Derrida & the Industrialization of Psychology
Steven Huett, PhD, Denver Health
“Psychology—as an academic study, as a discipline, as a profession, as an economy and political arm—is presently experiencing unprecedented sociopolitical changes toward industrialization, the likes of which having never been witnessed since its formal inception in the late 19th century. This healthcare reformation affects all “allied health professions” which includes other therapy-based disciplines. Central to these changes is greater political and economic oversight for treatment accountability and fidelity, implementation and use of putative evidence-based practices, and a new burden of proof on psychologists to demonstrate outcomes. More ubiquitous still, however, are federally endorsed and privately developed electronic mediums permitting, upholding, and disseminating these industrialized trends—health information technology (HIT), health information exchanges (HIE), and electronic health records (EHR). The capacity for documenting, recording, reproducing, encoding, and trading this information suggests an inchoate ethical issue with an unforeseeable growth potential of conscripting the other, truncating the other, instrumentalizing the other, information-harvesting the other, and consuming the other as information. To substantiate this I rely principally on two works by Jacques Derrida that deal with themes of archiving and confession. In Circumfession Derrida discusses how the nature of writing about oneself tends to lead toward confession and relating one’s actions with themes of guilt. However, in this act we often employ the use of others and distort or misrepresent them as a way of exonerating ourselves, and in that very action, reduce, eliminate, and dispossess the Otherness of the Other, invoked them for our own sake. In Archive Fever Derrida offers a meditation on the act of archiving, employing Freud’s psychoanalysis as his case in point, showing how archiving (a la Freudian sessions) both represents and displaces memory, and also how the very act of archiving creates the archive that becomes the “prosthetic” memory of the historical event, tradition, and the characters themselves. Archiving renders the internal external in an effort to overcome finitude, or in Freudian terms, to salvage memory from the ravages of the death drive. Specifically, however, Derrida seeks to elucidate how new, electronic archiving mediums are “transforming the entire public and private space of humanity.” The process and technology itself determines how the archive is recorded, what it remembers, and how what is archived is used and thought about. The radical implication, then, is that new archiving media in psychology-related professions exemplified by HITs, HIEs, and EHRs present a two-fold risk: first, practitioners are lulled into representing confidential material in a truncated, self-justifying format to accountable authorities, regardless of violence to patients’ Otherness. Second, using radically transformed and networked health archiving technology changes the paradigm of the psychotherapeutic context, psychotherapeutic interventions, and the patient her/himself by virtue of how s/he fits or fails to fit health archiving technology strictures. The implication is that psychologists should resist self-justifying, confessional archiving and permit real material to still transpire between themselves and patient, even if we must consign material to what Derrida calls the “ash” of the archive—that which is burned, and not inscribed into the prosthetic memory.
“Psychology—as an academic study, as a discipline, as a profession, as an economy and political arm—is presently experiencing unprecedented sociopolitical changes toward industrialization, the likes of which having never been witnessed since its formal inception in the late 19th century. This healthcare reformation affects all “allied health professions” which includes other therapy-based disciplines. Central to these changes is greater political and economic oversight for treatment accountability and fidelity, implementation and use of putative evidence-based practices, and a new burden of proof on psychologists to demonstrate outcomes. More ubiquitous still, however, are federally endorsed and privately developed electronic mediums permitting, upholding, and disseminating these industrialized trends—health information technology (HIT), health information exchanges (HIE), and electronic health records (EHR). The capacity for documenting, recording, reproducing, encoding, and trading this information suggests an inchoate ethical issue with an unforeseeable growth potential of conscripting the other, truncating the other, instrumentalizing the other, information-harvesting the other, and consuming the other as information. To substantiate this I rely principally on two works by Jacques Derrida that deal with themes of archiving and confession. In Circumfession Derrida discusses how the nature of writing about oneself tends to lead toward confession and relating one’s actions with themes of guilt. However, in this act we often employ the use of others and distort or misrepresent them as a way of exonerating ourselves, and in that very action, reduce, eliminate, and dispossess the Otherness of the Other, invoked them for our own sake. In Archive Fever Derrida offers a meditation on the act of archiving, employing Freud’s psychoanalysis as his case in point, showing how archiving (a la Freudian sessions) both represents and displaces memory, and also how the very act of archiving creates the archive that becomes the “prosthetic” memory of the historical event, tradition, and the characters themselves. Archiving renders the internal external in an effort to overcome finitude, or in Freudian terms, to salvage memory from the ravages of the death drive. Specifically, however, Derrida seeks to elucidate how new, electronic archiving mediums are “transforming the entire public and private space of humanity.” The process and technology itself determines how the archive is recorded, what it remembers, and how what is archived is used and thought about. The radical implication, then, is that new archiving media in psychology-related professions exemplified by HITs, HIEs, and EHRs present a two-fold risk: first, practitioners are lulled into representing confidential material in a truncated, self-justifying format to accountable authorities, regardless of violence to patients’ Otherness. Second, using radically transformed and networked health archiving technology changes the paradigm of the psychotherapeutic context, psychotherapeutic interventions, and the patient her/himself by virtue of how s/he fits or fails to fit health archiving technology strictures. The implication is that psychologists should resist self-justifying, confessional archiving and permit real material to still transpire between themselves and patient, even if we must consign material to what Derrida calls the “ash” of the archive—that which is burned, and not inscribed into the prosthetic memory.