"Breaking the Power of the Past over the Present": Psychology, Utopianism, And the Frankfurt School (Critical Essay‪)‬

The members of the original institute [for social research] have always felt themselves one with psychoanalysis in the intention of breaking the power of the past over the present; to be sure, they have tried to realize this intention, as psychoanalysis does, through future-oriented memory. (Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society 69) One of the recurrent themes of the social sciences is the relationship between structure and agency, or, to couch the debate in Hegelian terms, between object (the world "out there") and subject (the Self). Arguably the most famous statement relating to the relationship between structure and agency is Marx's dictum, according to which "men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances given already, given and transmitted from the past." More recently, Anthony Giddens took up the challenge of definition, arguing that structure and agency should be seen as opposite sides of the same coin while Colin Hay modified Giddens' metaphor to suggest that it would be more accurate to understand structure and agency as components of the alloy from which the coin is made. In Hay's view, although structure and agency can be separated analytically, in practice they are completely interwoven. This insight appears to inform the "new" field of critical psychology, which seeks to challenge mainstream psychology to recognise its complicity in upholding the social status quo as a prerequisite for transforming both the discipline itself and also the social structures to which it belongs and contributes. Critical psychology, as elucidated by Fox and Prilleltensky, holds that psychology cannot be concerned with the study of the individual subject in isolation since the discipline always also influences, and is influenced by, existing social structures.