Towards a Reflective Science
From the Replication Crisis to the Crisis of Thinking As Such...
Note (1): Dr. Davood Gozli and I discussed his book Experimental Psychology & Human Agency (2019).
Note (2): Philosophy Portal will be hosting a conference on the Science of Logic June 24th and June 25th 2023. To register, visit Science of Logic for the Global Brain.
Note (3): Philosophy Portal has just released an anthology inspired by deep readings of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Davood Gozli is a psychologist here to challenge psychology in a very fundamental way.1 I appreciated one of his opening remarks in our discussion that psychology has a very bad memory, and is always trying to “wow” itself.
“X Psychologist: look at my fancy new model/experiment which teaches us about Y behaviour/mental state”
This is the problem with all sciences that obfuscate the universal importance of the (Freudian) discovery of the unconscious. But it is particularly problematic in psychology, since the unconscious, perhaps, bares the most direct significance to this discipline.2 As Lacan reminded us, psychology, including many branches of psychoanalysis, quickly regressed back to a pre-Freudian ego-psychology after the death of Freud.3 The basic anti-Freudian movement: closing the gap where the unconscious (neurotically, psychotically) bleeds in symbol. What closes the gap? Clear-consistent narrativisation.
Humans are at their most truthful when they are (symbolically) bleeding all over the place. Freud, a.k.a., an absolute beast, made room for that truth.4
Ego psychology implicitly or explicitly equates psyche and consciousness (something like the formula “psyche = consciousness” which could be understood as a type of A=A logic, inherited from Aristotle). What Freud discovered ruptured Aristotelian logic, but arguably can fit within Hegelian logic, with the idea that the psyche was a much more complex and paradoxical concept than consciousness, and in fact included registers of the pre-conscious and the unconscious.5 One could say that Freudian logic takes us into the territory where A=B, i.e. consciousness = unconsciousness. This basically means that the path to truth is usually found, not in the performativity of the normative civilised self, but rather its perverted deviations. Don’t take my word for it, I’ll defer to Lacan:6
“The core of our being — it is not so much that Freud commands us to target this, as so many others have before him have done with the futile adage “Know thyself,” as that he asks us to reconsider the pathways that lead to it. I bear witness as much and more in my whims, aberrations, phobias, and fetishes, than in my more or less civilised personage.”
This all has profound implications for psychology, which is actualised by civilised personas and thus, paradoxically considering its historical relation to Freud, manifesting many unconscious symptoms in the digital age. We all know about the replication crisis, i.e. the ongoing methodological catastrophe in which results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce (which totally undermines the entire validity of the application of scientific method to our psyche in the first place).7 But Gozli’s work brings our attention to, seemingly, an even deeper symptom, what we might want to call the thinking crisis in psychology.
What is the thinking crisis?
Gozli starts to define it as the over reliance on “facts and evidence” with regard to an unreflective use of basic categories and presuppositions in experimental psychology. In other words, for Gozli, psychology has focused too much on simplistic observations derived from an experimental machine that does not reflect on its own processes. The result is a situation where data eliminates thinking altogether. For those psychological experiments that can be replicated (i.e. we are going deeper than the replication crisis), psychologists operate on the assumption: if we can repeat it we can assume it. But the problem is, as Gozli points out: just because you can repeat something it does not meant that is the only way we can think about it.
Gozli gives a few profound examples in his book, where the way experimental psychologists set up controlled trials, become totally abstracted away from the real of everyday life. This leads to experiments giving us trivial results. For example, he cites studies where experimental psychologists discover some differences in openness between atheists and religious people (specifically Calvinists), or he cites studies where experimental psychologists discover there are some differences of mental control between people in love and people not in love. However, Gozli points out that while we do not need to doubt that there are real differences between people in such categories (i.e. religious/atheist; in-love/not-in-love), we can certainly doubt whether these differences were meaningfully isolated by the controlled experiments. Thus, it is not simply a problem of whether or not the experiments can be replicated, but a problem of whether the experiment is even set up in the right way to begin with.
