The Jargon of Authenticity – Positive Psychology and Ideology

The following  is an earlier version of an essay that first appeared here. For those who are interested, it repeats and expands upon certain recent themes of mine, mainly regarding the political and ideological implications of certain psychology trends.

The Jargon of Authenticity

For those who are interested, I have a paper in Arena magazine wherein, via Adorno, I explore the links between so-called positive psychology and fascism, militarism and neoliberal ideology.

The Debate on Directive Treatments in Psychology

Here are some responses to points/questions that recently arose on twitter, in longer than 140 characters:

Biopower and subjection: The strange and disturbing case of Martin Seligman

By now, it should be clear that the role of psychologists in organising torture for the CIA does not merely implicate a few individuals, or even a corrupt institution (the APA), but large swathes of the discipline of psychology. That is, the tortures which occurred at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere derived directly from officially-accepted, paradigmatic implementations of cognitive-behaviourism, and were therefore in keeping (and not in conflict) with the dominant ethical and intellectual underpinnings of Anglophone psychology.