General Psychology, Cosmology, Anthropogenesis

 My reading pushes me deeper into the idea that 'general psychology' is not possible without an account of the cosmos, the origin of life, and the origin of human beings.

General psychology simply means the study of the 'psyche' in general. Every discipline has general and specific elements. Physicians study of general medicine before they begin specializing.Niels Engelsted's book Catching up with Aristotle helped me understand this question of general psychology more than any other recently.

Psychology, at least in America, lacks any coherent center, any coherent form of 'general psychology'. This means we have no accepted answer to the question 'What is the psyche?' Instead, we have a chaotic and often contradictory collection of sub-types of psychology: behavioral, cognitive, existential, humanistic, just to name the few closest to my concerns. 

The question of what the psyche is cannot be answered apart from more general questions about the world: what is the universe, how did it come to be, what does life have to do with cosmic process as a whole, and what is human life.

The various ways we answer the meaning of psyche, or psychology, contain implicit answers to cosmic and anthropogenic questions. Behaviorism and cognitive psychology, for example, imply a basically materialist view of the cosmos, and assume that life processes are generally reducible to physical processes. As Engelsted would say, they are basically forms of 'reactivity theory' in which the world is assumed to be basically predictable physical process. Existential psychology tends to bypass cosmic and anthropogenic questions and tacitly assent to materialist views of the cosmos. Human freedom arises not from nature, but from history. History is treated as a metaphysically unique realm in which choice and freedom are triumphant over deterministic physical process.

Humanistic psychology contains an alternative cosmology, and implies a different account of anthropogenesis. Carl Rogers believed the universe was not made of fundamentally non-living, predictable matter. He claimed that the whole thing shows a directionality, a movement towards order, complexity, and interrelatedness. Rogers called this the 'formative tendency' and he regarded it as the theoretical foundation for humanistic psychology. Rogers does not offer an anthrogenic account, but one is implied in his conception of the formative tendency.

I am currently reading Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature. It takes up these questions at great depth, breadth, and length. 

I am hoping it will compliment my reading of Engelsted, as well as my growing interest in Soviet psychology, namely Alexi Leontiev's 'activity theory' (which I've only recently begun to study and reflect on). 

The most pressing clinical and political questions ultimately rely on the cosmological and anthrogenic ideas. The roots are deep, the links real. I worry that the clinical and political questions are hard to see in light of these deeper metaphysical questions. But the questions go all the way down.

What is the psyche? Is it the soul? Is it the mind? Is it behavior? Each of these answers implies comprehensive views of the world.