Psychology, Personhood, and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Jeff Sugarman on Theoretical and Critical Psychology

Jeff Sugarman is a distinguished scholar in theoretical and philosophical psychology, known for his work examining the psychology of selfhood, human agency, and the sociopolitical underpinnings of psychological science. A Professor Emeritus in the Education Department at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Sugarman has spent decades critically interrogating the ways mainstream psychology reflects and reinforces the ideologies of neoliberalism, shaping how we understand identity, mental health, and human development.

A past president of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA Division 24) and a former associate editor of The Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and New Ideas in Psychology, Dr. Sugarman has played a key role in advancing critical perspectives in psychology. His extensive body of work includes Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency (2010), Psychology and the Question of Agency (2003), and The Psychology of Human Possibility and Constraint (1999)—books that challenge psychology’s tendency to isolate individuals from history, culture, and power structures.

In this interview, he explores the philosophical foundations of psychology, the psychological costs of neoliberalism, and why developing a critical psychology of education and mental health is more urgent than ever.

 

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Tim Beck: Over the past five or six years, I’ve been reading your work critiquing neoliberalism and its relationship to psychology with great interest. I have to say, it’s had a pretty profound impact on my own thinking and writing about psychology. I’m really excited about this opportunity to hear more about your ideas and where you see them as especially relevant today, given the current sociopolitical climate.

To start, could you share a little about your personal and academic background? Topics like neoliberalism and subjectivity aren’t ones I see many psychologists writing about. What led you to these ideas, and how do they figure into your career as an educational psychologist?

Jeff Sugarman: It’s probably important for your listeners to know that I’m Canadian. I was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is sort of the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Midwest. I’ve lived in Canada my whole life, was educated here, and started my studies in psychology at the University of Waterloo in 1974. The 1970s were an adventurous time in psychology—it still felt like a new frontier, largely unexplored.

I finished my undergraduate degree in 1979, but instead of continuing in psychology, I spent the next decade trying to make it as a musician. I toured around, playing music, but eventually realized I needed a more stable career. The problem was, at that point, I didn’t have any real preparation for anything outside of music and drinking—so I figured I’d better go back to university. In 1988, I started a master’s degree in counseling psychology, which I completed in 1990.

For my doctoral studies, I went into a faculty of education at Simon Fraser University. At the time, all doctoral students in education were required to take a couple of core classes together, regardless of their area of focus. I was the only educational psychology student in these classes, surrounded by people studying curriculum theory, the philosophy of education, educational technology, and the history of education. The conversations were wonderfully rich and highly critical—unlike anything I had encountered in psychology.

Every so often, someone would bring up an issue related to psychology and turn to me. They’d say, So, you’re a psychologist. You have instruments and measures. You have a self-esteem scale—if I score a 10 and you score an 8, does that mean I have more self-esteem than you? What else can you measure this way? Can you quantify justice? Love? Empathy?

They asked pointed questions, and I found that I was completely unequipped to answer them. That’s because in psychology, the canon of critique is very narrow—we focus on things like experimental design, statistical validity, and generalizability. My peers in education, however, were engaging in a much broader critique, questioning the very foundations of psychological measurement and knowledge production.

I became close friends with a fellow student who was studying the philosophy of education. He was reading hermeneutic philosophy and essentially put me on a reading regimen of what he was studying. We started meeting regularly—three or four days a week, often for two or three hours at a time—just discussing what we were reading. That was what really got me interested in philosophical work and its relevance to psychology, particularly in understanding its conceptual and historical foundations.

One of the books we read together was Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which is a landmark in hermeneutic thought. It’s an extraordinary work of philosophical anthropology—by which I mean an exploration of how different historical periods have answered the question: What does it mean to be a person? These answers circulate within a society, shaping how people understand and live out their own personhood. Over time, what it means to be a self has shifted dramatically.

