OK, but what is unpsychology?
Definitions, disciplines and doctrines
1. Threads
A week or so ago, a comment appeared on a LinkedIn post of mine about the print edition of Unpsychology 9.1 Imaginings.1 It was from someone I will call J, and he asked a very pertinent question: “OK Steve, but what is unpsychology?”.
J was asking for a definition, and his inquiry caught me. I attempted to answer as best I could and, after a few exchanges, he seemed happy with the conversation and signed off with this: “I think I get it now. Unpsychology isn't a discipline or a doctrine; it's the magazine's title and a set of topics. Thanks for your persistence.”
He seemed satisfied. However, I had something left over. It had been a good question, and I wasn’t satisfied! Part of me was thinking: “No, you haven’t got it! How could you not understand this precious project for what it is?!”. But, then, what actually is it? What is unpsychology? J’s question was and is a good one, and I don’t know that I did it – or the unpsychology project – justice in my replies.
I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that, but I do want to explore it further and see if there is more to this inquiry. And I’d welcome any responses too!
The original thread is reproduced below and you can find the original post and comments in context HERE. Then, underneath the thread is my further reflection on these reflections! I guess I’m looking, in the ideas and practices of ‘unpsychology’, for what Nora Bateson terms the ‘small arcs of larger circles’; with a realisation that, as she puts it: “There is no language to define the spiralling processes of the vast context we are participants in”….2
2. OK Steve, but what is unpsychology?
(a short conversation from LinkedIn, October 2023)
J: OK Steve, but what is unpsychology? I clicked on the link but didn't see a definition.
S: I don't know J, it's probably not a thing to be defined. An approach? A space to play in? An ecology? A creative enabling? A counter psychology? A wood between the worlds? (See my last look at what it might entail - https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/unpsychology)
It came out of the Dark Mountain Project ten years ago,3 and was about psychological and creative responses to a breaking world. How do humans navigate self and soul and world and ecology and in our times? And whose voices do we hear?
Thanks for asking, I haven't asked myself for a little while! I'm not trying to be slippery either, I genuinely haven't got a definition for you that can be pinned down, and that might not mean something very different a few hours later... 🤷♂️
By the way, I think the magazine is worth reading (and previous editions too) and you may get a deeper sense of what unpsychology is about from them. 🙏
S: J, there is an ‘Unpsychology is...’ paragraph in the Wood Between the Worlds piece.4 It's not quite a definition but... : "Unpsychology is bittersweet; honouring sorrow and suffering – personal and collective. It can be revolutionary in values and intent, wild of thought and action, but it is also nostalgic and quiet, grounded, real and beautiful. It is a portal between worlds – between paradigms that always seem to be cancelling each other out."
J: None the wiser, but thanks for trying.
J: Thank you Steve; much appreciated.
S: J, I think trawling through the pieces in the mags and on Substack, might give a sense of it. The strapline on Substack is "Unpsychology Voices is the online home of Unpsychology Magazine, in which we explore mind, culture, ecology, psychology and soul...".
On reflection, there's a strong push-back to definitions and pinning things down in the unpsychology project. That's not to say that things shouldn't be defined - but maybe a more phenomenological 'describing' might often be more helpful. For example, what is the experience of someone who might be 'neurodivergent' in their thinking/responses and in the social/ecological/economic/cultural/relational contexts they live within, as opposed to: does this person meet the diagnostic criteria for autism or ADHD etc and how can they be 'treated' or made better. That might seem simplistic, but I guess its a way of looking at contextualised psychological phenomena…
J: I think I get it now. Unpsychology isn't a discipline or a doctrine; it's the magazine's title and a set of topics. Thanks for your persistence.
3. OK, Steve, but still, what is it….?
That’s my voice not J’s. It’s a voice in me that doubts itself, perhaps; one that agrees that what is needed is a definition, a discipline, a doctrine – otherwise how do we know what is going on – in here, out there, anywhere?
