Matthew Mythology
Art History & Psychocentric Thought (Surrealism and Modern Art Part 1)
Published episode script

Guiding Framework
What
The central idea of this episode is that art history is not only the study of visual objects, but also a way of organizing, interpreting, and retelling cultural history. Through this episode, I introduce Psychocentrism as a framework for understanding how modern art, philosophy, psychology, and cultural theory increasingly centered the psyche, the self, subjectivity, imagination, and inner experience.
Why
The reason for producing this episode is to clarify how my interests in Surrealism, neo-Surrealisms, psychological realism, and fantastical art fit within a larger art-historical and intellectual pattern. Before discussing Surrealism directly, I want to establish art history as a periodization practice and show how movements such as Romanticism, DADA, Surrealism, psychodynamics, existentialism, phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism can be understood as part of a broader psychocentric tradition.

This episode asks how Western thought moved from trying to classify, rationalize, and “conquer” knowledge toward a deeper concern with perception, interpretation, storytelling, unconscious life, identity, and meaning-making. In doing so, it frames Psychocentrism as both an art-historical current and a philosophical/cultural response to the limits of classicism, positivism, and modernist rationality.
Introduction
Hello, welcome to Matthew Mythology: Stories by an Autistic Art Historian. This is your storyteller Matthew Mahoney.
This episode will be the first part of An Introduction to Surrealism and Modern Art discussing art history periodization and psychocentric thought. I plan to talk about Art History, a discipline and field that explores the history of visual art, as a periodization practice. Psychocentrism is a concept I invented to explain a centering of the psyche in Western thought and culture, especially in 20th and 21st century academic, art, and cultural movements. In this part, I will focus more on the intellectual/philosophical movements and in the next part, change focus to Western art. This episode was redone from a script for an episode called “An Introduction to Art History & Psychocentrism.”
In my undergraduate college career, I have taken many courses that have trained me to be a good art historian. As an art historian, I have primarily been interested in how art participates in intellectual and cultural discourses of its time. I am particularly attached to how art participates in psychological-focused discourses in the 20th century. I am interested in fantastical art and psychological realism which is introspective, psychological storytelling; how artists express their mental, spiritual, and emotional lives in their work.
We will first discuss the origins of Art History as a Periodization Practice, and then discuss the emergence of Psychocentrism, reviewing various academic, art, and cultural movements I consider fitting within Psychocentrism. This episode has been revised along with the other pre-existing episodes to clarify and refine ideas, create better audio, and give life updates.
1. What Is Art History?
There is a fun debate as to what art history is exactly since its object of study, is not even well-defined. What is art? Is a centuries-old question and quite depending on subjective opinion and context. New works from the 20th century to now have worked to broaden what we call art and modern mentalities are even challenging what works we consider to be art before the 20th century. Lines are blurring or all together disappearing, such as between art and craft which some would argue is a sexist line attempting to create a gendered hierarchy, art and architecture with the advent of installation art, art and technology with the advent of minimalist and digital work, and fine art and commercial art, with the advent of pop art.

We also can’t agree on when the field started. One argument says Art History started with George Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, a book written during the Renaissance about artists including Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Another argument says Art History formally started during the Enlightenment, a time where categorizing, “scientifying”, and metaphorically “conquering” knowledge as a finite and objective object was an obsession. For the sake of my argument, I will say the latter is the true answer.

Art history in step with the period it was birthed from, attempted to make the history of visual art a tangible, comprehendible and “conquerable” body of knowledge. It was also very Euro-centric, focused on European art from the classical periods (Greek and Roman) to the medieval to the renaissance to its current period.
2. Art History as a Periodization Practice
With this, one could argue that Art History is a periodization practice as there is no other way to make history withs its millions of art objects tangible and conquerable. Periodization models create identifiable chunks of historical time and interpreting or identifying these chunks with zeitgeists or spirits, representing new pulses and significant changes in ideology, style, and/or content. When we talk about Classical to Medieval to Renaissance to Baroque to Neoclassical to Romantic to Modern, we are talking about periodization models.

