How Psychology Has Changed Human Consciousness
Within societies exposed to it, the field of psychology has fundamentally altered the psychology of human beings. We'll use
Sigmund Freud's work to demonstrate this point.
We've figured where Freud was wrong and tend to laugh at him now as some fool. But when Freud was right - he was so right that it might have altered the trajectory of human evolution, and he rarely gets the credit he deserves anymore. Here's an example
When you first heard the concept of the ego, or the Jungian shadow, you might have begun looking at yourself differently. in fact, most forms of therapy focus on "self-knowledge," which is often a bon-a-fide mix of self-knowledge and learning of a new psychoanalytic system. By going through these processes, it is not only our behaviors that change, but our self-concept, styles of thinking and sensemaking, our overall moods etc. This applies socially as well.
When Freud invented (or discovered) the idea of the subconscious, it worked it's way into the way nearly all therapists, artists, scientists, writers, etc view the world. These people then went on to build the next generation of culture where the concept of something occurring "subconsciously" is normal.
There was a point in time where humans had zero awareness of anything occurring "subconsciously," now phrases like "you're projecting!" or "I bet he subconsciously desires this!" or "You're lashing out because I'm reminding you of your mother" are used in everyday conversation. In this way, Freud did not merely discover a facet of human psychology - he invented a tool that we can use on ourselves to change our psychology.
To contrast this with the famous Pavlov's dog experiment - we discovered that if you put shock collars on dogs that they might be more obedient, but this did not fundamentally alter the nature of dogs. Dogs are not training themselves with Pavlovian technique.
In this way, interacting with animal psychology is like changing preferences on your computer, but interacting with human psychology is like editing code.
We must acknowledge that once animal life becomes self-aware, or intelligent (and begins to operate within cultures and economies of scale) that we are on a very different plane of science from simple Animal Psychology.
In this way it is similar to some parts of quantum physics. I’m sure you’ve heard of how observation of quantum experiments can alter the results of those experiments - it appears the same is true of the most complex social sciences - just over a longer time scale and in a way that’s difficult to observe objectively.
To close the enlightenment gap we will need a theory that bridges the fundamental principles of natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, animal psychology) to the emergent complexities of the chaotic social sciences.
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If you want to learn more about this topic, check out my recent podcast with Dr Gregg Henriques here: www.bradleywerrell.com/podcast-library/did-psychology-change-human-thinking-dr-gregg-henriques