Taylor’s book traces these transformations in selfhood in a way that is both rigorous and breathtaking in scope. Reading it was a profoundly humbling and eye-opening experience.

Another key influence on my thinking was Jack Martin. He had been at Simon Fraser University before taking a 15-year post at the University of Western Ontario. Just as I was beginning my doctoral work, he returned to Simon Fraser and became my mentor. His own interests in philosophy and history were developing at the time, so the timing was perfect. He had a major impact on my thinking, and eventually, we became co-authors. His presence at Simon Fraser was a huge reason why my work took the direction that it did.

Beck: I can definitely relate to that story. I think a lot of people listening to this interview can relate, too—taking psychology courses as an undergrad, feeling a general interest in the topics, but also sensing that something’s missing. Then, after taking a philosophy course or a class in another discipline, coming back and completely reinterpreting psychology through a different lens.

For me, that happened through Heidegger. I took a class on Heidegger and Gadamer, and like you said, it completely shifted how I thought about the self—not as something simply given to me at birth or something that emerges from my brain, but as something that is transformed through social context, something shaped by the historical period in which I live. That was a powerful realization.

It makes sense, then, why you would become interested in neoliberalism and how it structures subjectivity. That leads me to what I wanted to ask you next.

When I think of neoliberalism, I tend to think of a particular political philosophy or a set of governmental policies—things like free trade, deregulation, globalization, or the blurring of state power and private industry. But in your work, you do an excellent job of explaining why these ideas are also relevant to psychology—how neoliberalism shapes our sense of self and the ways we relate to one another.

For those who may not be as familiar with the term, can you briefly define what you mean by neoliberalism? And could you say a bit about which authors or theorists have influenced your thinking on this topic?

Sugarman: I’ll start by explaining how I became interested in neoliberalism. It was something I arrived at through my experience in the classroom.

One of the strange things about being a professor is that we get older, but our students stay the same age. Over time, you start to notice generational differences. You can see them passing through your classes, and distinct patterns begin to emerge.

At some point, I started realizing just how different my students were from me. The worst mistake I could make was to walk into a classroom and assume they were just like me—to talk to them the way I would my peers or contemporaries. Something had shifted.

I started reading to better understand these changes. One of the first books that shaped my thinking was Ken Gergen’s The Saturated Self. Another was a piece by Phil Cushman and Peter Guilford, published in Psychohistory Review (a journal that no longer exists), called From Emptiness to Multiplicity: The Self at the Year 2000. I also read a small book by Richard Sennett called The Corrosion of Character. These works helped me articulate not just why students seemed different, but how they were different.

From there, I started searching for explanations as to why these shifts were happening. I was already of the view that human psychology is shaped within its sociocultural milieu—that people’s psychological makeup is, in part, a reflection of the society in which they live. This is what led me to investigate neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a pervasive, all-encompassing ideology that positions the market as the central organizing principle of human life. It materializes in policy—things like deregulating capital markets, enforcing competition, promoting free trade—but its consequences extend far beyond economics. It reconfigures society and, in doing so, reshapes what it means to be a person.

Economists sometimes argue that “neoliberalism” is too vague a term to be meaningful. I disagree. These policies have very real, concrete effects—like the dismantling of welfare programs and the shifting of risk from governments to individuals. Under neoliberalism, you become responsible for your healthcare, you must ensure your child’s education, you must secure your financial future for retirement. Neoliberalism is not just an economic system; it is a project of social, political, and psychological transformation.

It produces a specific kind of citizen—the neoliberal subject. In this framework, you are a rational, self-interested actor, navigating a competitive marketplace. Your life is treated as an enterprise, and you yourself are understood as a form of capital.

This is different from classical liberalism, which expects people to participate in markets. Under neoliberalism, you are compelled to generate economic activity. Competition is seen as the defining feature of human life. Markets are framed as natural meritocracies, sorting people into winners and losers. Early neoliberal thinkers—Friedrich Hayek, in particular—argued that any attempt to redistribute resources, whether through taxation, trade unions, or government intervention, would disrupt this so-called natural order and inevitably lead to totalitarianism.