As a periodization practice, art history acts like both a science and an art like general history. We try to categorize and order the complex chaotic creativity of multiple eras of art, making us like an Enlightenment-era science. At the same time, art history acts like an art as many historians then use the periodization practice to problematize historical objects through analysis and interpretation and sees zeitgeists or spirits, rather than using them empirically or to simply describe artworks. We categorize like a science, but we analyze and interpret like an art. This is because half of art history is not necessarily historical, it is the study of tangible and visible art, which includes visual analysis and interpretation. Art history can be defined as “a historical consciousness through visual culture.” As art historians, we use history to build context and strengthen our analysis and interpretation, but at the end of the day, we are constructing meaning of these highly tangible and visual historical objects in a way that seems to highlight the time period as well as be relevant for present interests. Art history as an interpretive model of inquiry is hyperaware of the hermeneutic gap, realizing what we know is affected by how we design our explanations, that our view of the past is affected by the context of the present, that the implication of a historical object is different for the original audience versus the current audience.

There are different periodization approaches in art history with their own agendas, attempting to highlight some specific idea or trend in art and culture of a specific time period. Periodization practices are only problematic if they are seen as universal and the only true one amongst many. If art historians use periodization practices this way, then they are acting like Enlightenment-era and modernist thinkers, and in my opinion, ignoring the art and interpretive side of art history.
3. Classical and Anti-Classical Currents (Hocke and Gombrich)
The most popular art-historical periodization is called “the conventional art-historical periodization” and views art history like a pendulum swaying back and forth between classical and non-classical. This view was popularized by E.H. Gombrich in his 1963 book “Norm and Form” but has been expressed as an idea, although using different terms, earlier by art historians such as the case with Gustav Rene Hocke in his seminal 1959 book “The World as a Labyrinth.”

I read Hocke’s book as research for the episode of this podcast on the symbol of the labyrinth. In this book, Gustav Rene Hocke suggests that European literature and art has had two spirits, two currents, two breaths of life: classicism versus anticlassicism or mannerism. Hocke essentially argues that the classical is rational, harmonious, and seems to follow collective rules while the non-classical is fantastical, chaotic, subjective, and seems to express personal style and storytelling. Hocke used the term “Mannerism” to define the “non-classical”, believing it to better define the phenomenon of the anti-classical which he believed was an expressive violence that defied classical harmony and canons and embraced personal license (or licenza), personal style (or manner, maniera), and talent/genius (inventio). I find this definition interesting and useful.

Gombrich’s approach divides history into Classic (classical, before 1000), Romanesque (non-classical, 1000-1150), Gothic (non-classical, 1150-1500), Renaissance (classical, 1300-1520), Mannerist (non-classical, 1520-1600), Baroque (non-classical, 1600-1740), Rococo (non-classical, 1800-1850), Neoclassical (classical, 1760s-1850s), Romanticism (non-classical, 1800-1850), Formalist Modernism (classicism, 1860-1964), Postmodernism (non-classical, 1962-1990). We don’t discuss beyond 1990 because it is post-historical, its objects are not old enough to attempt to define them in an epoch or period.

While having relatively similar ideas, Hocke would disagree with this periodization in one way, he would consider Formalist Modernism to be non-classical. But as you may have noticed, when he published his book, he had not witnessed the period of postmodern art that Gombrich would experience. Despite this, I still agree with Hocke and believe we have had an unusually long period of anti-classical art. Hocke essentially argues that the classical is rational, harmonious, and seems to follow collective rules while non-classical is fantastical, chaotic, subjective, and seems to express personal style and storytelling. Formalist Modernism consisting of movements like Surrealism, Cubism, and Futurism is definitely non-classical.

