Cybernetic psychology and mental health : a circular logic of control beyond the individual / Timothy J. Beck.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beck, Timothy J., author.

Series:

Concepts for critical psychology.

Concepts for critical psychology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cognitive neuroscience.

Cybernetics--Psychological aspects.

Cybernetics.

Mental health.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (177 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020.

Summary:

"This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens. Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines and our neurons communicate with one another. Rather than suggest that such ideas are either right or wrong, however, this book analyzes how and why we have come to frame questions about ourselves in these ways, as if our brains were our own personal computers. Here, the rationality underlying information theories in psychology is followed to its logical conclusion, only to find it circles back to where it began: engineered methods of human control. After tracing a series of recent developments in this vein across fields related to mental health, Beck highlights emerging psychosocial alternatives by incorporating recent work of scholars and activists who have already begun creating collective support networks in radical ways. Their work overlaps fruitfully with ideas from those including Gilbert Simondon and Fernand Deligny, who foresaw many of the current problems with how information theories have been coupled with psychology and mental health care. This book is fascinating reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, mental health programs, and digital media studies, and academics and researchers with a theoretical interest in the philosophy of technology. It's also an interesting resource for professionals with a practical interest in organizing care services under the data-driven imperatives of contemporary capitalism"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Towards a Technical History of Thinking about Human Thought

Technology as a Medium for Thinking about Human Thought

The Cybernetic Foundation of Current Methods of Psychosocial Control

Some Social Reasons for the Research-Practice Divide in Psy-disciplines

(e)Merging Overlaps across Technoscience, Data Collection, and Mental Health

2 Cybernetic Narratives beyond the Individual

First-order Cybernetics: Engineering an Impulse for Psychosocial Control

Rethinking Mental Health in Terms of Second-order Ecologies

Gilbert Simondon and the Role of Affective Modulation in Transindividual Networks

3 Three (Psycho)Logical Myths of Auto- Individuation (Pseudo-AI)

Psychoanalysis and the Myth of Psychic-Individuation

Behaviorism and the Myth of Operant-Individuation

Cognitive Neuroscience and the Myth of Cerebral-Individuation

4 Deinstitutionalization, Biopolitics, and Network Maps of "Mental Disorder"

From Deinstitutionalization to the Decentralization of Mental Health

Biomedical Neoliberalism and the Ongoing Cooption of Deinstitutionalized Care

The Edges and Nodes of New Computational Diagnoses

5 Disorder Without Borders

Protocological Control and the Dividualization of Mental Health

Pre-Individual Investments Underlying Concepts of Mental Health

Circulating Diagnoses as Social Currency

6 The Network as a Mode of Being

The Techno-Politics of Hacking

Identifying the Glitches in Mental Health Programs

From Collective Self-Advocacy to Network Subjectivities

References

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-429-28704-6

1-000-08034-X

9780429287046

OCLC:

1143821556