Neoliberalism, then, is not just an economic project—it’s a solution to a problem of governmentality, to borrow Foucault’s term. Governmentality refers to the ways authority structures regulate the attitudes and behaviors of people. The challenge neoliberalism seeks to address is: How do you govern a population that prioritizes individual freedom above all else?

Particularly in the U.S., freedom is the dominant cultural ideal. It’s the lens through which many people define themselves. So, how do you govern a society that holds individual liberty as its highest value?

Neoliberalism provides an answer: govern through choice.

People come to equate the ability to choose with freedom itself. The more choices they have, the freer they feel. But what they don’t realize is that these choices are often structured in ways that constrain them.

Take credit cards, for example. There are endless varieties of credit cards to choose from. But try living without one—try booking a hotel, renting a car, or buying a plane ticket. The supposed freedom of choice conceals deeper forms of control. The structures remain hidden, but they shape behavior all the same.

Beck: With each credit card you sign up for, you enter into a contract—one that sets conditions on different aspects of your financial life, often in ways people are completely unaware of. On any given day, we’re likely involved in hundreds of such contracts, most of which we don’t consciously consider. Yet they shape our future lives in ways we rarely think about when we casually sign on the dotted line.

That example highlights something crucial about neoliberalism: its relevance to psychology isn’t just about how it shapes our self-understanding or the ways we interact with one another—though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also about how we come to evaluate ourselves in financial and marketing terms rather than through other human attributes or values. And beyond that, it dictates how psychology itself is practiced, how research is conducted, and how mental health is conceptualized.

In one of your articles on neoliberalism and psychological ethics, you discuss the striking increase in social anxiety diagnoses over the past 30 years. You identify two main drivers behind this rise: first, the explosion of pharmaceutical advertising in the 1990s, and second, the growing expectation that we must constantly market and network ourselves as prerequisites for a successful life.

Both of these forces seem to have obvious implications for how psychological discourse—and, in particular, mental health—gets shaped. Could you say more about how you see these two phenomena intersecting? Why were they important for you in linking psychology to neoliberalism?

Sugarman: This research was led by Sarah Hickinbottom, a former doctoral student of mine. It stems from my broader interest in historical ontology, a concept developed by Ian Hacking—particularly his work on what he called transient mental illnesses. These are conditions that emerge at a particular historical moment and then, often, fade away.

Take multiple personality disorder, for example. It surfaced in the 1950s, reached a cultural peak where people were walking into therapy offices claiming to have multiple personalities, and was popularized in films. At one point, there was even a bar in New York specifically for people who identified as having multiple personalities. Then, as the DSM revised its classifications—replacing multiple personality disorder with dissociative identity disorder—the diagnosis largely disappeared.

Sarah and I became interested in a similar question: Why, at this particular moment, did social anxiety disorder become an epidemic? How did it suddenly become the third most common diagnosis given by psychologists and psychiatrists?

What we found is that its rise is deeply tied to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism places a premium on self-promotion—on networking, exuding confidence, and constantly demonstrating your industriousness. But not everyone fits into that mold. Many people naturally experience anxiety in social situations. Some are more reserved. Some simply prefer a quieter way of engaging with the world.

We used to call those people shy. But under neoliberalism, shyness wasn’t just another way of being—it became a problem. And once something is framed as a problem, it can be medicalized, diagnosed, and treated.

This connects to the core idea of historical ontology: every psychological and social feature has a history. Nothing in psychology exists outside of time—it all comes into being through particular historical and cultural conditions. To fully understand any psychological concept, you have to understand the history that produced it.

This idea originates with Foucault and has been further developed by thinkers like Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose. When you start to see psychological categories as historically constituted, it becomes easier to let go of essentialist thinking—the assumption that mental disorders have always existed in the same way, across all of history. They haven’t. They emerge in specific social and cultural contexts. They take root, become widespread, and may eventually disappear.