While Gombrich used the simple term of non-classical, Eugenio D’ Ors, another art historian believing in essentially the same idea, chose the term “Baroque” to define the “non-classical” and identified 22 classes of Baroque. Hocke used the term “Mannerism” to define the “non-classical”, believing it to have less historical connotations than “Baroque” as well as better defined the phenomenon of the anti-classical which he believed was an expressive violence that defied classical harmony and canons and embraced personal license (or licenza), personal style (or manner, maniera), and talent/genius (inventio). I agree with this definition. Both art historians see their terminologies as defining a countercurrent to classicism, an “anti-classical” current.
4. Periodizing the History of Ideas Alongside Art
I have two revisions myself to Hocke and Gombrich’s model that will ultimately produce the argument that anticlassicism in the 19th and 20th centuries is a special kind of anticlassicism: Psychocentrism. The first revision I will discuss in this episode is about how the history of philosophy, mentality, and culture are deeply intertwined with the history of art and visual culture. The second revision we will discuss in my episode on Surrealism which will change focus from the influences of modern thought in periodization to how we can periodize more specifically, the various changes in modern art.

Interest in the psychological and centering of the psyche were not strictly related to Surrealism or modern art but also to modern changes in philosophy, mentality, and culture. It would be ignorant to see the history of art as separate from the history of thought, from the history of ideas when the art world challenges the academy and its ideas and contributes equally to new philosophies, new mentalities. Both academics and artists, both intellectuals and creatives, are exploring ideas and reflecting on themselves and the world and society around them, though, by different means. My interest in art history has always been not simply an interest in art but also an interest in artists’ dialogues within our academic and cultural debates. The art world does not exist in a bubble. Therefore, I suggest that when looking at periodization of art history, we must undergo some periodization of the history of ideas and culture.

With that being said, we can see currents in the history of ideas that echo classicism and anticlassicism in art history. In the history of ideas, the classical currents can be defined by being rational, empiricist, positivist (meaning a belief that questions in the arts & humanities can be answered by science and emphasizes quantitative data), Aristotelian (primarily interested in mimesis, imitation of nature and believes that knowledge comes from our sense perception), and modernist (believing that the universe is stable, simple, highly ordered, and rational and that knowledge could be conquered and used to improve mankind). The Mannerist or anti-Classical currents can be defined by being fantastical/theoretical, antipositivist/interpretivist (valuing subjective, qualitative knowledge, appreciates and finds necessary the split between arts/humanities and sciences), Platonic (primarily interested in the subjective powers of imagination including imagining, storytelling, mythmaking and uncovering the less obvious and unknown and believes in an ideal body of knowledge, believes in a world of ideas), and postmodern (believing that the universe is complex, incomprehensible, chaotic, and mysterious and that knowledge is contextual, subjective, and interpretative).
5. What Is Psychocentrism?
Psychocentric thought was a strong but unique current of anticlassicism in the 19th and 20th centuries. I plan for the rest of this episode to discuss what Psychocentrism is and how it emerged in philosophy, mentality, and culture. Psychocentrism, a centering of the psyche, the mind, or the self in our sense of reality, in Western culture, and in the arts & humanities fields, is in reaction to modernism, and now after reading Hocke, argumentatively also in reaction to modernism’s ideological relative: classicism. I realized after reading Hocke that psychocentrism at least in art and literature may not unique to the 19th-20th centuries. However, still argumentatively, one of the strongest currents of psychocentrism, being so varied, experimental, and long, is during the 19th-20th centuries.

Psychocentrism led to an increasing “internalizing” of our world. Modern people see reality as perception, as experience, as subjective, personal, and interpretive.  This has emerged as the order that classicism, and then modernism, have promised, was found to be fake, and that the world is more chaotic and harder to understand. Modernism has deceived us into believing that humans are perfectible which no doubt has contributed to medicalization, that knowledge of the world can be easily scientified, categorized, conquered, and understood, and that marginalization, war and fascism are justified. People sick of modernism have found that the ideal of rationality is inhuman and evil.

