The Church, the Factory and the

Market
Scenarios for Psychology in a Postmodern Age
Steinar Kvale
University of Aarhus
Abstract. Shifting styles of doing psychology reflect assumptions from
the culture at large. In the first section, three cultural metaphors for the
science and profession of psychology are put forththe church, the factory
and the market. The picture they provide of psychology is then contrasted
with the common histories of psychology as a succession of ideas. The
metaphors are thereafter invoked in a discussion of psychology as a
postmodern religious, industrial and commercial collage. What counts in a
postmodern age is less the truth claims of the different psychological
approaches than their marketability. Potentialities of a pragmatic and a
culturally situated psychology are discussed in relation to challenges to
Western psychology today raised by the psychological profession and the
globalization of culture.
Key Words: consumption, history, industry, postmodern, religion

Psychology is a cultural and historical activity. In this article I discuss how

shifting cultural presuppositions influence styles of psychological research
and professional practice. I start by suggesting three cultural metaphors for
modern psychologythe church, the factory and the marketplaceand then
go on to contrast the conceptions of psychology that these metaphors
provide with the more common insider histories of psychology as a
succession of ideas. The metaphors are then put into play in a discussion of
psychology today as a postmodern collage of religious, industrial and
commercial metaphors. In contrast to the earlier strong conflicts between
different paradigms of modern psychology, the truth value of conceptions of
psychology as a science tend in a postmodern condition to be subordinated
to their market value. Finally, I suggest, in relation to challenges by the
psychological profession and by the globalization of culture, some potentials
of a pragmatic and culturally situated psychology. In short, the article
attempts to understand some of the current contradictions of psychological
Theory & Psychology Copyright 2003 Sage Publications. Vol. 13(5): 579603
[0959-3543(200310)13:5;579603;036176]

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science and profession in the light of more general contradictions of the

cultural situation.

Metaphors Psychology Lives By: The Church, the Factory and

the Market
In an attempt to find some recurring patterns of human activityand the
psychology of human activityI shall turn to three prominent types of
buildings in the postmodern cultural landscape. There are the large and
often richly decorated churches, many overlaid with the patina of centuries.
There are the functional industrial factories, rectilinear and square, many in
sombre grey, some tainted by rust. And there are the new shopping malls,
extravagantly coloured, with reflecting glass faades and labyrinthine
interiors.
The human activities taking place inside these conspicuous buildings
differ. There is the solemnity of the often-empty churches; the visitors are
quiet or whispering, except for occasional ceremonies with songs and
sermons, and in the cathedrals clicks of the tourists cameras. In the older
factories, filled with noise and hectic activity, workers latched on to highspeed machines perform the same mechanical movements over and over
again. In the newer factories, often smaller and quieter, the workers are freer
to move about and interact while monitoring computerized production. In
the shopping malls people move freely around at their own pace, in their
own individual styles, glancing at and sometimes purchasing some of the
many tempting commodities displayed.
Metaphor means understanding one kind of thing in terms of another. I
shall here apply the institutions of the church, the factory and the market as
cultural metaphors that may serve to clarify the shifting styles of psychological research and professional activity in the 20th centurysuch as
introspectionism and psychoanalysis, behaviourism and cognitive psychology, and the humanistic psychologies and therapies.
Table 1 gives a simple schematic presentation of the three cultural
metaphors I will draw upon when relating psychology to its cultural and
historical context. They involve different conceptions of how to obtain
TABLE 1. Religious, industrial and commercial metaphors of psychology
AGE:

Medieval

Modern

Postmodern

INSTITUTION:

Church

Factory

Market

THEME:

Salvation

Production

Consumption

KNOWLEDGE:

Revelation

Methodology

Construction

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knowledge: emphasizing revelation, methodology and negotiation, respectively. Religious worship, production and consumption all take place in the
premodern, modern and postmodern ages, but with different dominance in
different epochs.
I shall try to show how these metaphors illustrate presuppositions of
modern psychology, each cultural metaphor involving different discourses of
the relation of human beings to their world. We cannot as psychological
scientists jump outside the cultural tradition we live in; we may, however,
be attentive to the presuppositions we think with and attempt to become
aware of how our cultural pre-understanding influences our research questions and the answers we obtain. In the following brief metaphorical
overview of some of the complex interrelations of psychology and culture, it
will not be feasible to extensively document and argue the many postulates
put forth. A few cases will be discussed at some length; for the remainder
there will be references to literature treating the postulated interactions more
extensively.
The Church Metaphor of Psychology1
Truth inhabits inner man. (St Augustine)

In medieval Europe, agriculture was the main form of production, to which

was added work in small craft shops. Medieval life took place in a tight-knit
feudal community and trade was little developed. Christianity was a ruling
spiritual and political force, with the churches as the visible symbols of
church power.
General churchpsychology correspondence. Modern psychology corresponds to religion, in particular Protestantism, with individualization and
construction of an inner person, in conceptions of the self and its development, in providing guidelines for human life, in seeking truth and consolation through contemplation and in confession and pastoral care.
Worldview. Religion faces the fundamental issues of the human situation; it
provides answers to basic questions of life. Both traditional religion and
modern psychology provide a worldview: they give a vision of what a good
life is, they deliver concepts and techniques for the ordering of interior life
as well as contributing to the ordering and legitimation of social life
(Browning, 1987). The Christianity that ruled the medieval age eroded
throughout the modern era. In the Renaissance, God was replaced by man as
the centre of the universe. God further receded from view as the romantic
thinkers of the 19th century translated key religious themes and values into
secular terms. The final diagnosisGod is deadwas given in 1878 by
Nietzsche (1994). Theology as a truth guarantee was replaced by the new
sciences, and psychology took over religions task of providing guidelines
for human life.

