Subjectivism in Psychology: what is it?

One of the problems that psychology has had to face along its history it is to define what is the starting point from which you begin to investigate mental processes. The difficulty of this first step is that, apparently, the object of study of this science is dual: on one side is the objective, and on the other is the subjective.

Subjectivism is the philosophical position that is born from the way in which some people decide to respond to this "fork in the road". In psychology, specifically, the implications of analyzing mental processes starting from subjectivism lead to to very different conclusions than researchers advocating an objective-focused perspective, which may be measured.

It is this article we will see how subjectivism affects psychology and what are the characteristic problems of this approach.

• Related article: "dualism in psychology"

What is subjectivism?

In short, subjectivism is the belief that reality, in the first instance, is formed by the ideas and the subjective appreciations that one himself makes about what happens to him for the head. Said like that it sounds complicated, but surely you are familiar with mottos of life of the style of

"Reality is created by our attitude" and other discourses that focus on consciousness and "the mental" to explain what nature is like of elements of reality that other people try to know from the objective aspects of these.

Thus, subjectivism is closely related to idealism, which is the belief that ideas exist before matter, and to the relativism, according to which there is no pre-established reality that exists beyond our diverse points of view and in many respects faced.

Now, what we have seen so far is plain subjectivism, without considering what its effects are in a specific field of science. It is important to keep in mind that, for example, starting from subjectivism in physics is not the same as doing it, for example, in sociology. These two disciplines study different things, and therefore subjectivism also acts on them in a differentiated way.

But it is in psychology that subjectivism is most likely to wreak havoc. Why? Mainly because in this science something is studied that can be confused with the very source of subjectivity, and which is normally known as "the mind".

subjectivism in psychology

As we have seen, psychology has the peculiarity of being the field of knowledge in which what is studied it can be considered that from which the intention and action of studying reality starts, something that does not occur in other disciplines. As a consequence, subjectivism can lead psychology into a loop that is hard to get out of and leads nowhere.

For example, one of the methods that subjectivist psychologists have historically advocated is the introspective method. In this, it is the studied person himself who pays attention to his mental processes (whether cognitive or emotional) and reports about them.

Free association as an example of this philosophy

For example, in the free association that he used Sigmund Freud (one of the most outstanding subjectivists in history) the patient began to pronounce aloud ideas or words that he thought were related to the idea that the psychoanalyst wanted research. It was up to him to know what information was relevant enough to say, and it was up to him too. that "search" through memories and imagination to come up with something that could advance the session.

From subjectivism, in short, it is believed that the subjectivity of each individual is the best source of data about mental processes, on the one hand, and that mental processes are what drive actions based on movement. For example, someone's subjective beliefs cause him to ban a woman from the store. person who has the aspect of not having a home, and it is those subjective beliefs that must be explore.

• Related article: "What is 'free association' in Psychoanalysis?"

Is the individual the only one with access to the mind?

Thus, for subjectivists what one knows about one's own mind is something separate from its own. environment and the context in which you find yourself when internally assessing your thoughts and feelings. There is a radical distinction between the mind and objective actions. and easy to observe that the person performs, and it is proposed that the important thing is in what cannot be observed directly by someone other than the person, because it is those internal and subjective aspects that lead to the movement of the person.

This approach, if we do not pay attention, the only thing it does is condemn psychology to not being able to answer any of the questions about the human behavior that it intends to address, since it always attributes the cause of this to an internal and subjective dimension of reality that only oneself can know. Not only does it not support itself philosophically by denying the existence of an objective reality, but it is also incapable of proposing useful applications to address psychological problems.