Socialization and Emancipation in Psychology and in training Psychotherapists

Abstract

Summary: In this paper it is argued that emancipation in psychology and psychotherapy needs to focus on overcoming the mechanistic-causal world view which has enriched our cultural everyday life with many technical gadgets. This technical success has led to an overgeneralization of these technical principles for understanding and dealing with human affairs by applying the same technical principles. This tendency is fostered by fear and uncertainty due to increasing complexity and globalization. These feelings typically evoke reductionism and a continued clinging to antiquated patterns and so obstruct creative adaption to changing conditions. Here the mechanistic-causal world view is contrasted with a developmental, dynamic, and self-organized one which contains essential principles of both humanistic psychology and modern science. Emancipation needs, therefore, to challenge the 19th-century world view and so, turn one’s attention to the humanistic approaches and to a more interdisciplinary understanding of our world.

Keywords: emancipation, psychotherapy, psychology, world view, view of man, meaningfulness, self-organization, dynamics, development