The established, institutionalized set of beliefs about human nature that dominate psychological discourse and popular understanding—the often-unexamined assumptions about how people work, what drives behavior, what mental health means, and how change happens. Psychological orthodoxy includes commitments: that the individual is the unit of analysis, that early experience determines adult outcomes, that mental disorders are individual pathologies, that therapy should focus on individual change, that psychological categories (personality, intelligence, disorder) name real things, that Western psychological concepts are universal. Like all orthodoxies, it provides frameworks for understanding self and other, but it functions as ideology—making particular conceptions of personhood seem natural and universal, obscuring how psychological categories are culturally and historically specific, and delegitimizing alternative understandings (collectivist, spiritual, structural). Psychological orthodoxy determines what counts as "healthy" vs "pathological," what explanations are "insightful" vs "superficial," and who counts as "psychologically minded" vs "naive."
Example: "He explained social problems in terms of individual psychology—as if inequality were a matter of personal growth. Psychological orthodoxy had made the individual feel like the only level of analysis."
by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026
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