Consider Asperger’s syndrome. When it was removed from the DSM, many people who had identified as Aspies felt as though their very existence had been erased. That reaction illustrates how contingent these psychological categories are. They are not fixed, universal truths; they are constructed within particular historical and social moments.

This is one of the ways psychology becomes complicit in the neoliberal project—not necessarily in an intentional or malicious way, but simply because we all, often unknowingly, participate in the logic of neoliberalism. It’s difficult to step outside of it.

And yet, something is shifting.

If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have confidently characterized North America as a neoliberal society. But I think we’re witnessing a major transformation.

Nancy Fraser has written about progressive neoliberalism—how corporations co-opt progressive causes like feminism, environmentalism, and racial justice movements to serve their own interests. I found that critique insightful, but ultimately, it still felt like business as usual under neoliberalism.

What I see happening now, however, is different.

Kleptocracy is being inserted into the heart of neoliberalism.

I think we are entering a new phase—what I would call kleptocratic neoliberalism. By this, I mean an abuse of power within a neoliberal economy, where a small, tightly connected group of political and economic elites use their wealth and influence to further consolidate their position. They do this by manipulating markets, misappropriating resources, rigging privatization efforts, and creating systems designed for their personal enrichment—at the direct expense of citizens’ wages, public services, health, and overall well-being. And they’re able to do this, in part, because decision-making is increasingly insulated from democratic control. Power and wealth are shifting into fewer and fewer hands.

Kleptocracy thrives within neoliberalism because it aligns with its core principles: privatization, the dismantling of government welfare programs, tax cuts for corporations, and the systematic stripping away of financial and environmental regulations. It relies on weakening labor unions, restricting public influence over policy, and advancing market imperialism—commodifying and subjecting to the market what were once considered public goods. Surveillance, both corporate and governmental, expands in the process, further consolidating control.

Neoliberalism, in this sense, has created the perfect conditions for kleptocracy. These actors have little respect for the rule of law; they see it as something to be bent, bought, or ignored when it serves their interests. They employ armies of lawyers to do their bidding, making it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to resist. The result? An ever-upward siphoning of wealth.

Consider this: in ancient Rome, the wealthiest 1% controlled about 16% of the empire’s wealth. Today, in the United States, the top 1% controls 40% of the nation’s wealth. The consequences are everywhere. Chronic underemployment. A collapsing healthcare system. Declining educational standards. Child poverty rates that rival those of the Great Depression. The degradation of the environment. The rise of the far-right. And the ascent of figures like Trump and Musk—demagogues celebrated for their supposed ability to restore America’s “greatness” but who, in reality, serve only to deepen its inequalities.

In kleptocratic neoliberalism, everything becomes a commodity—exploited until it is depleted, destroyed, or collapses entirely. There is no long-term vision, no concern for consequences.

Isaiah Berlin once said, “Freedom for the wolves usually means death for the sheep.” That, I think, is where we are now.

Many Americans are caught up in debates over DEI offices, gender policies, and immigration. But the real question should be: Where is the power and wealth going?

Take last week, for example. Trump fired Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, known for her aggressive stance against corporate monopolies. He replaced her with Andrew Ferguson, a corporate loyalist who will not only gut antitrust regulations but also make it easier for major corporations to operate unchecked. Meanwhile, as public attention is distracted by culture war battles, Trump is quietly laying the groundwork to enrich the wealthiest Americans—especially himself—and transform the country into a corporation controlled by a handful of obscenely rich men.

That is kleptocratic neoliberalism.

I could be wrong, but this is the future I see unfolding.