Psychocentrism with its many manifestations: Romanticism in Art History, Existentialism and Phenomenology in Philosophy, Psychodynamics in Psychology, and Postmodernism in Cultural Studies, have shown us that human experience is subjective and that things are more complex and labyrinthian than we could ever imagine. While this sense of chaos may bring fear, we are brought into the existential reality that we are human, and opens to our view a complex labyrinth where we can make new beautiful constructions and interpretations and gives us freedom to make meaning for ourselves. It is important to note that Psychocentrism did not exist on its own and was constantly challenged by Modernism and Classicism.

Psychocentrism also coincides with the linguistic turn in the academy as questions of reality, being, and knowledge have turned increasingly to how humans as subjects perceive and create meaning out of the world with language. With Psychocentrism, there is also a centering of language in reality and questions of metaphysics have become trivial as the focus of reality has changed from what is reality to how we perceive and “know” reality through constructions of the self and the other, everything in contrast to the self. Oftentimes, scholars such as critic Roger Fry and my academic advisor Professor Santos like to mention, modern art, not just modern thought, emphasized language, playing with it through new, increasingly abstract forms.
6. Romanticism and Neoclassicism
Romanticism is one of the factors that contributed to Psychocentrism. A famous Romantic painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco Goya depicts the titan, his Romanized name, Saturn, his Greek name Chronos, as eating one of his sons. Some art historians have interpreted this painting as representing the madness of Romanticism “eating” the “rationality” of Neoclassicism. As you will see in the Labyrinth episode, psychocentric and mannerist movements like Romanticism are thought of as mad, as insane as they work against classical harmony and modern rationality, the ideology of movements like Neoclassicism.

Neoclassicism was the artistic counterpart of the Enlightenment. The Enlightment was positivist and modernist, focused on categorizing, “scientifying”, and conquering knowledge as a finite and objective object, rather than the fluid, contextual, reflective, and subjective body it is. Modernism and all its worst ideas Race/Racism, Gender/Sexism, and Disability/Ableism, variations of the Norm and the Other, as well as colonialism and medicalization, depending on how you define them, were born, or at least, strongly reinforced and made justified in the Enlightenment. Colonialism is the notion that land, people, and thanks to the Enlightenment, knowledge, could be conquered. Medicalization is the pathologizing of normal, healthy variations of human minds and bodies including Autism in the 20th century to be diseased, abnormal, medical issues, or pathological states. Medicalization happens because of medical industries, governments, and societies wanting to control people’s bodies, including things that don’t understand and are enforced by law, social judgements made legally concrete; norms, social judgements made culturally concrete; and constructed ideas of sanity. The Enlightenment claimed to value rationality, civility, and harmony, but in reality, it valued and reinforced power dynamics as well as the stories that benefited powerful people. Modernism gaslights those who don’t have the “normal” experience.

Romanticism was a countermovement to Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment and its positivist ideals of discovery and ultimately, conquest of knowledge. Romanticism represents a significant antipositivist current in the centuries-long debate of science’s place in questions of the human condition by emphasizing the subjectivity and poeticism of human nature and the world, by emphasizing storytelling and the discovery of general truth from stories, rather than the discovery of universal, “scientific” truths about humanity. Romanticism was a significant movement in art and literature to go away from art’s “inherent” value to promote morals, traditions, and thoughts to the collective and towards art and literature as a personal expression of an artist’s mind and “personal imagination.” Within Romanticism, one can find the exotic, the occult, the dark, the spiritual, the novel, the supernatural, and the fantastical.  Romanticism can be summarized as the mantra “Admire the world, don’t conquer it.”
7. Phenomenology and Existentialism
The next significant psychocentric thought movements would be phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology attempted to “reintroduce the subject” in the process of knowledge and linked for the first time questions of ontology, the philosophy of being, with questions of epistemology, the philosophy of knowing. Phenomenology also fought against the positivist idea that knowledge was based in reality, and could be discovered, by shifting focus to the subject making knowledge from interpreting his surroundings. The phenomenologist’s belief is that knowledge will always be filtered through what the human subject, experiences, and finds meaningful. Knowledge is only constructed through our interaction with the world and how we interpret those interactions to be meaningful. Therefore, we should focus on the being and their experiences at the center of the process of knowledge.

