What’s Wrong With Western Psychology pt.2 - Scientific Foundations of the New Liberation Psychology

What’s Wrong With Western Psychology and How to Fix It, part.2 The Need for a New Liberation Psychology and its Scientific Foundations.

In this second part of What’s Wrong With Western Psychology and How to Fix It, we’ll explore the need for a new liberation psychology that not only interprets the psychological world, but also serves to change it. We’ll see how dialectical materialism could offer a path to evolve a psychological science that sidesteps the traps of dualism, materialist reductionism and overcomes the opposition between mind and matter.

Taking up Vigotsky’s program for a future marxist psychology, we’ll consider the role of dialectical materialism and its psychological insights and see that dialectical materialism and spirituality need not be incompatible. Next we’ll see how human consciousness may represent a specific form of consciousness that sets humanity apart from other organisms.

After a deep dive in the advances of behavioural science and the contributions of Pavlov and Skinner, we’ll see that, tough behaviorism uncovered some basic processes that govern the behavior of organisms, it ultimately failed to account for the specificity and complexity of human psychological experience.

In the last part of the video, we’ll uncover the central role that the behavioural process of relating played in the emergence of meaning. Though relating is a common behavior of many species, only humans display the unique variation that leads us to derive relations that haven’t previously been learned through direct experience.

We’ll last see how, due to the fact that the process of relating also serves to transfer functions, including emotional and affective valences the process of deriving relations forms the basic process which gave rise to the infinite complexity of human psychological experience.

As we’ll explore in the next video, the quantity of deriving activity most humans learn to engage in in, gives rise, dialectically, to the new qualities of language, complex cognition, human consciousness, the unconscious and our individual and collective identities.

Stay tuned as we prepare to decode the infinite complexity of the human mind in the next video.

00:00 Introduction to the Series
01:53 Why we n a New Liberation Psychology
04:35 Introduction. Marxist Psychology: Historical Context and Challenges
9:42 Summary of the previous Vidoe
11:25 1. Vygotsky and the Dream of a Dialectical Materialist Psychology
15:07 2. Is Materialism Necessarily Godless?
18:31 3. Marxism as a Perspective on Psychology
23:49 4. The Contribution and Limits of Behaviorism
31:27 5. Marxism, Psychological Experiences and Forms of Consciousness
36:01 6. Of Human and Non-Human Forms of Consciousness
41:57 7. The Role of Relating in the Emergence of Language
46.02 8. Relational Responses and Meaning
52:31 9. Specifically Humans: Deriving Untrained Relations.
58:21 Conclusion