I wanted to pick up on this in Richard's post:

"I understand that critical psychology is trying to rise above and 
confront the dominance of individualism but I don't get the apparent 
denial of the importance of the individual."

There are for sure tricky issues here but - at least in my view -  this 
doesn't amount to a denial of the individual, or a negation of 
individual experience. Instead its a recognition that individual 
experience is never - could never possibly be, never is, never has been 
- pristine, bounded, and self-contained. Its about recognising that its 
never the case that social and material forces are simply context: they 
are also, always, fundamental constituents of experience.

Individuals are not and never have been separate from their social and 
material environment. They are instead always and already social 
products, the outcome of prior processes of socialisation and 
enculturation. What we experience as our 'individuality' is 
co-constituted from the accretion of social relations, cultural and 
symbolic artefacts, and the traces of life events. These things impress 
themselves upon our (variable) biology in ways that are contingent upon 
the shifting and detailed particulars of our life trajectories (so its 
hard to generalise about their effects: social causation is always and 
necessarily probabilistic in character).

So the congealed traces of social relations, symbolic artefacts and life 
events interpenetrate our biology to give us the skills, knowledge and 
experience upon which our choices are made. They give us what we call 
our beliefs and attitudes, they give us norms of emotionality, safety 
and reactivity, and attributes such as confidence; and they give us 
regimes of feeling that locate our bodies, with exquisite sensitivity, 
in our dynamically changing social and material worlds: and all these 
things load information with valences that situationally create preferences.

Social relations and life events also give us meta-cognitive faculties 
of remembering, planning and deliberating that allow us to wield 
cultural resources and symbolic forms effectively and legitimately; they 
give us habits of the body and of thought, and they give us memories 
that 'thicken' our experience with echoes of prior moments of living. In 
sum their interpenetration with our biology is so thorough that no 
experience we have - not even one - is simply and wholly an 'individual' 
one. You can 'prove' this to yourself: try to think of any single 
experience you've ever had, ever, that was wholly free of social influence?

Consequently its never the case that individuals simply 'choose', 
'decide' and 'act'. To be sure, we do experience ourselves doing such 
things. But the actual bases of our choices and decisions are never 
simply our own. We are not, despite our fond illusions to the contrary, 
sovereign agents controlling our own realm of action. Rather, every 
'choice' we ever make is always, absolutely always, pre-reflectively 
figured and shaped by material and social forces that we may not always 
be able to identify or recognise. And every 'choice' we ever make is 
always enabled, too, by neural systems that are dynamically open to 
external influence, many of which operate outside of conscious awareness.

Now none of this means that individual experience isn't important, 
doesn't exist, or should be discounted. For psychologists to take such a 
stance would be strange indeed.

But it does mean that simply counter-posing 'the individual' to social 
influence is likely to produce false dichotomies and over-simplistic 
explanations. It means that explanations rooted in 'individual' choice 
are necessarily only ever telling part of the story. It means that the 
analysis and unpicking of experience, on any given occasion, is so 
incredibly complex that we are always prone to errors of omission or 
reification.

Moreover, we have an ideological climate where individualism is 
frequently associated with (neo)liberalism, capitalist notions of the 
bourgeois individual freely choosing her or his place in labour and 
other markets, and explanations for any number of psychosocial phenomena 
that reduce the massive complexity of social and material influence down 
to 'individual' choice in ways that frequently result in victim blaming 
and work ideologically to mask the contribution of social and material 
forces.

Given all of these considerations, it makes very good sense for critical 
psychologists to be consistently wary and suspicious of simplistic, 
individualistic explanations. This is why it can seem that 'the 
importance of the individual' is denied.

J.
********************************************************
John Cromby
Department of Human Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leics
LE11 3TU England
Tel: 01509 223000
Email: [log in to unmask]
Personal webpage: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~hujc4/
Co-Editor, "Subjectivity": www.palgrave-journals.com/sub
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