Existentialism deconstructed the very idea of meaning and a structured reality, stating that there is no inherent meaning, and that reality is absurd. Following phenomenology’s logic that knowledge is always filtered through what we experience and what we find meaningful, Albert Camus in his work has implied that human truth is personal and that there is no truth beyond experience. Existentialists concluded from this that the only meaning in the world is the meaning we make in the world and that reality as a concept will always be unattainable. This naturally has led to philosophical debates about if a universal, objective, and neutral reality even exists outside of our perception and interpretation of reality. Is reality just interpretation? Camus suggests that humanity is Sisyphus, driven and doomed to activity, thinking their lives are meaningful to the universe somehow. Many have interpreted this negatively, uncomfortable with the notion that our lives are absurd, without considering that it is actually liberating. Instead of wasting time trying to fully grasp and “conquer” reality, we can find our own meaning within reality and appreciate the poetics and mystery of the world.
8. DADA: Deconstruction and the Mechanical Head
The art movement DADA was the artistic counterpart to existentialism and both DADA and existentialism were reacting to the modernist horror that was the first World War. A DADA work that illustrates this well is Raoul Hausmann’s “The Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Time).” The work is a crudely shaped head of a tailor’s dummy with objects attached to it including a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case, a piece of metal. It’s a critique of phenomenologist Georg Hegel’s idea that “everything is mind.” This head that supposedly is rationally and independently observing the world is actually having its thoughts determined by objects literally and metaphorically fixed to it. The modern world has hijacked the head of the individual man, making him and his thoughts no longer separate from the collective of modern society, making robotic and under its control. The head is expressionless and lacks a soul, the self is dead, with only a drawn heart on the empty tin cup being the only remnant of any expression or soul. It ultimately expresses fear and anxiety about the “modern man”, a dystopian vision of a rational and impersonal man. As I forementioned, Existentialism’s vision may seem dystopian, but it is liberation from this destiny to become the “modern man”, a man determined by outside forces like science, religion, or government.

This work expresses well the philosophy of DADA. DADA wanted to deconstruct the self and society and its relationship to point out the chaos, evil, and absurdity of the supposedly orderly modern world and its damaging influence on the individual. The logic was if society is oppressive and chaotic, we might as well have anarchy. However, one subsequent movement went further than this work and other DADA works, not just expressing anxieties about “the modern man” but offering a more concrete vision of a new society, inspired by Marxism. This movement was Surrealism.
9. Surrealism: From Deconstruction to Reconstruction
Surrealism was an artistic counterpart to another very important psychocentric thought movement: psychodynamics, the birthplace of modern psychology. Psychodynamics would replace Romantic vocabularies of “imagination”. “subjective”, “personal”, “symbolic”, and “subject” with new vocabularies of “psychological”, “subconscious, “unconscious”, “mental”, “internal”, “ego”, “thought patterns”, and “self”. Surrealism would replace Romantic vocabularies of “Romantic” and “imagination” with the “Fantastical” and “dreams.”

Surrealism attempted to reconstruct what had been deconstructed by DADA, using psychodynamic and Marxist discourses to led individuals towards individual psychological liberation and hoped ideally for in the process, also to political Marxist revolution. They believed they needed to liberate the individual first. With psychodynamic ideas, they pointed out and normalized the absurdity of the self and attempted to arm the individual with tools to express a unique identity in spite of the modern world’s attempts to depersonalize and dehumanize the individual, even if this unique identity was weird, illogical, absurd, and “surreal.”

