The Psychologization of Everday Life

In a recent Critical Inquiry article, clinical psychologist Jan De Vos makes the case that "the pscyhologization of everyday life"--the widespread dissemination of psychology as a framework for interpreting--structures the understanding, critique, and solutions posed for Guantanamo and Abu Grahib. Rereading the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and Milligram experiments, De Vos demonstrates how psychology itself served as the ultimate rationalizing fantasy for everyone involved in these experiments (Zimbardo explicitly recruited volunteers for a "psychological experiment"). If he's right that psychology itself is a widely applied function of biopolitics--that the belief that we are psychological creatures structures our submission to psychological discipline--then there's an uncanny reflexion between critics of Guantanamo and the torturers themselves; both see their efforts through a psychological framework, and both fantasize about their ability to view the Real of torture or human existence (Zimbardo claimed to have "laid bare" the human impulse to torture), even as what they really view is a product of psychology's own narrative fantasies. It's possible that this, too, is part of the disruptive work that Acker does in Empire of the Senseless and elsewhere: to lay bare the commonly circulating jouissances at work around torture and torture's observers.