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As Fred Alford has convincingly argued (this issue), myriad social, political, and cultural forces have obstructed the establishment of a robust field of psychosocial studies in America. Such forces include the inhospitable historical context in which the work of prominent psychosocial scholars might have otherwise come to the fore, the well-known pragmatic leanings of American philosophy, positivism in the natural sciences and scientism in social and behavioral sciences, the physicalization and medicalization of suffering, the full (if not excessive) embrace of the body and affect as appropriate loci of research in clinical psychology, the entrenchment of a mind/body split, and more.
In this paper, I offer a cultural-historical-intellectual background to the American landscape and its relative infertility for psychosocial study, with particular reference to the influence of what I have called elsewhere the ‘ideologies of experience’ (Bowker 2016). The ideology of experience entrenched in the United States is one that locates supreme cultural and moral authority and value in ‘experience,’ valorizing experience in a way that makes it unamenable to mentation, reflection, and communication. This ideology, to be sure, has roots both within and outside of American traditions, but it has, nevertheless, profoundly impacted the development of virtually all American academic disciplines that attend to psychological, political, and social phenomena.
To explore the influence of the ideology of experience on the development (or lack thereof) of an organized field of psychosocial study, I emphasize the split between the psychosocial and the real in American thought. This split is closely related to the mind/body split mentioned above and discussed in some detail by Alford (this issue) and elsewhere. Of course, when the body is privileged, the split remains in force (or returns to force), although the epistemic and moral values attached to each are inverted with respect to their Ca