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Subject matter. The soul and its unity with God are the subject matter of
religion. The religious soul was in the modern era replaced by a secularized
psyche and a self, with the relation to God severed. The subject matter for
modern psychology became a self-encapsulated consciousness.
Telos. In religion, life is a striving for unity with God, a quest for salvation
of the soul. In a secular culture where salvation of the soul is replaced by
realization of the self, the humanistic psychologies provided a scientific
legitimation of the worship of the self. The biblical story of the fall and
ultimate redemption became in psychology individualized into theories of
the growth of the self and stages of psychosocial development. In the
psychological liberation of the self, the evil and tragic dimensions of the
human condition disappeared. Although also facing the dark irrational sides
of humankind, the new psychoanalysis remained in line with Enlightenment
rationalism and optimismWhere id was, ego shall become.
Individualizing. A psychological conception of human being originated in
the 4th century after Christ with St Augustines autobiography Confessions
(1952). The God of nature and heaven was moved into man, constructing an
inner person of contemplation. Certain knowledge was sought by looking
inwardsthrough introspection and self-reflection. Redemption was sought
through an inner confession to God. Augustine was influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy and defended Christianity against a sceptical philosophy
at the dissolution of the Roman Empire, at a time when the concept
modern first came into use. His argument against the sceptics doubt of
certain knowledge was I reply, If I am mistaken, I exist. A non-existent
being cannot be mistaken, therefore I must exist, if I am mistaken
(Augustine, 1972, p. 460).
A thousand years passed before an Augustinian monk during the Renaissance radicalized the individualizing and interiorizing of mans relation to
God instigated by St Augustine. Martin Luthers Protestantism left human
beings alone with God, to be sought inwards by prayer and by study of the
Holy Scriptures. In Protestantism, people were set free from confession and
the absolution of their sins by the church and left to their own inner
conscience and free will. The very term psychology was coined in the 16th
century, and the Protestant line of individualization came to dominate the
Enlightenment psychology developed in the following centuries.
Styles of inquiry. Theological modes of obtaining knowledge through inner
contemplation and exegesis of sacred texts were carried over into introspectionism and psychotherapy. Augustines quest for certain inner truth, by
contemplating on how the inner states of consciousness appeared to the
introspecting observer, was systematized in the introspective psychologies of
Wundt and Titchener. The theologians elaborate exegesis of the parables of

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the Holy Scriptures were taken over in Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900/1953).
Modern psychotherapy was preceded by the Christian confession. To St
Augustine and Luther there was an individual inner dialogue and inner
confession to God, whereas the Catholic Church had institutionalized a
confession to a priest. In 1215 ce the Fourth Lateran Council required all
Christians to confess their sins annually, with a medical model in mind:
The confessor should be direct and careful in the manner of experienced
physicians . . . diligently inquiring about the circumstances of the sin and
the sinner, whereby he can learn what sort of advice to offer and what
remedies to employ, making diverse attempts to heal the ailing person.
(quoted from Jonsen & Toulmin, 1989, p. 46)

In church the topic of the confession is the confessants soul; in psychoanalysis the topic of the therapy is the analysands psyche. There are in both
instances a sympathetic listener and an examining questioner, quasianonymously hidden behind a curtain or seated behind the patient on the
couch. With a guarantee of anonymity, the confessing parishioner or patient
recounts his or her sins and guilt, anxieties and worries. The confessing
person receives relief through the priests absolution, and the therapeutic
patient receives relief through reacting out his or her feelings in relationship
to the therapist. The affinity of the new cathartic cure to the Roman Catholic
confession, mentioned in passing by Freud and Breuer in Studies of Hysteria
(Freud, 1895/1955, pp. 212, 282), was hardly followed up within the
psychoanalytic tradition.
In instruction manuals for Catholic confessors, one finds recommendations that the confessants examine their thoughts, including the content of
their dreams, and recount everything, however trivial and insignificant it
may appear (see Foucault, 1998, in particular pp. 2021). Centuries later we
rediscover such instructions in psychoanalysis; here the patient is asked to
recount his or her dreams and free associations and follow the golden rule of
psychoanalysis to say everything which comes to mind, however insignificant and repulsive it may be to conscious thought. The Catholic ritual of
confession with its catharsis could lead to a close personal relation of
penitent and priest, involving sympathy, love, lust and power, with the
danger of transgression, themes addressed again as transference and countertransference relations in psychoanalytic therapy (see Webster, 1996).
The yearly confession, where a church-appointed judge listened to the
culprits self-diagnosis, instigated self-reflection and the social construction
of an internal space: The new confessional order relocated penance from the
outer into inner space; it compelled each soul to create this new space with
itself, and to create it according to architectural rules laid down in Church
law (Illich, 1982, p. 154). Modern psychology followed up the confessional
interiorization of the soul and the privatization of the self, refurnishing the

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soul with internal mental representations stored in cognitive boxes and Id

EgoSuperego edifices of the self.
Sexuality as sin and guilt became a major theme in confession and later in
psychoanalysis. When compared with the medieval Catholic manuals for the
confessors, psychoanalysis appears rather Victorian. Foucault (1998) has
noted the transformation of sex into discourse, and self-confession and selfexamination as a specific cultural form of dominationWestern man has
become a confessing animal (p. 59).
Specific churchpsychology correspondence. There exist specific correspondences between the many schools of modern psychology and the
religious denominations. Influences of Freuds Jewish upbringing may be
found in his development of psychoanalysis (Bakan, 1958). The religious
roots of modern psychology are not confined to psychotherapy or introspective psychology. Thus, Watsons scientific behaviourism is related to
the Baptism that he was brought up with and for which he was planning to
become a minister (Birnbaum, 1964), and has also been interpreted as a
reaction against his religious upbringing (Creeland, 1974). In one theological
commentary, Skinners belief in the relentless force of natural selection is
close to the Calvinistic theory of predestination, and his belief in a perfectly
planned operant environment appears as a secular counterpart to the Presbyterian obedience to the providence of God (Browning, 1987).
A Protestant psychology. The discipline of psychology is generally most
prominent in Protestant countries. It may be that the stronger religious
community of the Catholic Church, and its confession, make recourse to
professional therapists less relevant than in the more individualized Protestant denominations. On a biographical level it is noteworthy how many of the
pioneers in psychology, from Wundt onwards, were sons of ministers, and
how in some cases, such as Jung and Rogers, strong religious fatherson
conflicts influenced the psychology they pioneered.
Piagets religious mission. Piagets intellectual life may be seen in the light
of the theological conflict between a transcendental and an immanent
religion in Protestantism (see Berndt, 1989; Vidal, 1987). In his first book at
the age of 20, La Mission de lIdee (1916), Piaget laments the loss of a true
idea of the absolute, and concludes, in view of the sufferings of the First
World War, with a hope for a new renaissance of religion. The following
quasi-autobiographical novel, Recherche (1918), finishes with the protagonist receiving the heavenly mission of uniting science and faith throughout his
life. To answer the question How can one believe and yet remain objective? Piaget sought to develop a science that was consistent with his
religious beliefs. He repudiated a theology of transcendence and revelation,
which he found dogmatic and authoritarian, and argued for an immanentist

