Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress

This paper explains the shared background and working pract the authors; identifies the main assumptions of a social materialis psychology, and sets out a manifesto showing what it might mean to cons distress from a social materialist perspective.

What follows is aimed in part, but not exclusively, at people in the Psy professions who se have any other vocabulary in which to talk about these issues outside of psychiatry on the hand, and talking therapy on the other. The article marshals a wide range of theory and r on the kinds of misery that get treated by mental health professionals.

We are a group of psychologists: clinical, counselling and academic. We have been meetin regularly since !!". We call ourselves social materialist psychologists. This is not necess formally worked#out philosophical stance. $ost psychology is individual and idealist. %t tak individual as a given unit of analysis, and treats the social as a somewhat optional and of uniform context. &nd, in what is still at root a 'artesian move, it treats the material world straightforwardly present, but simultaneously subordinate to the immaterial cognitions by reflect upon it.

%t is by contrast to this that our psychology is social materialist. (ocial because we affirm primacy of the social, of collectivity, relationality and community, because we acknowledg individuals are thoroughly social: ontogenetically, in their origins, and continuously and n optionally during their existence. &nd material because we acknowledge that the cognition which we reflect upon the world do not simply float free of its affordances, character and properties. 'ognition is both social and material, rooted in the ring#fenced metacognitive we have ac)uired, the embodied capacities it recruits, and the resources and sub*ective p our world supplies +,ohnson, !!-; Tolman, .//0; 1ygotsky, ./2 3.

4y social materialist psychology, then, we do not mean to imply a mere inverse reflection mainstream, a negation, a futile rush to its polar opposite. %ndividuals exist, but their exp are thoroughly social, at the very same time as they are singular and personal. &nd cogni occur, but their relation to the material world is neither determinate nor arbitrary. 5ur so materialist psychology is therefore aligned 6 in sentiment, if not content 6 with other cont initiatives that similarly refuse the na7ve separations of individual and social, experience a materiality: psychosocial studies, studies of sub*ectivity, process philosophy, the turns to and to affect. %n each of these perspectives +and more besides3 we find resources, echoes inspirations.

We write as we act: collectively. %n this, we align ourselves with a tradition of psychologis .//03, political theorists and activists +The 8ree &ssociation, !..3, writers and artists +9 .//.3 who re*ect in practice the notion that ideas are simply the achievement of individua moment when collectivity, solidarity and mutual trust are so sorely needed, this simple ac take on significances beyond the pages within which it appears.

This manifesto is unfinished, a work in progress, a direction rather than a destination. We find the ideas useful. $oreover it may inspire you to *oin with like#minded others, spend t sharing ideas and interests as we continue to do.

1. Persons are primordially social and material beings 4efore anything else, we are feeling bodies in a social world +'sordas, .//0; $erleau#Pon (chut:, ./-!3. Primordially, experience consists of a continuous flux of bodily feedback, o This feedback 6 which is the raw stuff of consciousness itself +;amasio, .///3 6 reflects o embodied, material situation +hot, tired, hurting etc3. %t situates us in a particular setting, furnishes an ongoing sense of our bodily potentials: an embodiment. This feedback is also continuously social +influenced by the changing social relations of the lived moment3 and +somewhat habitual, shaped by the impress of prior experience3. 4odily feedback, in the f feelings, is the most elemental stuff of our being human.

9owever, the ineffability of the body means that the centrality of feeling often eludes refle