DADA only expressed the absurdity of the world, destroying “the drawers of the brain and of social organization” and capturing its inherent chaos to warn humanity of its risk of dehumanization (to become rational, impersonal, perfectible, non-human traits). The mind is a microcosm to society was part of the mantra. Surrealism embraced the absurdity, armed with academic ideas from psychodynamics and Marxism, to rehumanize, to find a postmodern human (opposed to the modern man), a kind of human who is liberated and has control of its own constructions, meanings, beliefs, values, and understanding, a human that is still unique, individual, and personal.  This kind of human is also what the Existentialists were striving for.
10. Psychodynamics: Freud, Jung, and the Subconscious
Psychodynamics refers to the multitude of theories regarding the modern conception of the subconscious put forth first by Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytical theory and then the Neo-Freudians, students of Freud like Carl Jung and Alfred Alder who had similar ideas of the subconscious.

Most people confuse psychodynamics as psychoanalysis, the framework and collection of Sigmund Freud’s theories, however, this would be misleading as it doesn’t include the Neo-Freudians like Carl Jung and Alfred Alder who were inspired by Freud and psychoanalysis but intentionally distanced themselves and made and named their own approaches. The term psychodynamics was coined by Freud and inspired by the word and concept of thermodynamics. The term gets at the underlying premise of their different approaches which is the study of the interrelation of unconscious and conscious psychological energies (libido) and psychological forces in the mind.

The psychodynamic conception of the subconscious suggests that knowledge and thought are not dictated by divine intervention (as believed historically) but is contained within a personal and collective unconscious that is “a ‘deep’ but understandable ‘structure’… ‘inside’ individuals”.[^1] While psychodynamics tried to be positivist, focused on finding a scientific and universal theory of the human mind and using scientific and medical language, it still created vocabularies and conceptual frameworks to explain the new psychocentric reality that phenomenology and existentialism were starting to formulate. And with knowledge comes power, agency, and liberation. By exploring our minds through constructions such as Sigmund Freud’s Id, Superego, and Ego or Oedipus Complex or through Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious and Archetypes, and through vocabularies such as life and death instincts and variously named coping mechanisms, we have the tools to understand our psyches more fully so we can reconstruct them to maximize happiness and to live the life we want to live, a life we create with meaning. Theories that answer questions like how we develop as human beings and/or how we cope with trauma and practices like talking through your problems became tools to help us live successfully in a new psychocentric reality. In a way, we gain control over the world through increasing knowledge of our self and changing our reaction to the world, goals emphasized by other psychocentric movements including existentialism and Surrealism. These ideas are very tangible for our contemplation.

Freud’s life and death instincts for example refer to our desires to create and to also destroy. This concept has helped me understand why as an artist I desire to create but also sometimes desire destroy what I have created. It put words to an anxiety I had related to my creations simply existing and being in the world which Jacques Lacan suggests was Freud’s very point about a death instinct, that Freud’s death instinct represented an anxiety related to the “regulation of life”.[^2] Death instincts explain self-destructive behavior, why we harm ourselves, why someone might be suicidal, as well as explain how human beings can be corrupted to be cruel to one another.

Another example is Freud’s Oedipus complex, an idea that boys are sexually attracted to their mothers. Many people dismiss the idea because of the word “sexual.” For one, Freud had a different idea of sexuality. Within his idea of sexuality, something we do not see as sexual such as a mother breast feeding a child would be considered sexual. We know this because of his theory of psychosexual development. Oral activities such as breastfeeding are within the first stage of one’s psychological and sexual development (Freud 48). Second, while Freud’s idea may be flawed, it is not completely wrong. In a non-sexual nature, it is normal for boys to have better relationships with their moms than their dads. Also, resentment towards the same sex parent as suggested by Freud is normal as we look at them for what we want to be and what we don’t want to be. I know it is true for myself. Freud was onto something and just because scholars are too uncomfortable to work with these ideas because of the word “sexual” does not mean make them any less accurate or less worth exploring.