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conception of religion, within which he later also incorporated his empirical

studies of cognition. Immanentism was to Piaget the identification of God
with universal and impersonal norms of thought. Main themes of Piagets
later work were expressed in Recherche, such as the assimilation of
experience to the existing cognitive structures, the development of consciousness through successive levels of logical thought, and an allembracing movement towards equilibrium, which represented biological as
well as religious truth, with God as the ideal equilibrium.
In psychological textbooks Piagets philosophical interest in developing a
genetic epistemology and his biological orientation are emphazised, sometimes mentioning that he began publishing articles on biological topics when
he was 11 years old. In contrast, Piagets two subsequent religious books,
where he lays out the programme for his lifes work, are nonexistent in
histories of psychology.
The present thesis of modern psychologists taking over the earlier role of
priests is not entirely new. When Auguste Comte founded sociology and
positivist philosophy in the early 19th century he explicitly envisioned
sociologists as the new positivist high priests preaching the positivist
doctrine of the religion of humanity (see Samelson, 1974).
The Factory Metaphor of Psychology2
Man a machine. (La Mettrie, 1748/1974)

Modern industrial production splits the work of the skilled craftsman into
separate manual and mental skills. The workers of the new factories were
left to carry out fragmented repetitive movements. The management, for
whom the workers were mechanical bodies without souls, did the planning
of work. Industrial workers were uprooted from the tight-knit unity of the
medieval community and isolated in rationally planned factories. The
modern person was further individualized by the liberal economy loosening
feudal bonds; now everyone became the architect of his or her own fortunes
in an individual struggle for survival in the free market. The Protestant ethic
of hard work and saving was in line with the demands on workers from the
new capitalism.
General factorypsychology correspondence. The fragmented and monotonous situation of the industrial worker, devoid of meaning and influence,
embodied by the repetitious mechanical behaviour at the assembly line,
provides a model for the early psychologists laboratory studies of human
activity. In the present perspective, and contrary to frequent laments that
psychology gives an artificial, mechanical view of humanity, laboratory
psychology has, albeit in a scientifically disguised form, produced a valid
picture of human life in a modern industrial society.

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Worldview. Natureand human naturebecame in the modern age raw

material to be explained and formed rationally. The Enlightenment philosopher La Mettrie (1748/1974) conceived of the human being as a machine.
The degradation of human labour in the factories was carried over into the
mechanical dehumanization of human subjects in the new psychological
laboratories, treating humans and animals in the same experimental design
and language, in one epoch with rats as the favoured subjects of experimental psychology. Experimentation in psychology contributed to a worldview where it became scientifically legitimate to talk of soul and body, the
mental and the physical, of human and machine, and of human and animal in
the same breath.
Subject matter. Throughout the 20th century the subject matter of modern
psychology moved from an internal consciousness to external behavioural
responses and back again to internal cognitive processes in a mind. The
mechanistic orientation, the focus on the individual and the exclusion of
cultural aspects of human activity remained constant throughout the transformations of the subject matter of psychology. The industrial conception of
human activity was not confined to behaviourist and the later cognitivist
psychologies; psychoanalytic meta-theory was also replete with mechanical
metaphors of the human psyche as a system of energy transformations and
the mind as a microscope, and with therapy conceptualized as the repair of
ego-functions.
Telos. A technical interest in control over objectified processes became a
presupposition for theoretical and empirical work in the new psychology. A
technological paradigm for understanding nature and humanity was pervasive, a technology characterized by a meansends rationality, employing the
most effective techniques for transforming raw material into refined products. The natural science conception of behaviour had the ideological
function of making a technological approach to human activity legitimate
and self-evident.
Styles of inquiry. Psychology was founded as an experimental discipline at
the height of societys industrialization, dated to Wundts opening of a
psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. In the same period the engineer
Frederick Winslow Taylor developed a new scientific management of
workers in American factories. Taylor regarded modern engineering as the
model for the modern scientific management of workers. It was to be based
on systematic and scientific time studies of each workmans job in isolation,
dividing it into a number of subdivisions, and measuring the time for each
subpart of the work operation and comparing it against a standard. The
system enforced a standardization of the work process: An instruction card

