History of Psychology

Week 1

• The history of psychology influences the future and shapes the present.
• Psychology connects to the historical events of Colonialism and Apartheid.
• Knowledge production in psychology informs its practice through teaching, research, psychometric assessment, and psychotherapy.

Key Features From Nando's Reading

• Western Eurocentric values are based on knowledge generated from white, heterosexual, middle-class, educated American and European societies and standardized on these values.
• Promotes a positivist-empirical science where knowledge is scientific, valid and factual only when observable, objective, highly controlled, and quantified, aiming for an accurate and universal theory of behavior, but takes people out of their natural environment.
• Example: Attachment is a bond between mom and child.
• Consider the social, cultural, economic, and political context from which you come.
• Mainstream psychology tends to decontextualize experiences.
• There are implications to the psyche.

WEEK 2: History of South African Psychology

• The history of psychology in South Africa can be divided into pre-1994 and post-1994 periods due to significant political landscape shifts.
• South Africa psychology pre 1994, and South Africa psychology post 1994.

Main Features of pre-1994

• South Africa was an apartheid state.
• Psychology adopted a humanitarian role.
• Psychology authorized racism; black students didn't receive the same education as white students due to societal roles.
• Quote: "Steve Biko – the most powerful tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
• Psychology documented white peoples' experiences while ignoring black people's experiences, forming a mutually beneficial relationship between science/psychology and apartheid.
• Psychology generated a racially skewed knowledge production and training process, where whites practiced while blacks were excluded, resulting in a predominantly white psychological workforce, and raised questions about help for African language speakers.
• Psychology created racially defined diagnostic systems like Bantu hysteria vs. depression, distinguishing black people as pathological and white people as clinical.
• Psychology objectified black people as the negative "other."
• Psychology's major concern was 'poor white people'.
• Poverty among black people was seen as less shameful than poverty among white people.

South African Psychology pre-1994 and Apartheid Resistance

• The indoctrination of South African psychologists into specific systems of knowledge and ideologies left little room for critical analysis and challenging of racism.
• The majority of psychologists were white and middle class, and benefitted from apartheid's racism.
• Black psychologists made up less than 10% of registered psychologists, lacking a sufficient number to mount a strong resistance.
• The eugenics movement, which included the idea that black people are genetically inferior to white people, was embraced and supported by psychology during apartheid.
• The "Extension of the University Education Act No.45 of 1959' reserved access to the best universities, funding, and resources for white students only.
• The psychology curriculum was complicit in reproducing racism.
• The psychology institute of the Republic of SA had influence over the content and curriculum of psychology programs at universities.
• The publications act No.42 of 1974, banned over 18,000 books from universities that promoted critical thought challenging apartheid and racism.

South African Psychology Post-1994

• 1994 marked South Africa's first democratic election.
• It signified the end of apartheid and institutionalized racism.
• The post-1994 period represented hope and a need for change.

Key Features of Post-1994 Psychology

• Psychology shifted to addressing race and racism.

• There was reform at professional and institutional levels.

• Organized psychology removed ties with apartheid racism.

• New organizations formed, like PsySSA (the psychological society of SA).

• Academic reform focused on research and publishing to represent marginalized voices excluded during apartheid.

• New forms of marginalization emerged, characterized by:

  • Low publishing rates among black psychology academics
  • Black academics being stationed at disadvantaged universities with limited research support
  • Heavy teaching loads for black academics, hindering research
  • English as the primary publishing language, excluding non-native speakers

• Western/Eurocentric knowledge continued to be used in psychology.

• Professional psychology training programs remained radicalized.

Summary

• Significant barriers remain in eliminating racist ideologies which affect the practice of psychology.

Week 3 Lecture 1: Decolonization of Psychology

• It is a critical analysis of the knowledge psychology has produced over time.
• It involves analyzing colonial interests attached to the knowledge psychology produced in the past and still used today.

Why Decolonize Psychology?

• Mainstream psychological knowledge is steeped in colonial assumptions and ideals.
• Systems of knowledge are often given preference over others.
• Psychological knowledge is legitimized, making truth claims about human life.
• Psychologists are rethinking the knowledge, theoretical models, and ideas used in everyday practices.

Decolonization

• Decolonization is a current topic in South African psychology and a frequent buzzword.
• Frantz Fanon is an important postcolonial writer known for works like "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth".

