In the auditorium with George Canguilhem: What is Psychology?

Abstract

The article presents a debate made by George Canguilhem in the essay What is Psychology? when he indicates the (im) possibility of a unification among psychologies that carry different ideas of man, formation, cognition, development, health, socialization... It addresses a debate about the particularities of Psychology as an autonomous epistemic field. The argument was to find in the author an opportunity for a politics of remembrance, which is already known to be perennial. It brings back this classic work by George Canguilhem, recognizing that the remembrance of a text and the labor it imprints is an act of resistance in a society that subtracts, under the effect of mass education, the chances to risk, to fail, to experiment projects where imagination appears in force. The article exercises unpredictable resonances of the past event in today, marked by openings.