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for each operation must be written out stating in detail just how each
operation on every piece of work is to be done and the time requried to do it
(F.W. Taylor, 1903/1947, p. 65). The scientific management aimed at a
clearcut and novel division of mental and manual labour in the workshops,
where all possible mental work should be removed from the workshops and
centred in the planning departement: There is no question that the cost of
production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work
as much as possible from the manual labor (F.W. Taylor, 1903/1947,
p. 121; see also Bravermanns [1974] discussion of the degradation of work
in scientific management).
The workers protests against the scientific management of their work led
in 1912 to Congressional hearings to investigate Taylors shop management.
The behaviourism John B. Watson founded in this period came to reflect the
goals, conceptualizations and methods of Taylors human engineering, albeit
with natural science rather than industrial efficiency as legitimation. To
Watson (1914), Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective
branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of
behavior (p. 1). In line with Taylors human engineering, behaviourism
moved the brain work away from their subjects activity in order to
objectively control and predict their subjects behaviour. The mental thinking and planning parts of work were left to the engineers and the behavioural
experimentalists. There is a common quantification and timing of the motor
movements of the industrial workers and experimental subjects, who were
uprooted from their cultural contexts and planted into strictly controlled
factories and experimental laboratories.
When Ebbinghaus in 1885 instigated the natural science study of the
higher mental processes with experiments on learning and remembering
nonsense syllables, he also instigated what may be termed the assembly line
paradigm of psychological research. Remembering was studied by learning
lists of nonsense syllables by rote, at a prescribed speed, and by measuring
the time saved when relearning the same lists. The lived meaningful world
of the subject was split into isolated fragments, with experimental manipulation counteracting possibilities of creating meaning from the situation. In the
subsequent pursuit of a natural scientific psychology, the meaning of what is
learned and its cultural context became sources of error.
The strict scientific management of the workers behaviour has for
some time been outdated within industry. Human engineering was from the
1930s on replaced by, or supplemented with, human relations management,
where workers experiences, feelings and self-worth were regarded as
important for their productive efficiency. The themes raised by the new
technological humanism of industry became manifested in the many group
studies of the new social psychology and by mid-century also in humanistic
psychologies.

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Key professions. Throughout the 20th century, priests as mediators of truth

were replaced by scientific psychologists as the ultimate authorities in
human matters. Psychometric testing has become pervasive within education, administration and management, providing apparently objective
methods for access to social privileges. The behavioural engineers applied
refined industrial models to human behaviour in factories and schools. In the
clinical domain the new techniques of behaviour therapy and cognitive
behaviour modification competed with the older confessional therapies.
Specific factorypsychology correspondences. Today, mechanical movements at the production lines have been taken over by automatized machines
and computerized robots and by the inexpensive and more easily manipulated workforce in the Third World. In particular the information industries
require more cognitively demanding work. A revised psychological conception of human nature has followed suit, replacing behaviourist stimulus
response models with more complex cognitive hierarchies of thought. In
fact, the cognitive revival of the mind actually strengthened the industrial
conceptions of human nature by now treating the human mind as a
machineas a computer. Behaviourisms assembly-line model of behaviour
had been legitimized through appeals to the natural sciences. The cognitive
rebellion no longer needed the detour of a natural science to legitimate its
industrial model of human activity. The new information psychology could
now model its human mind directly on the computer.
A two-way interaction. The mechanization of human behaviour in industrial
factories preceded the mechanization of behaviour in psychological laboratories. A direct interaction was soon advocated, such as by Munsterberg,
a pupil of Wundts laboratory, in the book Psychology and Industrial
Efficiency (1913):
Our aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science, which is intermediate
between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the
service of commerce and industry.
We ask how we can . . . secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of
the work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influence on human minds which are desired in the interests of
business. (pp. 3, 2324)

The present tracing of the development of psychology to the history of

industry is not original. Karl Marx stated in his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts from 1844:
It can be seen that the history of industry and industry as it objectively
exists is an open book of the human faculties, which can be sensuously
apprehended.

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No psychology for which this book, i.e. the most tangible and accessible
part of history, remains closed can become a real science with a genuine
content. (Marx, 1964, pp. 163164)

The Market Metaphor of Psychology3

I shop, therefore I am. (Photo-collage by Barbara Kruger)

The visual and the symbolic landscape is no longer dominated by churches

or factories; today, it is shopping malls and all-pervasive advertisements that
draw our attention. The importance of augmenting industrial production has
receded; the key to economic growth is increasing consumption of the
abundance of commodities produced. With the exploitation of wage labour
and the workers adaptation to industrial discipline well secured in the
Western countries, today it is the maximum exploitation of consumer desires
that is the crux of economic growth. It is now necessary to manufacture
customers as well as products.
General marketpsychology correspondence. In an economy based on
consumption, the manipulation of consumers desires, fantasies and selfimage is essential for economic growth. Such themes, which were relegated
as unscientific by classical behaviourism, became reflected in the mid20th-century humanistic psychologies of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and
Frits Perls. In addition, earlier-rejected qualitative research methods, which
have long been essential for marketing, are today slowly being admitted into
academic psychological research.
Worldview. With the erosion of a comprehensive frame of meaning, of
traditional values and communal bonds, individual self-realization became
the goal of life. The concept of realization has several meanings in
Websters dictionary: to make real, to understand, to convert into money, to
realize a profit, to be sold for a specific price. In the theories of humanistic
psychology, the meanings of self-realization as making real and as understanding prevail; in the present market metaphor of psychology, commercial
dimensions of self-realization are also included.
Cushman (1995) has traced the construction of the self in relation to the
development of advertising and psychotherapy in American consumer
society. He depicts a compatibility between a rainbow humanistic psychology and the consumer world: Humanistic psychologys liberationist, transcendental, expressivist tendencies, combined with an optimistic pragmatic
stance, moved in a direction often compatible with the energetic, flamboyant, on-the-make, sometimes nihilistic, always consumer-oriented post-war
landscape (p. 243).
The advertising and therapeutic communities promoted a new psychological ethos of spontaneity, joy and wish gratification. Individual salvation

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took the form of self-actualization to be fulfilled through consumption.