That is what I would call the thinking crisis in experimental psychology.8
The idea of the thinking crisis brings me to an important psychoanalytic-philosophical mystery of thought that I have been puzzling over for some time at the intersection of Freud and Deleuze:
For Freud: we repeat because we repress
For Deleuze: we repress because we repeat
There is something of a weird psychoanalytic-philosophical circle here. For Freud, repression is fundamental, for Deleuze repetition is fundamental. For Freud, repetition conceals the repression of traumatic experience.9 For Deleuze, repression conceals the affirmation of repetition.
How might this be linked to Gozli’s critique of experimental psychology? It might be linked in a profound way. To repeat, Gozli’s critique involves the fact that even if experimental psychology can repeat something that does not mean we are thinking the thing. On the one hand, experimental psychology (again: blind to its own history, and, repressing the unconscious, always trying to “wow” itself), is setting up experiments which purport to tell us meaningful differences (for example: between atheists/religious people, or people-in-love and people-not-in-love).10 On the other hand, to derive those results, it must set up controls which are insanely disconnected from the real of life. Thus, in a Deleuzian way: experimental psychology affirms a repetition of differences which is based on the repression of the real of everyday life. Or and also, in a Freudian way: experimental psychology represses the trauma of everyday life of the mind in order to repeat scientific results which conform to the predictable expectations of neoliberal capitalist reality.
As much of a beast as Freud was, absolutely central and foundational to any future psychology, he did not adequately think the relation of psychoanalysis to the future of politics.11
This loop between repetition and repression is deep and the only way to break it would be to, return to the philosophical drawing board, and actually think: what would it mean to isolate a meaningful difference between people with religious identities and people with atheist identities? What would it mean to isolate a meaningful difference between control capacity for people in love versus people not-in-love?
From a philosophical level, these are insanely difficult questions. However, for experimental psychology, it seems that the researchers are convinced with their results as long as a certain control can be repeated (and even that is breaking down).
Talk about revenge of the unconscious. Talk about revenge of trauma. The “funny” thing about the unconscious is that it cannot be isolated and controlled. One may even say something like: the unconscious is what isolates and controls. The ego is just the (frustrated) symptom of this primary process. Scientific cogitos or civilised personas in general, are not exception. The “funny thing” about (real) trauma is that it cannot be repeated. One may even say something like: trauma is the impossibility of repetition.
In this light (or is it darkness), what would it mean to affirm a different repetition, internal to experimental psychology? For Gozli, there is an answer: it does not involve any new content, but rather a shift of focus, a simple perspectival shift, where we can recognise the role of people (researchers and participants) in producing the results (for example, an unconscious disposition of researchers to “wow” themselves with isolated differences which we must presuppose are meaningful). In other words, instead of overly focusing on isolating controls and repeating abstracted experiments, perhaps we should focus on the nature of the psyche as involved in such procedures (i.e. the primary processes of the psyche as engaged in isolating, controlling, and repeating), and focus on a laboratory based on our actual lives (i.e. the old Marxist slogan that the laboratory is everywhere), as opposed to a laboratory based on physics envy.
Or maybe that would disrupt too much the civilised personas currently actualising experimental psychology?
There are many other questions and reflections that emerge from this. Gozli reminds us of these in his work: what are the questions that motivate research projects? What are the activities that enable and guide research projects? What is the meaning of research in the broader context of human concerns? What is the relationship between an experimental controlled set up and the real of everyday life?
I will leave these questions with you, and also encourage you to explore Dr. Gozli’s thoughtful work, which seeks to add a layer of reflection to psychological research in general.12 To my mind, that brings us back to thinking, reflecting upon, the way in which our minds are conditioned by traumatic experiences.13 This does not mean that repression, as a type of force exerted by egoic/superegoic structures of the psyche on the primary processes of the id, is fundamental. This does not mean that repetition, as a type of intrinsic affirmative movement of our psyche’s primary process, is fundamental. It means that there is a type of (strange) loop between the not-two (repetition and repression) which is constituted by something which is primally repressed.14
What is primally repressed (in Lacanian jargon) is the “missing Other” or “THE Signifier” (fundamentalists always want to “close this gap”).15 And the universal significance of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, i.e. its relevance to anyone, up to and including scientists and experimental psychologists, is that this “missing Other” as “THE Signifier,” is also entangled with scientific methods and procedures, unconsciously constituting why we study what we study, or even conditioning why we want to do scientific experiments in the first place.
