Psychologie universelle, psychologie plurielle : la psychologie est-elle une production culturelle ?

Psychology is envisaged in this article as a “cultural product” of the Western World. The Greek etymology of the word itself and the history of the discipline indicate the cultural origin of psychology and justify questioning the universal value of concepts wrought in the midst of the western context. Following its birth at the end of the 19th century, psychology, emancipated relatively to philosophy from which it came and claiming it was following the model of natural science, pretended finding an extension of laws governing natural phenomena in man. But the epistemological crisis exemplified by the works of W. Dilthey (1883) led to the now classical opposition between natural sciences and social sciences. Concurrently, the question of meaning became paramount in the field of clinical psychology and of psychopathology. If the historical perspective clearly shows the western sources of psychology the notion of Western World remains to be defined. This definition is essentially cultural and the author examines both the ideal of mastery and control and the project of conquest of western man symbolised by the Promethean myth. The missionary enterprise and the civilising action of the Western World were underlain by the conviction that western civilisation was the incarnation of an ideal model of culture that had attained perfection. Toward the middle of the 20th century the universalist view of psychology was shaken by the recognition of cultural differences more particularly identified in the field of psychopathology. The transcultural perspective, with the notion of a basic personality, showed up the specificity of western mentality. It also showed up two essential traditional dimensions of western thought: the dualism at the origin of the development of science and technology and the individualism that favoured interest in the individual, in his mental life, in its cognitive and affective aspirations and in the meanders of his interior life. The questioning of the universal value of psychology as it is currently envisaged, applied and taught in the Western World is inseparable from the debate relative to the epistemological statute of the discipline. This could be formulated as follows: should psychology be considered as a science of nature or as a science of subjectivity? Psychopathology is exemplary in showing the necessity of the recourse to a specific anthropological model to render the problems that are observed and the proposed interpretations intelligible as both the problems and the interpretations differ according to the cultural context within which they are expressed. Beginning in the 1940's American works, by denouncing the potential dangers of a standardizing approach of psychic problems, showed the lack of references to nature and underlined the requirements of analysing the cultural milieu. For the last fifty years or so the encounters with historical and cultural realities foreign to the Western World that were nevertheless coherent, and the discovery of different models that had their own pertinence have shaken the secular confidence in the unbeatable superiority of western knowledge. Comparing the western model of the person to the traditional African model, the author tries to show the relation between the diversity of psychopathological expressions and the plurality of cultural models that are encountered. Autonomy and interiority are characteristic traits of the person in the West, however, in Africa, the person is defined by the explicit bonds that guarantee its unity and coherence by connecting it to family, community and spiritual axes. The field of psychopathology turns out to be particularly heuristic to show up the interest and necessity of taking into account models of representation of the world and of man which, if they are different from those with which we are familiar, are not the less useful, and even necessary to listen to man's suffering and to try to give it meaning in the midst of a cultural universe which is incomprehensible using only the key of Western discourse. The author claims the interest of an ethnopsychology and concludes by indicating the necessity of taking into account cultural specificities not only in the domain of psychopathology but also in the other fields of psychology, including those concerned with measurement that is supposed to guarantee their objectivity, scientific nature and universality.