Maslows pyramid of needs is well suited to the upper classes in Western
societies, for whom the basic needs are fulfilled and who can now devote
themselves to their self-realization and peak experiences.
When religion and the meta-narratives of modernitysuch as growth,
progress and emancipationeroded, there appeared to be no truth outside of
man. In the ethics of humanistic psychology, virtue became responsibility
towards ones own existence and vice became irresponsibility towards
oneself. From a religious perspective, humanistic psychology appears as a
new 20th-century religion in which the fundamental object of devotion is the
self (Vitz, 1994). A potential destructiveness of the new psychologys
individualism also offers itself as one interpretation of a cryptic remark
attributed to Karl Kraus in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century:
Psychoanalysis is the sickness psychoanalysis seeks to cure.
In an experiential economy, the consumption of commodified experiences
such as tourism and the virtual realities of the Internet are becoming as
important as the consumption of material products. The coming age has been
termed a dream society where large parts of the economy will rest upon the
consumption of commodified dreams. At the beginning of the 20th century,
a new psychology was introduced by Freuds Interpretation of Dreams
(1900/1953). At the beginning of the 21st century, psychologists have
become instrumental in fabricating and marketing commodified dreams for
consumption.
Subject matter. The self with its feelings and desires became the subject of
consumer manipulation as well as of the new humanistic psychologies. The
substantial self of the early modern epoch became a relational self. In an
other-directed society, the social construction of the self is a key issue.
Marketing fosters a critical awareness of the appearance of the self to
othersadvertisements massively picturing the approving, or disapproving,
gaze of others to oneself and to the products surrounding the self. The
social self of George Herbert Meadconstituted by taking the attitude of
the other towards oneselfbecame the self of the age of consumption. The
current prevalence of narcissist vulnerable selves became in psychology
centred on childhood disturbances and internal complexes, commonly disregarding potential influences of systematic marketing strategies destabilizing a secure self.
Behaviour control through the emphasis on the self goes beyond the
market to also encompass the states control of its citizens. Foucault has
depicted how the self-discovery, self-fulfilment and freedom of choice
advocated by the new confessional sciences work together in the technologies of the self. The resulting self-governmentality through internalized
controls secures the modern state a control of its citizens with little directly
experienced oppression (Rose, 1989).

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Telos. The market has today replaced the church and industry as the main
force in the shaping of cultural values. The Protestant work ethic of
discipline and savingof energy, of time and of moneyhas today been
replaced by a psychology of wish gratification and indulgence. Reality and
identity appear as socially constructed and reconstructed with consumer
products, with a planned obsolescence built into the commodities purchased.
The meaning of life is found in consumption; what matters is to express,
design and redesign your self at the pace of the market. An insecure self
emptied through a loss of tradition and social bonds is now saturated by
consumer goods and commodified experiences in a perpetual identity
shopping. In a photo-collage by Barbara Kruger, St Augustines argument
against the sceptics If I am mistaken, I exist has become I shop, therefore
I am.
Key psychologies. Therapy and marketing have been key venues of psychology in the consumer age, an epoch also referred to as a therapeutic culture.
The humanist therapists followed Freuds approach of listening to and
conversing with their patients, but dismissed classical psychoanalysis as too
authoritarian. For the psychoanalysts, their patients were sick persons to be
cured; they had delusions regarding their outer reality as well as their inner
selves. For the new anti-authoritarian therapists, their patients became clients
and consumers. To the client-centred therapists, the client was the ultimate
authoritythe customer is always right.
Humanistic psychology is in some respects close to a consumer ideology
with its promotion of spontaneity, of living out fantasies and desires, and
with individual self-actualization as the goal of life. Also the different
approach of a social constructionist psychology, with its emphasis on the
social construction of a fluid self through conversations and narratives,
comes in some respects close to an ideology promising consumers the
freedom of constructing their own identities and worlds freed of the ties of
family and tradition, saturating their selves through commodified experiences and fashion-designed lifestyles, providing narratives for creating and
re-creating their selves through an incessant purchase of commodities.
Today, marketing is the field where Watsons scientific goal of prediction
and control of the behaviour of others has become a billion-dollar industry.
Pioneered by Watsons work as a marketing executive in the 1920s, and
followed up by more subtle humanistic approaches, psychology has provided concepts and techniques for the prediction and control of consumer
behaviour through marketing and advertising. Idiosyncratic meanings and
cultural variations, which were abhorrent to the rational planning of human
engineers and administrators, as well as to behaviourist scientists, are the
very themes for the managers of a market-sensitive responsive capitalism.
With sophisticated psychological techniques they search out new market

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niches and continually promote new lifestyles tailored with individual

meanings.
Styles of inquiry. In the consumer age there has been a resurgence of
qualitative research, earlier dismissed as unscientific by natural-scienceoriented psychologists. The new wave of qualitative research in the social
sciences had been preceded by market research half a century earlier, its
telos captured in book titles as The Strategy of Desire (Dichter, 1960) and
Captains of Consciousness (Ewen, 1976). Qualitative research interviews,
which Dichter used for market research in the 1930s, have during the last
few decades also become employed by academic psychologists. Marketers
perceptively track consumers experiences and desires in therapeutically
inspired interviews, today mainly in the form of focus groups. The marketer
needs to be sensitive to the variety of individual experiences and meanings
in the different segments of the population in order to exploit them for
increased consumption. Today probably a major part of the knowledge
production through qualitative interviews takes place within market
research.
A two-way interaction. The ideology and methods of marketing have
influenced and often preceded the application of corresponding concepts and
techniques within humanistic therapies and qualitative research. In contrast
to the dominantly one-way influence on psychology from religion, psychologists have also contributed directly to the development of consumption.
This has taken place by promoting an image of people as driven by
impulses, sanctioning a self-centred morality, and providing techniques for
the investigation and promotion of consumer desires.
Metaphors and Histories of Psychology
Psychology is not, and has not been, a unitary discipline. The different
cultural metaphors of the church, the factory and the market have existed
side by side in psychology. They have dominated in different historical
epochs, but are not sequential stages linked to specific epochs or persons. In
the biographies of pioneers such as Freud and Watson we thus find all three
metaphors represented. Freuds invention of psychoanalytic therapy contains
relations to the Catholic confession as well as to his Jewish background. His
meta-psychological theories were replete with industrial metaphors, including combinations of religious and industrial metaphors, such as seeliches
Apparat (apparatus of the soul). And the individualist image of human
beings driven by unconscious and primarily sexual desires was conducive to
the later manipulation of consumer desires. As noted above, Watsons
behaviourist view of human nature has been traced to a Baptist theology. His
academic contribution was mainly a translation of Taylors human engineer-