Lecture 2: Post-Colonialism

• Colonialism is the relationship between an indigenous majority and a minority of foreign invaders.
• Post-colonialism refers to what happens after colonialism.
• Post-colonialism is interested in common and central countries that experienced a historically protracted formal period in which one race/culture (i.e. western/European) controlled how another race/culture lived, and how they saw themselves
• Postcolonial refers to the continuation of colonialism even when the formal period and process of colonialism ended

Post-Colonial Studies

• Post colonial studies investigate colonial relations.
• Fanon was interested in the psychological effects of the relations from both perspectives.

Psychological Effect of the Colonizer-Colonized Relationship

• It's characterized by a master-slave dyad, representing an unequal power relation and a racial dyad.
• Black/white represents meanings cemented and solidified for hundreds of years.
• Western/European psychological theories privilege white consciousness and devalue black consciousness.
• Colonial violence influences the knowledge psychology produced including violence towards one's identity or a mental/psychological form of colonisation.
• Native people suffered deep seated inferiority complexes regarding their skin color, identity, and ethnicity.

Decolonization of Psychology - VIP

• Adam's et al (2015) propose Liberation psychology as conceptual resources for decolonizing psychology, involving movement within the discipline and influenced by contexts with longstanding histories of colonialism such as South America and South Africa.
• The overarching goal is social justice through the redistribution of wealth and resources, with a recurring emphasis on indigenous perspectives, interests, and knowledge.

Three Goals/Tasks of Liberation Psychology

• De-ideologizing everyday realities, where ideology is a set of beliefs, values, or norms attributed to a person or group of people from institutions/social settings.
  • Everyday experiences contain ideologies that construct versions of reality.
  • This involves revealing and disrupting the ideology of everyday realities.
  • Assuming our everyday assumptions about the world are constructed for us, and this everyday knowledge is NOT neutral, objective, value free, and not natural.
  • The aim is to critique the role of ideology and power in dominant institutions like academia and psychology.
• Recovering historical memory which consists of the recovery of repressed historical memories replaced by the imposition of the coloniser’s understandings.
  • This helps counteract institutional denial of historical violence, raise awareness of alternatives to colonial violence, and promote alternative understandings of history and progress.
• Privileging marginalization perspectives which consists of a concerted effort to understand the realities of the oppressed while giving them voice and authorship.
  • Allowing the oppressed to speak shifts the knowledge, views, and perspectives of those that are privileged
  • Represents a challenge to authoritative discourse I.e. the experts
  • Production of a localized knowledge made by and for the people on the margins of society

Cultural Psychology

• Considers how the mind and culture mutually constitute each other.
• This relationship has two directions:
  • The sociocultural constitution of psychological experience
  • The psychological constitution of sociocultural reality
• Normalize Other Experience, normalizing the experiences of marginalized and oppressed groups and recognizing local experiences while affirming the intellect and humanity of people in marginalized spaces.
• De-Naturalizing Conventional Scientific Wisdom, by questioning the relevance and standards of conventional and ‘natural' scientific knowledge
• Scientific knowledge is inherently Eurocentric and Western.
• Its relevance in formerly colonized countries needs to be questioned and de-naturalised
• The Decolonization of Psychology Project aims to resurrect the experiences and voices of those forgotten, silenced, marginalized, and/or oppressed.
• The discipline of psychology in South Africa implicitly and explicitly
  • Supports and furthers the interests of the European colonizers
  • This has been expressed through the apartheid regime's racist and oppressive ideology

Week 4 Lecture 2: Gender & Psychology pt.2

• Studying gender in psychology helps:

  • Understand Tamara Shefer's psychology and regulation of gender
  • Reveal psychology’s role in the reproduction of gender inequity
  • Examine knowledge production
  • Understand domination by white male psychologists and exclusion of female and black psychologists
  • Challenge unequal gendered practices in academia

• Psychology reproduces a gender-as-difference discourse, where gender is seen as rooted in fundamental differences between men and women.

• Men and women are set up in opposition to each other.

• Differences between men and women are seen as unchangeable (immutable) and natural.

• The gender-as-difference discourse confuses sex with gender.

• Sex includes biological or anatomical markers of male versus female bodies

• Gender includes social and cultural roles and practices distinguishing men versus women

How Psychology Reproduces Gender-as-Difference

• Essentialism posits a real, true, and authentic property of a given entity. Psychology essentializes gender differences by portraying men and women as psychological states residing deep inside people in a pure form

• A unitary sexual character in which gender is treated as a collection of traits linked to biological sex.

• Psychology relies on a unitary sexual character to conceptualize gender.

• Gender is confined to a singular sexual character (male = man & female = woman).

