1st Edition

Cybernetic Psychology and Mental Health A Circular Logic Of Control Beyond The Individual

By Timothy J. Beck Copyright 2020
176 Pages
by Routledge

176 Pages
by Routledge

176 Pages
by Routledge

This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens. Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines... Read more

Introduction. 1. Towards a Technical History of Thinking about Human Thought 2. Cybernetic Narratives Beyond The Individual 3. Three (Psycho)Logical Myths of Auto-Individuation (pseudo-AI) 4. Deinstitutionalization, Biopolitics, and Network Maps of ‘Mental Disorder’ 5. Disorder without Borders 6. The Network as a Mode of Being

Biography

Timothy J. Beck is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Landmark College. His research takes a critical, transdisciplinary approach in exploring how social boundaries are both regulated and persistently reconfigured through applications of psychological theories to problems related to "mental health."

"The necessity to think through issues related to the intersection of twenty-first century technology, psychology, subjectification, and human experience is an urgent concern for all fields of human inquiry, but perhaps particularly urgent for psychology as it moves from nineteenth and twentieth century theoretical formulations to theory responsive to the shifting terrain of consciousness and society in the twenty-first century. This volume is situated in such a way as to offer one opening set of possible formulations. Bringing forward the work of Simondon, Guattari, Deleuze and Deligny as the central interlocutors for this volume opens a field of inquiry that is very original and timely. The three core concepts of transindividualism,the society of control, and networks as a mode of being make sense as way to conceptualize life affirmative networks of care under twenty-first century capitalism."—Hans Skott-Myhre, Professor of Human Services, Kennesaw State University, USA