Psychologies of Power

Abstract

Psychology, as the study of the human mind, tends to begin with the individual and to come to matters social and political as something of an afterthought. The mind is structured in this or that way, people are social, in the social world there are collectives and in those collectives, power comes into play. As a result of this ordinal primacy of the individual, psychology has always struggled to provide insights into the intersubjective world. At best, the discipline has sought to plumb the complex interaction of individual and social processes, and we see this in the development of sociology and social psychology. At worst, it unwittingly adopts a methodological individualism that misses the strange and synergetlc effects of groups and simply forgets about power altogether.