Beck: Yeah, I think that’s a really important insight—that what we’re seeing today isn’t even classical neoliberalism anymore. There’s a shift happening, and it’s crucial to acknowledge. Around the world, we’re witnessing the rise of fascist discourse and governments consolidating power in ways that, at first glance, might seem like reactions against neoliberalism. They’re pushing back against policies that traditional neoliberals championed—open borders, free trade, globalization. They’re exploiting people’s fears and frustrations, particularly around how neoliberalism has appropriated identity politics and other progressive movements.

On the surface, this looks like a rejection of neoliberalism. But as you point out, it’s also an evolution—an intensification of it. The wealth and power in this emerging system aren’t being redistributed to those voicing their discontent. Instead, they’re being funneled upward, concentrated in corporations that are increasingly intertwined with these governments.

That leads me to another point I wanted to ask you about, especially in relation to the second connection you make between neoliberalism and psychology. You describe how neoliberalism demands that we all engage in self-marketing and social networking as prerequisites for success. For me, it’s impossible to separate this from the role of social media, the internet, and digital technologies. These platforms have become central to contemporary life.

Take the recent TikTok ban, for example—people went into crisis mode when the platform went offline for just twelve hours. It wasn’t just about losing a source of entertainment; their entire livelihoods were at stake. These platforms are more than tools for interaction—they are economic infrastructures, and people have become completely dependent on them to generate income.

On one hand, the concept of historical ontology is helpful because it reminds us that things haven’t always been this way—meaning they can change. But on the other hand, change doesn’t necessarily mean things will improve. They could get worse. Given how deeply embedded the internet and corporate-owned media platforms are in our daily lives—especially when they’re controlled by the same economic elites funding political campaigns—what do you see as the alternative? Is there a viable way out of this shift toward kleptocratic neoliberalism?

Sugarman: What we need is something of a moral renaissance—a cultural movement capable of generating the moral and civic perspectives necessary to face what I see as a deeply unsettling future. Right now, we are woefully unequipped—socially, morally, ethically, and politically. As we become increasingly ensconced in algorithmically curated, ideologically insulated filter bubbles, we lose sight of our shared predicament. But our shared predicament does not lose sight of us.

That said, I have a tempered belief that ideas remain the most powerful sources of individual and collective change.

At present, the dominant morality embedded in the neoliberal, AI-assisted regime is what I would call preference utilitarianism. This framework is rooted in thinkers like Hayek, and earlier liberals such as Hobbes and Bentham. At its core, this system conceives of people as conduits of capital—creatures of desire, fueled by appetites that demand satisfaction. Neoliberal corporations harness AI to optimize these features of neoliberal subjectivity, efficiently balancing the fulfillment of individual desires with what the market will bear.

The logic driving this optimization is the assumption that human well-being consists in the satisfaction of preferences. Under this regime, the good—if we can call it that—is simply whatever maximizes the fulfillment of individual preferences. Ethics and morality are reduced to a predictive exercise: determining which operation or policy best satisfies those preferences. The content of the preference itself becomes irrelevant; all that matters is that it is fulfilled. There is no hierarchy of worth among different desires, no evaluative reflection on what we ought to desire. It is simply assumed that the more our preferences are gratified, the better our lives must be.

But ethics and morality are not just about fulfilling desires; they are about critically reflecting on what our desires should be. And I think that space for reflection has shrunk considerably.

I want to elaborate on this a bit. About 50 years ago, Harry Frankfurt made an important distinction between first-order desires and second-order desires. First-order desires are simply desires for things—a drink, a cigarette, sex, a novel. Their objects are external. But second-order desires are desires about desires. I might crave a drink, for example, but I might also have the second-order desire not to be a drinker—not to be the kind of person who depends on alcohol.

Frankfurt pointed out that this ability to have desires about our desires is a defining feature of personhood. Animals might have cravings, but only humans possess the capacity to evaluate their cravings and act—or refrain from acting—on that basis.