Problems with Gender-as-Difference

• Gender is set up as a binary system, which:
  • Prohibits fluid and open-ended views of gender identity
  • Presents masculinity and femininity as one-dimensional
  • Justifies and reinforces opposite-sex attraction as the norm
  • Silences and marginalizes sexualities outside cis-heteronormativity
• It neglects the social and cultural contexts that produce masculinity and femininity.
• It perpetuates offensive and negative gendered stereotypes.
• It ignores long-standing histories of unequal gendered power relations.
• It perpetuates an androcentric view of psychology that is produced by men for men.

Why the Gender-as-Difference Discourse Persists

• Essentialism romanticizes gender by relying on cultural ideals of what it means to be a woman and a man.
• Culturally valued masculine and feminine ideals are recycled and rehashed, especially through popular culture such as music, film, social media, and fashion.

Challenging Gender-as-Difference in Psychology

• Poststructural feminism sees gender as socially constructed.
• Gender is constructed through social practices and activities.
• Gender is constantly reinterpreted, reimagined, reworked, resisted, and reinforced.

Week 5 Lecture 1: Sexuality & Psychology

• Gender identity and what it means to be masculine/man and feminine/woman becomes a site of constant struggle and negotiation.
• Gender is negotiated via repetition of acceptable masculine and feminine behaviors.
• Judith Butler (1990) asserts that gender is performed through stylized repetitions of actions.
• Gender is a performance

Adolescent Sexuality

• It is often viewed as a source of danger, disease, shame, and death.
• It can be viewed as a source of pleasure, enjoyment, empowerment, and life.

South African Adolescent Sexuality

• It involves investigating sexuality education in high schools around the Western and Eastern Cape.
• Comparing sexual education (formal) and popular music (informal) forms of sexual socialization in the lives of adolescent high school learners.

2 positions are made available by a discourse on responsibilisation or a discourse on sexually responsible decision – making

• Formal sexual socialization from the Department of Education conceptualizes sexuality education based on responsible decision making.

• “Learning outcome” 1: personal wellbeing AS 3: explains the changes associated with growing towards adulthood, and describes values and strategies to make responsible decisions regarding sexuality and lifestyle choices in order to optimize personal potential.

• Sexuality education is framed around understanding male and female reproductive systems.

• Life orientation textbooks refer to:

  • The responsible sexual subject
  • The irresponsible sexual subject
• • What is the discourse on sexually responsible decision – making a response to?

• Macleod (2009) argues that danger and disease are guiding metaphors in sexuality education.

• Climax by Usher and Beez in the Trap by Nicki Minaj constructs:

  • Sexually desiring positions
  • Sexually desirable positions

• Both positions are made available to young men and women.

• Formal mediums of sexual socialization depict adolescent sexuality as a site of responsibilisation and danger and disease.

• Informal mediums of sexual socialization depict adolescent sexuality as a site of pleasure but not without tension.

South African Adolescent Sexual & Reproductive Health Challenges

• HIV/AIDS
• STDs
• Unwanted teenage pregnancies
• Unsafe abortions
• Sexual abuse
• Rape
• Gender-based violence
• Female genital mutilation
• Unsafe male circumcision

Internationally

• 16% of the world's population are adolescent youth and a 1.3 billion in total.
• 16 million 15–19-year-old female youth give birth per annum.

Nationally

• 17.4% of South Africa’s population are adolescent youth

• Sexual debut for young men and women is between 16 to 18 years of age

• Coercive sexual experiences occur for 7% of 15-to 19-year-old young women.

• 2019 saw 106,303 registered live births among 10–19-year-old female youth.

• 30% of 15-to 19-year-old female youth become pregnant (unplanned).

• Abortions among women below 20 years of age around was 12.9% in 2019.

• 360 582 South African adolescents infected with HIV with 202 923 females and 157 659 males.

• HIV prevalence is four times greater in adolescent females than adolescent males.

• Adolescent sexual dynamics and relations are regulated by heteronormative constructions of gender.

A Young Woman's Sexual Respectability

• Sexual availability to her partners, submission to men's decision-making, ability to be coy and resist sexual advances, having one sexual partner, avoiding pregnancy, and virginity.

A Young Man's Sexual Respectability

• Ability to control and dominate partners, being sexually active early on, having multiple partners, and early fatherhood.

Gender Regulates Sexuality

• Heteronormative representations of gender constructs include:
• Men/masculine sexuality as initiators of sex, sexual pleasure and desire
• Women/feminine sexuality as receivers of sex, sexual pleasure and desire
• Men are accorded more sexual decision-making power than women, promoting unequal gendered power relations and gender-based violence
• Men bring more sexual agency than women to their sexual connection