The only “way out,” as Dr. Gozli reminds us, is to work towards a reflective science.16 I would wager that this reflective science requires that we make room for the subject of the unconscious, as the gap in thinking-being where even the scientific cogito must recognise, not: “I think, therefore I am,” (the immediate unity of thought-being where Descartes grounds modern science) but rather: “I think where I am not” (the immediacy of thought’s un-being where Lacan rescues Freud’s discovery from the ego psychologists). Here we must engage an abyssal self-mediation.17
The thinking crisis exists because thinking requires ethical engagement with negative affect. Ego psychology, like many other sciences, do not want to engage this dimension of thought.
REMINDER: Dr. Davood Gozli and I discussed his book Experimental Psychology & Human Agency (2019).
REMINDER: Philosophy Portal will be hosting a conference on the Science of Logic June 24th and June 25th 2023. To register, visit Science of Logic for the Global Brain.
UPDATE: Philosophy Portal has just released an anthology inspired by deep readings of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
You can find his book, here: Gozli, D. 2019. Experimental Psychology and Human Agency. Springer. You can also find his home page here: Davood Gozli — Exploring of Selfhood and Community.
However, Alenka Zupančič has made the compelling case that the discovery of the unconscious has just as far reaching implications for politics, see: Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. (I have taught a course on this book, which you can find here).
Just because the truth bleeds all over the place, that does not mean you occupy the moral high ground to bleed all over the place. As Lacan notes, the truth of the unconscious does not mean that you can shirk self-responsibility for your engagement on the level of the symbolic: we must even take responsibility for our unconscious (killing, incestuous, cannibalistic drives).
The logic of the unconscious introduces the negative, i.e. un-conscious means not-conscious. However, when we move from psychoanalysis to its political and scientific implications, we must follow philosopher Slavoj Žižek in positivising the unconscious with the logic of “is unconscious.”
Lacan, J. 2005. The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious: or Reason Since Freud. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. p. 515.
Baker, M. 2015. Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.18248 (link)
To resolve it, it certainly would not hurt to think like 21st century Hegel vis-a-vis the development of spirit science, see: Last, C. 2022. Neessity of Absolute Knowing. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books, Independently Published, p. 284-304.
For the most advanced reflections on the history of Freudian theories of repression, see: Trauma Outside Experience. In: Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 106-110.
Wow, isn’t it cool that we discovered a difference between atheists and religious people? Wow, isn’t it cool that we discovered a difference between people-in-love and people-not-in-love? Researcher proceeds to post blog on Psychology Today letting everyone know, while leaving unquestioned the possibility that this difference is trivial, the result of controlled experiments that have isolated and abstracted a situation with no relevance to the real.
This is why we need the Slovenian school, or Troika of the Real: Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar.
I am very sympathetic with this aim, and even lead off the Preface of my latest book, Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundation of Science and Philosophy, with the title “On Scientific Reflection.” This title points towards the reality that “science continues to operate in relation to a real independent of the subject, while for continental philosophy, such discourse is meaningless.”
(Or, following Zupančič, maybe even conditioned by a fundamental non-experience which is the condition of our existence itself). See again: Trauma Outside Experience. In: Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 106-110.
Here the dualism of Freud and Deleuze could be worked-through via Lacan to the (aforementioned) Slovenian school qua Troika of the Real.
Where religious fundamentalists or scientific fundamentalists, in the end it makes little difference (irrespective of what non-sense experimental psychologists purport to isolate).
In in the Science of Logic course, I try to work through the idea that most science attempts to collapse essential mediation back into Being, as opposed to mediating abyssal essence towards the self-Concept. (see)
This is one of the purposes of the latest Philosophy Portal anthology inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Straight fire: I love the idea of a “Thinking Crisis.” That’s a great framing, and I really like how you focused in on the key assumption: ‘if we can repeat it we can assume it.’ Very succinct, and as you say ‘just because you can repeat something it does not meant that is the only way we can think about it.’ ‘The result is a situation where data eliminates thinking altogether […] even if experimental psychology can repeat something that does not mean we are thinking the thing.’ Amazingly, and the case for the need to incorporate the subject (‘the psyche as involved in such procedures’) is beautifully made.