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ing in the American factories into a behaviourism legitimated as a natural

science. Watsons post-academic career, as mentioned, was as an innovative
and successful marketing executive.
The three cultural metaphors drawn here do not claim to be the core
structures of modern psychology; they serve to highlight, but do not exhaust,
the range of cultural presuppositions of modern psychology. Thus, a further
metaphor could be the modern highrise, which may capture a compartmentalized bureaucratic conception of the relation of human beings to their
world. Bureaucracies are characterized by impersonality, anonymity, formal
structures and prescribed, preferably quantifiable, rules of decision. Such a
bureaucratic metaphor, not developed in the present context, would focus on
the extensive testing industry of modern psychology, on its diagnostic
culture, as well as the bureaucratic, rule-driven conceptions of research
methodology and the cognitive bureaucracies of internal mental boxes and
their impersonal processes.
Some divergences between the present metaphorical cultural story of
psychology and the common insider stories of psychology as a succession of
ideas shall now be mentioned.
The repression of religion and the legitimation of psychology through
philosophy. Histories of psychology rarely consider a possible continuity
between religion and psychology. They prefer to treat Descartes rather than
St Augustine as a founding father of modern psychological thought. When
psychology entered the scientific laboratory in 1879, Nietzsches recent
death certificate for Christianity was taken literally and the door to religion
slammed shut.
With the neglect, or repression, of religion, religious practices and modes
of thought may today pervade research and practice without psychologists
awareness. Psychology and religion have been connected through a one-way
street: there have been many studies of the psychology of religion and very
few investigations of the religion of psychology. It has generally been left to
scholars from other fieldstheologians, sociologists and anthropologists
to violate the one-way street sign and address religious influences on modern
scientific psychology. The few religious psychologists, who have gone
against the trend, feel like they are shouting in the desert. McClelland
(1964), who in a positive vein has discussed psychoanalysis as a new JudeoChristian religion, thus wrote of a conspirancy of silence on religion in
psychology, and Vitz (1994), who for more that a quarter of a century has
written on psychology as a religion, notes that the extensive literature on
religious influences upon modern psychology is almost never, if ever,
mentioned by the teaching of psychology.
The door to philosophy remained half-open for the new experimental
psychology. By the construction of a past for the new science of human
beings, the history of philosophy appeared more legitimate than the history

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of religion. I believe that if the doors to religion are again opened, systematic
textual studies may find a closer correspondence of the images of humanity
in European and American psychology to Christian thoughtfrom St
Augustine to the current multitude of religious sects in North Americathan
to the history of philosophy. In particular, it may be worthwhile to
investigate the social construction of the reflecting inner self of modern
psychology in relation to the social constructions of a reflective inner self
and an interior mental space in the confessional booths of late medieval age,
preceding the more often evoked philosophy of Descartes.
A natural science psychology mythology of natural science. Treating the
history of industry as the context for development of behaviourist and
cognitive psychology falls outside the insider story referring to the natural
sciences, in particular physics, as the model for the new scientific psychology. The psychological science narrative has been taken from the speculations of positivist philosophers about the natural sciences. In their story,
experimentation and quantification were the major criteria of scientific
method. Somehow overlooked in the psychological natural science narrative
was chemistry, where the qualitative analysis of components of a substance
is as fundamental as their subsequent quantitative analysis, and also
Darwins qualitative descriptions of the evolution of species. Changes in
physics throughout the 20th century hardly penetrated the walls of the
psychological laboratories (see, e.g., Brandt, 1973). It remained for anthropologists to open the doors to the natural science laboratories and to
empirically observe research behaviour totally differently from the formal
method bureaucracies depicted in the social science textbooks. On the basis
of his own empirical studies of laboratory life (Latour & Woolgar, 1979), as
well as newer social studies of science, Latour (2000) depicts the ruling
social science conceptions of the natural sciences as simply a comedy of
errors.
The borrowed philosophical feathers of humanistic psychology. The new
American humanistic psychologies sought their legitimation in European
phenomenological and existential philosophies. More often than not their
conceptions of phenomenology and existentialism were superficial and
selective. Humanistic psychologies came close to a religion lite, focusing
on the good and on the growth potentials of life, dismissing existential
anxiety and dread as too pessimistically European. With an amplified
Enlightenment optimism, humanistic psychologists sought to substitute the
evil and dark sides of human life with the good and sunny sides.
Pointing out correspondences to the church, the factory and the market does
not invalidate the findings and practices of psychology, nor does it reduce
psychology to nothing but religious ideology, industrial manipulation or

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exploitation of consumer desires. The way out is not to de-situate psychology by attempts to eliminate cultural traces of religion, industry and
consumption in psychology. Rather than regarding such metaphors as some
disturbing cultural noise for an autonomous psychological science, we may
seek to become aware of the metaphors we as psychologists live by, and
reflect on how they influence our scientific and professional activities. The
truth of modern psychology has been in its presentation, albeit unreflectively, of the religious, productive and consummatory domains of the
human condition.
Psychology as a Postmodern Religious, Industrial and
Commerical Collage
I shall now turn to the position of psychology in the postmodern condition.
In the first part I speculate on how the metaphors of the church, the factory
and the market enter into a postmodern collage under the reign of the
market. The unification of psychology, which was earlier sought in the true
nature of the psyche, to be provided by the natural scientific method, is today
left to the market. I shall conclude by searching for potentialities of a
pragmatic and a culturally situated psychology through addressing challenges to a psychological science from the psychological profession and the
globalization of culture in a postmodern condition.
Psychology between the Cathedral and the Marketplace
In the discourse of todays financial backers of research . . . scientists . . .
are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. (Lyotard,
1979/1984)

In previous epochs the religious, the industrial and the market metaphors for
the relations of human beings to their world would be regarded as incompatible. Thus the founding of psychology as an experimental natural science
was seen as a threat to religion. As late as the end of the 19th century the
Cambridge University Senate rejected the establishment of a psychophysics
laboratory, on the grounds that it would insult religion by putting the human
soul in a pair of scales (quoted in Hudson, 1973, p. 100). Today earlier
incompatible discourses may amalgate into a psychology as a lively postmodern collage, drawing on multiple metaphors of human behaviour,
appearing as a pastiche of previously incommensurable concepts and techniques (Kvale, 1992). From a market perspective the heterogeneous religious, industrial and commercial metaphors of psychology, to be briefly
re-addressed in what follows, appear as a unity where issues of truth value
are subordinated to market value.
The modern age was characterized by a desacralization of the world,
replacing ancient religion with modern science. With a loss of faith in the

