The modern science of psychology is lacking its foundational concept — that of the psyche itself. Not to worry. In the Modern Age it has been replaced by consciousness and subsequently consciousness has been reduced hypothetically to something generated causally by the neurological activity of the material brain, for that is something modern science can get a grip on. Today's neuroscience has set out on the futile quest to 'prove' empirically that this is so, without ever being able to say what consciousness itself (a mere 'quale' or 'quality' of matter?) is, not to mention, what the venerable psyche is. The modern, scientific mind imagines the psyche as something fuzzily spiritual, soulful, and rejects it out of hand.
The experimentally discovered neuroplasticity of the brain is said to offer therapeutic opportunities for 'rewiring' it, thus helping those with a psychological malady. Manipulation of a part of the soma is supposed to improve performance of the psyche-cum-consciousness. In this kind of research, tinkering with animals' brains is assumed to help in attempts to 'rewire' those of that other kind of animal assumed to be we humans. This kind of brain mechanics is what has become of psycho-somatic therapy, with the material soma trumping the immaterial psyche, whose very existence is put into doubt. The barbarism of this kind of thinking (scientific, evidence-based) goes unnoticed.
For ancient Greek thinking, the psyche (ψυχή) was the principle of life, signifying the self-movement of living beings and their sensuous openness to the world. Such self-movement is fourfold: change of where (loco-motion), of how much (quantity: growth, decay), of how (quality: maturing, aging) and of what (propagation, self-replication). Aristotle's De Anima is Western thinking's foundational book investigating the psyche, whose deep insights into what life is have been rendered superficial today. Hence there is no serious critical engagement with the question: What is life? It is answered with a short definition, such as self-replication (e.g. of DNA).
Whether Aristotle's investigation of life as a mode of being has to be rethought and revamped is not on the agenda. His thinking has been written off as superseded by modern science because it allegedly does not account for the empirical data. Life itself is taken for granted as an empirically established fact, and science concentrates on finding the molecular building blocks of life and figuring out how their combination somehow springs to life, perhaps as a single-cell yeast in a lab somewhere. Astrophysics goes in search of moons or exoplanets on which such building blocks can be detected — on the hunch that living organisms will eventually be discovered there with help from the appropriate technological apparatuses.
The failure to re-engage with Aristotle's thinking on the psyche and human being itself has many consequences, starting with postulating without further interrogation that the human is a kind of animal. This latter is an axiom for all modern science, for it enables the will to power to get a material grip on the movement of human lives. Perhaps the psyche itself as a mode of being has to be completely rethought and deepened in connection with interrogating the Aristotelean hermeneutic casting of time as linear, and more specifically, as derived from counting it off physical movement that, in turn, is supposed to be governed by effective causality.
Human psychology is practised as kinds of therapy for psychic conditions and as techniques for manipulating human behaviour. The latter prove themselves to be extremely useful in marketing goods and services to the consumer, whose essential function is to realize sales revenues for capitalist enterprises. As a linch-pin in the gainful game, consumers are supposed to find happiness in consumption, and modern science has apparently even discovered happiness hormones, whose exudations under the application of appropriate advertising techniques can be measured. Much research goes into such manipulative techniques for the sake of (unknowingly) enhancing valorization of The Medium*. Market research itself is an established, well-paid part of the advertising industry that is crucial for turning over advanced capital, preferably as quickly as possible.
Psychological illnesses themselves have everything to do with the way of life in an historical kind of society whose movement is dictated by a principle of movement antithetical to the movement of human life. The hectic pace of living induces stress, anxiety and depression in many leading their lives under such conditions of accelerating turnover-time of globally valorizing capital.
Insight is entirely lacking into the essential connection and grating contradiction between the human psyche's belonging to the three-dimensional openness of time (that is at the core of human freedom of movement) and the straight-jacket of the circular movement of ever-valorizing thingified value along sequential, linear time. The elementary question concerning the nature of time itself is not on the agenda.
* The Medium of thingified value itself remains invisible, entirely unknown to the social science of economics, as well as to any other modern science.
Further reading: CO2 and The Medium.
Capitalocene & The global law of movement.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.
