The Restoration of Psyche: Heidegger, Ellul, and the Question of Technology in Clinical Psychological Science

Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s questioning of technology and Jacques Ellul’s analysis of technological society, this study provides a critique of the mechanistic and functionalist methods of clinical psychological science. The study traces the genealogy of "psyche" as it has been construed across the Western philosophical, theological, and scientific traditions. It also examines the history of responses to human psychological distress and the gradual medicalization of psychological suffering as it came to be understood as "mental illness." Problems associated with the objectification of psyche, psychological phenomena, and the human person via mechanistic and functionalist theories of cognition, emotion, and behavior are also explored. Finally, the study advocates, as an alternative to scientific methods and models of human psychology, the adoption of descriptive approaches traditionally associated with the humanities. The personalist psychology that emerges allows for the restoration of “psyche” to its ancient definition of human "aliveness" and returns the mystery of psychological phenomena to a central place in human life. This “re-mystifying” approach prioritizes the beautiful and the sacred as truth criteria in psychology, deliberately relinquishing epistemologies predicated on naive empiricism, correspondence theories of truth, or pragmatic workability. The study concludes with a discussion of “the therapy of life,” a psychotherapeutic dialogue predicated on a poetics of the human person.