About Borrowed Language

Borrowed Language is a blog about psychology and materialism, written by educational psychologist Sean Octigan.

Borrowed Language seeks to critique the way Western psychology often presents our subjectivity as detached from the material world around us. Under capitalism our subjective selves are reified into a fixed thing called 'the self' that can be 'treated', 'improved' or reduced to a docile body.

Borrowed Language seeks to reconnect subjectivity to the material world, instead understanding our subjective 'selves' as produced by our historical, material and social conditions whilst simultaneously shaping these conditions in turn.

This is an attempt to turn Western Psychology 'right side up' (to steal a phrase from Marx) revealing to us that there is no separation between our subjective selves and the world, or our subjective selves and each other.

From this starting point, as psychologists, we can no longer consider the human being in isolation and must consider include factors such as power, culture, politics, ideology and material conditions within our analyses of subjectivity.

Ultimately, the role of the psychologist must change. Currently our practice ignores or side-lines the rapidly worsening material and social conditions through which subjectivity emerges, instead focusing on supporting individuals to manage within a broken system. A materialist psychology would look to primarily change the system - seeking to foster bonds of connection and solidarity whilst redistributing all forms of power more equitably, so as to facilitate the flourishing of positive individual and collective subjectivities.

Put simply, positive psychologies and subjectivities are produced by a fair and just system and the core question for any form of psychological practice must be:

How can my work create the conditions for human flourishing?

(N.B. I am speaking here in a personal capacity, not on behalf of any organisation)