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Enlightenment meta-narrative of emancipation through knowledge and science we see in a postmodern condition a new attention to religion, ranging
from New Age spirituality to fundamentalist movements. Within the social
sciences the religious dimension of human life has been addressed by
politically critical scholars such as Benjamin and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School (see Gur-Zeev, 1998), and recently by educational researchers
such as Wexler (1996) and Popkewitz (1998). The implications for psychology of a resacralization of the world are twofold. It may entail openness in
psychology towards its own religious history and towards the religious
domain of human life. It may also mean that the need for secular psychological services may be reduced in a culture where some of the professional
tasks the psychologists took over from the priests may again return to the
church.
The industrial metaphor of human beings is still going strong in the prevailing computerization of the mind in cognitive psychology. The earlier
mechanical industrial conceptions of the natural sciences, emphasizing
experimentation and quantification, may, however, recede somewhat with
psychologists exodus to the neurosciences. They will here, in contrast to
their methodology textbooks from psychology, encounter natural scientific
studies of the human brain involving case studies with qualitative descriptions and interpretations.
The market rules psychological conceptions of the human life in a
postmodern society. From a consumption perspective we may discern a
unity in the current fragmented and contradictory field of psychology. The
public image of psychology appears as a Janus head talking with two
tongues. One face presents therapeutic narratives in a colourful language,
providing illuminative insights into the human condition, legitimating a
psychology of human concerns. The other face presents the experimental
statistical research of psychology in a quantitative language, legitimating
psychology as a natural science. The two oppositely directed faces need not
talk to, or listen to, each other; what matters is that the public can hear the
two languages of psychology together providing a public image of a
scientific discipline with a human concern. From a Janus head interpretation,
the hardly commensurable languages of scientific and professional psychology work together to uphold a strong discipline, the one providing the
public with practical relevance and entertaining narratives of human activity,
the other providing a strict scientific legitimacy of the discipline.
The commercial dimension of human life in a capitalist consumer society
goes beyond the markets for therapy and pop psychology to rule academic
conceptions of the nature of psychology as a science as well. Issues such as
whether psychology is a natural science or a human sciencein earlier
periods the topic of heated theoretical controversiesare today simply left
to the market. In The International Handbook of Psychology, published
under the auspices of the International Union of Psychological Science, the

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editors discuss Why does the classification of psychology matter? With

evidence from countries around the world they document how classifying
psychology under the humanities or the social sciences gives less funding
than a psychology classified as a laboratory-based natural science: Failure
to obtain recognition for the scientific status of psychological research
retards the further advance of such research and its applications. . . . If
psychology is classified as a science, funding is usually more adequate
(Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 2000, p. 6). The editors endorsement of psychology
as a natural science is here not based on any conceptual discussions of the
true nature of psychological knowledge and research, but left unproblematized to the rule of the marketwhere there is funding there is also
psychology in the postmodern age.
The science and profession of psychology are influenced by the culture in
which they exist, including the logic of the capital of the postmodern age
ranging from the economic rule of the therapy market over the consumer
images of human beings promoted by humanistic psychologies, to the
conceptions of psychology as a science being determined by funding
options. What is criticizable from a scientific point of view is a lack of
reflection on the social and economic influences on human behaviour in
psychological theories of human activity. The eyes of psychology have
remained wide shut to the economic situation of the human beings studied,
leaving an impression of psychologists paid and funded to explain and
control human behaviour without mentioning the impact of money on
human behaviour in a capitalist society.
The Rise of a Profession and the Decline of a Science
Psychology is mysteriously disappearing from the social sciences. Its
unheard-of success in the real world may have tempted it to give up the
theoretical life. (Bloom, 1987)

The rise of a profession. Psychology enters the 21st century as a profession

of remarkable strength and expansion. It is today among the university
subjects most frequently chosen by North American students and is rated
among the ten fastest growing career tracks in the United States. The
multitude of psychological testing services has a strong position in the
market for personnel selection and management. Psychology has a strong
hold on the rich therapeutic market through rigorous licensing and certification procedures, also when taking into account the advent of new biomedical
and New Age therapies, as well as the increased use of semi-professional
therapists, which follow from the costbenefit analyses of managed health
care.
The decline of a science. Psychology entered the 20th century as a promising
young science, with new experimental laboratories being established and

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Freuds Interpretation of Dreams instigating a new psychological culture. At

the start of the 21st century, however, the science of psychology appears in
a puzzling state, somehow empty of radically new insights into the human
situation.
One may object that, contrary to an intellectual stagnation of psychology,
there are today exciting new developments over a broad spectrum such as
cognitive science, neuro-psychology and psycho-linguistics. Psychologists
working within such expanding areas may sometimes prefer to drop the term
psychology and to call themselves cognitive scientists or neuro-scientists.
The many hyphenated psychologies at the borders of the mainstream of
psychology today lean heavily on concepts and methods imported from
neighbouring disciplines, leaving psychology in a limbo between neurology
and language. Perhaps, neuro-science and the humanities will eventually
take over the field of academic psychology, dropping the hyphens of current
psychological lifelines, such as psycho-neurology and psycho-linguistics,
and also leave behind the metaphysical entanglements of the Platonic quest
for the essential nature of the modern secularized soulthe psyche.
The psychological professionscience knot. The relation between scientific
and professional psychology has often been controversial; here two alternative positions of the profession as a barrier to, or a resource for, development of psychological knowledge of the human situation, respectively, shall
be suggested.
While psychotherapists may lament a lack of relevance of scientific
psychology for their practice, the economic base of their practice relies on
the scientific Ph.D. diploma and certificates ornamenting their offices,
securing their privileges against the many competitors on the therapeutic
market. The need for a natural science legitimation by a psychological
profession may, however, be a clamp on the foot for an intellectually open
and searching academic psychology. Other disciplines, such as anthropology
and sociology, the media sciences and philosophy, with no large profession
to legitimize, roam more creatively in the postmodern cultural landscape and
there theorize and investigate human activity by whatever concepts and
methods are appropriate to the subject matter.
We may, however, also envisage a rehabilitation of professional practice
as an important source of psychological knowledge. In a pragmatic postmodern culture we may accept the Aristotelian conception that there are
distinct forms of knowing not reducible to each other, and that practical
knowledge is not necessarily the application of theoretical knowledge
(Aristotle, 1994). The practitioners interactions with their clients may then
be treated as significant sites for producing knowledge of the human
situation, giving a privileged access to the subjects lived world, as outlined
in A Postmodern Epistemology of Practice (Polkinghorne, 1992) and in
The Case for a Pragmatic Psychology (Fishman, 1999). A psychology

