Thomas Teo - Fascist Subjectivity and the Subhuman

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2021

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

Thomas Teo is a Professor of Psychology in the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology Program at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has spent his 20+ year career challenging the status quo in academic psychology. His unique approach to research has been described as both critical and meta-psychological. He often takes the discipline of psychology itself, including its methods and assumptions, as the target of his analysis.

He is currently the co-editor of the Review of General Psychology (Sage), editor of the Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, and co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology. He is the former president of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, of the American Psychological Association's Society of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24), and former chair of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association. He has a research record with more than 200 academic publications and refereed conference presentations.

In this interview, Teo expounds upon concepts covered in a recent Science News Article and explains what it means for him to be a critical psychologist. He outlines how, as he became disappointed with the general state of psychology in Western Europe and the Americas, he sought alternative approaches that could better account for how culture, society, and economics are entangled with psychology. This led him to look more closely at historical examples of fascism, as well as postcolonial authors, to better understand how the psychosocial dimensions of social power operate in the world today. As he explains, this has important implications for how we think about psychiatry, mental health, and disability.

Teo concludes the interview by foreshadowing some of his future work, which will further build on his concept of subhumanism to examine how subjectivity is shaped by the premium placed on certain lives. In contrast, others are constructed as less-than-human under neoliberal capitalism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:13.4	Hello, welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Tim Beck, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Taylor.
0:20.4	Thomas is a professor of psychology in the historical, theoretical, and critical studies of psychology program at York University in Toronto, Canada.
0:29.7	Thomas has been active in the advancement of theoretical, critical, and historical psychology throughout his professional career.
0:37.0	This includes more than 200 academic publications and refereed conference presentations.
0:42.3	He takes what he describes as a meta-psychological approach to research,
0:47.3	which means that he focuses on the practices of psychologists themselves
0:51.3	to highlight hidden assumptions in their discipline and hopefully new
0:55.6	possibilities for human subjectivity. Recently, he has published on social topics ranging from
1:01.8	gender discrimination to migration, racism, and fascism. And so thank you so much for joining me
1:07.3	today, Thomas. I've really been looking forward to this opportunity to talk to you.
1:11.6	Thanks for inviting me. So just to get started, I notice you're an academic psychologist with what I would describe as a very unique approach to doing research in psychology,
1:20.6	especially compared to other psychologists in North America. And so I'd like to ask you soon to talk about how you would describe this approach and what
1:30.3	your main theoretical influences have been.
1:33.3	But before we get to that, can you share a little bit about your personal history, maybe
1:38.3	before academia?
1:39.3	Is there anything you can point to in your life that might have contributed to this
1:43.3	unique approach that you take to psychology? I think it has to do with the fact that there was a
1:53.2	disappointment, and that sort of say during my student is a disappointment about the discrepancy between what would be possible in
2:03.8	psychology and what is actually done in psychology. So I think psychology produces a lot of
2:08.6	interesting stuff, but it doesn't fulfill actually the promise that it had, at least in my mind,
2:16.7	as a student.
	...

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