Webinar Series 2023: The Mythology of Psychology

With Rami Gabriel, PhD Columbia College Chicago

In every society, a mythology is developed to express, enhance, and codify belief. The symbols adopted and maintained by the practice of rites and rituals in a given human semiotic niche are a response to feelings of doubt and perplexity. I suggest that in contemporary society, psychology as the study of the mind construed broadly as an empirical science, a therapeutic method, and a codification of neuropsychopharmacology currently serves as a secular mythology of human nature. I locate the origin story of this new superstition in individualism and the nature of explanation in neuroscience.

Dr. Rami Gabriel received his doctorate in cognitive and perceptual sciences. He is Associate Professor of Psychology and Fellow of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Research group in Mind, Science, and Culture in Department of Humanities, History, and Social Science at Columbia College Chicago.

Rami is the co-author of The Emotional Mind (2019) and author of Why I Buy (2013). A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2023. His research on the philosophy of psychology, affective neuroscience, consciousness studies, and the self is published in technical and popular journals.