Matthew Giobbi

A Postcognitive Negation: the Sadomasochistic Dialectic of American Psychology Matthew Giobbi

In this, his first book, Matthew Giobbi takes the reader from the earliest days of the experimental psychology movement, continues through the media manufacturing of the social "need for psychology," and brings us to the current political and economic power structure of American psychology. ------ As a critical theorist, Giobbi draws the reader's attention to the unconscious motivations of both the psychologist and the experimental psychology movement itself. He then introduces a way forward through Heidegger and presents a psychological ontology which asks the reader to reconsider what psychology and human Being really are. ------ "From an upstart position to a restart opportunity, Giobbi argues for and provides a well-documented background check on the modern paradigm of cognitive psychology--with all of its scientistic and positivistic presumptions. Systematically, yet paralogically, Giobbi turns his readers toward seeing what still remains concealed and hidden in modernist thinking: namely, the "sadomasochistic event" of mind-body split, master-slave relations, and subject-object dualisms. Giobbi prescribes a post-cognitive psychology of unconcealedness by way of a Heideggerian philosophy of Dasein." -Victor J. Vitanza, Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy, EGS