ from a critical standpoint”

This month, we discussed a theoretical paper by David Fryer and Rose Stambe.  Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the paper examined the contribution of psy-power-knowledge to the construction of the ‘unemployed’ subject, and the production of neoliberal unemployed subjectivity.   

We discussed our government’s invention of cultural tropes; ‘the age of entitlement’ and ‘dependency culture’.  We noted that proposed changes to welfare policies reflect an increasing readiness to locate the problem of unemployment in the unemployed individual, and not in broader society, which effectively functions to obscure the social, political and economic aspects of unemployment and to alleviate the neoliberal regime of responsibility.  We asked what is required of the unemployed individual?  They must celebrate their New Start by self-improving, up-skilling, and reporting their work search efforts to our surveillancing government.  The unemployed individual may choose to, or even be required to, engage with agents of the psy-industry to assist them to achieve their goals. 

We considered how the psy-industry articulates with neoliberalist ideology.  The psy-industry promotes happiness (e.g Seligman), the absence of mental illness, the right to freedom, and fulfillment of an individual’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual potential.  The dominant theme of two psy-products­­­, ‘positive psychology’ and CBT, is the idea that it is necessary to change the way one sees the world, as ‘mental-ill-health’ is the product of faulty or irrational ideas about the world, the self, and/or others.  Accordingly, these psy-products neglect the impact of the structural inequalities on wellbeing and employment status.  Thus, we can see how these tenets resonate with neoliberalism’s promotion of competition, freedom from others, self-fulfilment and consumerism.   So, the psy-industry supports the maximization of productivity in a neoliberal regime by treating and fashioning a healthy and motivated workforce.  Accordingly, the psy-industry contributes to the rejection of poverty and inequality as explanatory frameworks for unemployment and unhappiness. 

We reflected on the compromised social status of the unemployed person, and in our efforts to bring to mind other subjectivities, we realised the extent to which the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism has foreclosed other ways of being.  We acknowledged the difficulty (and near impossibility) of envisaging a different kind of society, with a multitude of subjectivities for both ‘employed’ and ‘unemployed’ individuals and collectives.  We discussed the notion that psychology is political, sociological and philosophical.

            Naturally, the issue was then considered for its expression in the mutually-constructed interpersonal space of psychotherapy.  As the psy-industry is a knowledge producing entity, and indeed constructs subjectivities, how do we move beyond the taken-for-granted assumptions that we as practitioners bring to the therapeutic space?  While noting the discouraging nature of this reality, the use of Foucault’s conceptualization of power and resistance offers a way out.  By deconstructing reality, we undermine the familiarity of the present, and may be somewhat comforted (and activated!) by Foucault’s theory that hegemony is always subject to contestation..