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starting from case studies from professional practice need not be devoid of
conceptual reflection, psychoanalysis is one instance of the knowledge
potentials of therapeutic practice (Kvale, 2003).
Western Psychology in a Global Multicultural World
Be commensurable or disappear. (Lyotard, 1979/1984)

Scientific psychology is a specific Northern European and American mode

of conceiving the relation of human beings to their world. We may obtain
one impression of cultural dominance in psychology in a global multicultural world by looking at the last International Congress of Psychology in
Stockholm in the year 2000 and the speakers invited there. Of the 23
keynote addresses, 13 of the speakers came from the United States, the
United Kingdom and Canada, 6 from North and Central Europe, 1 from
Australia and 3 from Asian countriesChina, Japan and South Korea,
respectively. We may speculate why there was such a culturally skewed
sample of invited speakers at an international congress of psychology in the
year 2000. Perhaps psychology is an undeveloped science outside North
America, North Europe and the earlier Dominions of the British Empire. Or
possibly psychology in the other countries consists mainly of outdated
imitations of a Western psychology. Or maybe an individualist and rationalist psychology is alien to other culturessuch as Buddhist, Hindu and
Muslim cultures, which may be less prone to the confessional soul therapies
of a Judeo-Christian culture.
I shall conclude the present discussion by outlining two modes of
internationalization of psychology today. I here draw upon two forms of
legitimation in a postmodern conditionperformativity with global commensurability versus pragmatics of local narrativity and discourse as outlined by Lyotard (1979/1984). On the one hand we see a psychology
immersed in Western rationalist and individualist conceptions of human
beings. Western psychologists think locally and act globally. With the
current globalization of economy and culture, psychology may come to
serve as a new cultural imperialism, following Lyotards performance
dictumBe commensurable or disappear. Psychologists take over as new
secular missionaries, the psychotechnicians striving to make all humankind
measurable and the humanistic psychologists preaching a gospel of selfworship. Human beings are de-situated from their culture and taught to
pursue their own self-realization through commodities and individual therapy, becoming well-adapted consumers in a free global consumer market.
Western psychology, as presented here through the metaphors of the church,
the factory and the market, is one historical and culturally specific conception of human nature that today enters into the Western cultural neocolonialism of a postmodern age.

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An alternative mode of globalization would be to open Western psychology to multiple cultural discourses in the postmodern condition, taking
seriously the narratives and morals of other spiritual and material cultures.
This would imply going beyond the factvalue split of modern psychology
and addressing how psychology as a cultural enterprise has served as an,
albeit unacknowledged, moral guide to life in current Western societies.
Psychology then needs to reconsider its own practice, and view its own
theoretical activity as normative from the outset, as argued by Brinkmann (in
press). In this view, a psychological framework is needed that does justice to
the nature of values and morals in human life. This Aristotelean-inspired
endeavour entails a moral ecology where psychology will again become a
moral science.
Developing an intercultural psychology would imply going beyond the
Judeo-Christian individualized stories of human beings and opening the
floor for discourses of non-Western cultures and their indigenous psychologies. An intercultural dialogue may open not only to an understanding of
cultural influences on the science and profession of psychology, but also to
the role psychology today plays in the economic and power structures of
different societies. While such a dialogue across cultures may challenge
some of the presuppositions of psychological knowledge taken for granted in
a Western culture, it may enrich the conversation about what it means to be
human in a global postmodern age.
Notes
1. For the church metaphor, further documentation is provided in particular by
Browning (1987), who analyses the modern psychologies as mixed disciplines of
religious, ethical and scientific languages; see also Bellah (1987), Bertelsen
(2002), Kirschner (1996), Laursen (1999), Leahey (1987), Saugstad (1998),
Srhaug (1996) and Vitz (1994). The epigram is from St Augustine, De Vera
Religione, XXXIX, 72 (quoted in C. Taylor, 1989, p. 129).
2. For the factory metaphor, further documentation can be found in Bravermann
(1974), Bruder (1971), Ellul (1964), Kvale (1976) and Sohn-Rethel (1972).
3. For the market metaphor, further documentation can be found in Cushman
(1995), Jackson Lears (1983), Kvale (1992), Miles (1998) and Wallach &
Wallach (1983).
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Acknowledgements. The point of departure for this article was an

invited State-of-the Art-LecturePsychology in the Postmodern Ageat
the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden, 248
August 2000. An earlier version of this paper was published in the
conference proceedings.

Steinar Kvale is Professor of Educational Psychology and Director of the

Centre of Qualitative Research at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He
received his Dr. Philos. from the University of Oslo in 1974. He is the
author of Prufung und Herrschaft (Beltz Verlag, 1972) and InterViews
(Sage, 1996) and has edited Psychology and Postmodernism (Sage, 1992)
and, with Klaus Nielsen, Mesterlre: lring som social praksis (Hans
Reitzels Forlag, 1999). Address: Psykologisk Institut, Asylvej 4, DK 8240
Risskov, Denmark. [email: steinark@psy.au.dk]