My response to J’s final response is that, actually, he has it partly right. Unpsychology is the magazine title and a set of topics. But words (and titles) mean something, and so do topics – or contexts, or issues, or frames. And unpsychology is not just these things but what flows in and between them…
Unpsychology means something – something that ‘psychology’ might not be in the culture we live in and often accept unconditionally. Unpsychology is UN something, NOT something. Yet, it can’t simply reject everything that psychology or science (or other ‘disciplines’) offer us – that way leads to the conspiracies and alternative truths of what Naomi Klein calls the ‘Mirrorworld’.5 None of us – ‘unpsychologists’ or not – can live and thrive and learn in that nihilist and destructive space. Unpsychology is not a doctrine, then, to be sure…
However, I’ve just used the term ‘unpsychologist’ – so maybe there is a ‘discipline’ of sorts here after all – though, not in the way that the ‘academy’ would recognise. In her essay, Mental Mono-Cropping, Nora Bateson writes about the compartmentalising ideas of the culture’s disciplines and ‘fields’: “This language and culture favour singular focus, clear definitions, and linear narratives of causation” .6 So, an ‘unpsychologist’ might be someone who is UN all that; whose focus is on the contexts and influences that, in Nora’s words, “emancipate the ideas and they will burst into co-evolutionary bloom in a nearly unreadable knot of spiralling influences”.
There is more to it, perhaps. Pass the undoubted insights of ‘psychology’ through the lenses offered by art and poetry and science and literature and economics and sociology and politics and creative forms of all kinds – an altogether messy affair – and we begin to recognise that causality and effect are always embedded in the ecologies of the real world, and not in the theories, models and straight lines of psychological (and other disciplines’) determinism and ‘systems’.
Unpsychology, then, might be about the way that ‘mind’ emerges and navigates our world in these troubled and broken times. Our minds riff off the social, political and ecological frames all the time; and in turn these contexts feed into our confusion, pathologies and ways of being sad and mad.
And stepping on from this, unpsychology might also be a way of seeing our way through the trouble. The poems and pieces of art, the essays and voices we carry in our magazine and online spaces, offer ways of seeking solace, acknowledging grief, accepting our diversity as the wellspring from which our humanity flows, rejecting supramicist accounts and extending our ideas of agency and consciousness to the non-human world.
So, thanks to J for your engagement and tenacity. I think I get it now (a little more than I did before, at any rate!).
What does unpsychology mean to you? Let us know in the comments…
The post and thread can be found on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/steve-thorp-7143a64_very-exciting-news-unpsychology-imaginings-activity-7107741029474152448-MDSt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Quote from Small Arcs of Larger Circles - framing through other patterns by Nora Bateson, Triarchy Press, 2016
The Dark Mountain Project began in 2009 around the publication of the ‘Dark Mountain manifesto’. You can find them here: https://dark-mountain.net
Unpsychology - the wood between the worlds: https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/unpsychology
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2023, and https://theintercept.com/2023/09/15/deconstructed-naomi-klein-doppelganger-book/
‘Mental Mono-Cropping’ in Small Arcs of Larger Circles - framing through other patterns by Nora Bateson, Triarchy Press, 2016
thank you S for this exploration - I will point people to this post whenever I am asked what unpsychology means. This is a far more eloquent response than the verbal brick wall they meet in my own attempts, which often include me grinding to a halt and confessing 'I don't know.' Haha. And it reminds me too of the slippery nature of how to respond to an equally perplexing question: what is mad studies? A friend recently questioned my stock answer (an emerging academic discipline that critiques the mainstream mental health system) as he thinks of mad studies as an undiscipline, so to speak. Undisciplined and anti-discipline. I veer toward a more nuanced view, an undisciplined discipline perhaps. Anyway thank you for this, rich food for thought. :-)
First thoughts are that unpsychology is still open, if not unmade, unthought, unwritten. It is an emergent thought form that does not want to be defined (as yet). It seems a vehicle for this type of undefining thought.
Second thoughts are around its etymological cousins associated with reversal or negation, which could include anti psychology and a link to Cooper and Laing's revulsion of the coercive control of 'psychiatry' in the form of Anti-psychiatry. The anti prefix is binary in a way that 'un' is not.
The 'un' is pregnant with potential and rather like a liminal space that is held by Hermes as the spirit in this transitional spaces before the inevitable Saturnian boundaries come to 'protect'.