Another example is Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, bringing our attention to a connection between psychology and narrative, mythology, and symbols. Freud was the first to connect literature and classical mythology with psychology but Jung deepened this connection with discussion about archetypes, characters with similar traits that pop up over and over again in literature and also represent aspects of individual psyches. Jung’s ideas started a revolution in understanding ourselves, our psyches, and the world, and led Joseph Campbell to his ideas of the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey which proposes a general structure to most, if not all, literature. Jung and Campbell serve as an ideological steppingstone towards postmodernist ideas of reality and sensemaking as “narratives” and “storytelling.” Postmodern thinkers would further connect language, rhetoric, narratives, and symbols, inventions of the human psyche, to human understanding of reality and to the nature of human culture and social interactions.
11. Critiques and Reframing of Psychodynamics
It is  important to understand in the bigger context of history that psychodynamics has rightfully been discredited in the sciences as a pseudoscience. It is a humanities methodology masquerading as a scientific methodology which makes psychodynamics kind of the black sheep in psychocentric movements, being modernist, positivist, and attempting to be scientific and medically sound while recognizing the subjective and narrative-building aspects of the psyche. Its contradictory, almost as if it was trying to scientify humanity and subjectivity, trying to make something not objective, objective. Many of psychodynamics’ problems lie in its flaw of trying to make general truths that use abductive reasoning and is the business of the humanities, universal truths, presumably the business of the sciences. If you’re psychocentric and postmodern like me, you believe universal truths don’t exist. If you believe in universal truths, then you would argue it requires a different kind of reasoning.

Like I mentioned before, psychodynamics holds in it a very modernist rationality, which is another flaw, a flaw of general psychology. Psychodynamics in step with modernism promotes a process to change and improve people to be perfect, ideal, healthy humans, which by its nature, also promotes that anyone outside the psychological and neurological norm are not natural or healthy; and that with increased psychological control, one can master and hack their psychology to get over all their problems. The idea of self help, a modernist phenomenon, was birthed in psychodynamics. It doesn’t recognize society’s fault at all for psychological problems and puts all blame on the individual, justifying governments to oppress, neglect, and control the bodies of their citizens and justifying corporations to exploit the insecurities and perceived imperfections of consumers. While a great vision and dream that can help people to improve themselves, it is also a nightmare that keeps people in control and acts only as a band-aid to psychological problems caused by societal issues like racism, sexism, and ableism. As an Autistic person, I use Freudian and Jungian ideas to understand myself and others but also recognize its influence on abnormal psychology and thereby, harm to the Autistic community.

The last flaw I want to mention is Freud’s ideas of sexuality. His ideas fundamentally misunderstand female sexuality and homosexuality.

However, I suggest we approach their ideas differently. They offer basic structures to understand the psyche, that since the late nineteenth century, have been made the center of reality. We must take them as general truths, not universal truths, and once we do that, psychodynamics becomes a lot more acceptable. Its concepts are constructed and mythical just like our ideas of the self, the norm, and the other. It’s a useful mythology or construction. One benefit to see them as general truths is we become able to see the different theories, the different logics within psychodynamics from Freud to Jung as elaborate layers to explain complex psychological realities, rather than necessarily contradictory to each other. If we consider psychodynamics with postmodernism, moving it beyond its modernist roots, criticizing and challenging where their theories are problematic, and seeing it as an arts & humanities methodology that can aid most profoundly in analysis of art and literature, it can be of good use.
12. Feminism, Conscious-Raising, and Postmodernism
After psychodynamics, the latest psychocentric movements: feminism and postmodernism. Feminism was focusing on making safe conversational spaces where people won’t pretend to be politically correct and hide what they truly think about issues, where people, kind of like a social/cultural form of psychoanalytic talk therapy, can share what they understand and be open to new ideas that may change their understanding. Feminists were focused on educating without educating, creating opportunities to understand without the pressure to radically change which can keep people from wanting to understand. One of my favorite words coined by feminism sounds like something from psychodynamics: “conscious-raising.” Conscious raising is the idea that discourse can help individuals uncover hidden and ugly parts of the collective unconscious, the racist, the sexist, the ableist in all of us, the bad ideas we are socialized to believe or affect our judgement consciously or unconsciously.

All our minds are like labyrinths containing many rooms and some of these rooms contain bad ideas we get from everyday social interactions. Decluttering these rooms requires a process of awareness and renegotiation. The culture of radical compassion in feminist activism treats social problems as psychological ills that can be worked on through talking, and increased awareness and understanding. This is the process of conscious raising.

The last psychocentric movement, postmodernism, leaned into psychocentric tendencies by giving further power and agency to the human subject for the construction of reality. Postmodernism in contrast to modernism, believes that knowledge is constructed and deconstructed, it changes, rather than grow or becomes discovered. Knowledge becomes a process of construction and interpretation where we are constantly reassessing and reinterpreting what we know based on new experiences which led to changes in the construction of our body of knowledge. Postmodernism replaced psychodynamic vocabularies with new communications/language-focused vocabularies such as “identity”, “narratives”, “discourses”, “negotiation” and “cocreation.” A significant vocabulary change was from “self” to “identity.” Postmodernism suggests that identity, reality, and meaning are all negotiated and cocreated by individuals in discourses undertaking constant renegotiation of ideological contradictions developed by alternative narratives from multiple people.

Discussing postmodernism, seeing where psychocentrism went beyond the end of Surrealism and the advent of psychodynamics, is important to seeing how older movements like psychodynamics, Existentialism, and phenomenology are still influencing our ideas today. Each of these ideas are so complex and could take up full episodes. I tried to summarize them the best I could. At the end of the day, though, I am hoping that what you get from this idea of psychocentrism is that it is a trend in our modern thinking, argumentatively more than a trend, an almost 2 centuries tradition.
13. The Antidote: Storytelling and Mythmaking
This tradition offers an antidote to modernism including its flawed rationality that pretends to be flawless, its dogma that shuts down necessary democratic functions like discourses, and its desire to order, control, and conquer what can’t be ordered, controlled, and conquered. This antidote is the human imagination.

Human beings are storytellers. Our rationality is narrative-building. We, intellectuals, creatives, and others, are all creating our own understanding of the world around us through stories. We are not perfect, nor will we ever be. Psychocentric movements remind us that we are humble, storytelling animals while also showing the power of storytelling in influencing the world around us. People act off stories. Countries rise and fall from stories.

We work in general truths and can only know general truths. Despite philosophy, science, religion, and modernism, we also still rely on mythmaking and mythological reception to understand ourselves and the world. Postmodernism shows us that myth is only dangerous in its dogma, when we don’t recognize its constructed by humans. And once we realize we are telling stories, it opens the possibility for alternative stories which led to possibilities for alternative visions for the future.

As an Autistic person, this possibility allows for my story to be told as well as so many others outside the norm and silenced by modernism, and this is my biggest reason for wanting to be part of the psychocentric tradition. I also think as an arts & humanities scholar that my role is to be a storyteller conveying general truths; beautiful, poetic truths; and new perspectives about the world. This journey may be chaotic and labyrinthian, people may call you insane but the psychocentric vision, the psychocentric dream is better than the modernist vision and dream. A great literary reference that alludes to the dichotomy between reason and positivism, and imagination and Psychocentrism is the short story “the Exiles” in Ray Bradbury’s book: the Illustrated Man.
14. Conclusion
To conclude, we explored the field and discipline of art history as an periodization practice, and then went on