This is also, by the way, something AI cannot do. Machines don’t have second-order desires. They lack skin in the game. They lack finitude, mortality, and the ability to construct purpose in the way that humans do. For second-order desires to carry weight, you have to know that your life is limited—that you are mortal. You have to have a sense of purpose. These are existential features of what it means to be human. And they matter.

Following Frankfurt, Charles Taylor—whom I mentioned earlier—developed the concept of strong evaluation. This refers to our uniquely human capacity to distinguish among our desires and feelings and, through higher-order reflection, choose which ones we want to identify with. Taylor expands on an idea first captured by Heidegger: that the world is not simply a collection of neutral objects but is imbued with human meanings and values. Moreover, we care about the kinds of beings that we are. We are self-interpreting creatures, and in our attempts to understand and interpret ourselves, we actively shape our own being and becoming.

But for self-interpretation to be possible, we need a background—a horizon of qualitative distinctions and standards of worth. These distinctions are what allow us to judge our actions, desires, and emotions as right or wrong, better or worse, more or less worthy. And crucially, this horizon of meaning is not something we invent for ourselves; it is something we inherit from our culture and society. It stands independent of us. That’s why we can say to someone, You ought to be ashamed of yourself—even if they don’t feel ashamed.

Choice alone does not confer worth. There is a social and cultural background of intelligibility that allows some things to appear more meaningful or worthwhile than others. And this is something that neoliberalism exploits to great effect. More choice does not necessarily mean more freedom—just as I pointed out with the credit card example. What distinguishes human beings is not simply our ability to choose or to strategize about how to get what we want. It’s our ability to discover what is worth wanting. And this is what neoliberalism’s preference utilitarianism erodes: the space for reflecting on what our desires should be.

Neoliberalism assumes that when your preferences are met, you are happy. And isn’t happiness the goal of a good life? But the problem with this view is that happiness is fleeting. The moment you encounter difficulties, happiness vanishes—and then you are left with nothing. A more stable foundation for a life is not happiness, but meaning. Meaning runs deeper than happiness. It gives you direction, even when things are hard. It keeps you grounded. It allows you to remain useful to your family and community, even in times of struggle.

But here’s the key: you don’t find meaning inside yourself. That is a modern myth. Your life becomes meaningful not because you generate meaning from within, but because you respond to meanings that exist outside of you—realities that push back, that exert force upon you, that matter in ways that demand your engagement. If meaning is entirely self-created, then you can simply take it back whenever it becomes inconvenient. True meaning requires commitment. And if the only commitment you have is to yourself, you will never experience anything as truly meaningful. You’ll just be a king without a castle.

I believe that not only has our capacity for moral and ethical reflection diminished over the neoliberal era, but the space for such reflection has steadily eroded. Tocqueville foresaw this nearly 200 years ago. He warned that if you combine individualism with instrumentalism, you undermine the shared interests necessary for democratic life. People retreat into the satisfaction of their private preferences, and the collective fabric of society frays.

The Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries was, in many ways, a revolt against this kind of narrow, instrumental thinking. It emerged in reaction to the rigid theological focus of medieval scholasticism, turning instead toward the question: What does it mean to be human? Renaissance humanists sought to cultivate human virtues to their highest and fullest extent—not just to produce individuals of a certain kind, but to embed this vision institutionally, to reshape the cultural and political order itself.

When I call for a moral and ethical renaissance, this is the kind of transformation I have in mind. Not a mere refinement of individual character, but a sweeping reimagining of our culture, our institutions, and our shared sense of what it means to be human. The Renaissance was political to the bone—dedicated to dispelling ignorance, superstition, dogmatic obedience to authority, and the brutish regimes that flourished under those conditions. And I believe that is precisely the kind of movement we need now.

Beck: This reminds me of an article you wrote on social justice and psychology with Erin Thrift, which I found really thought-provoking. In it, you critique how many psychologists have taken up the term social justice, and you make a particularly striking point:

“Psychological services that merely help individuals to adjust to circumstances of poverty and inequality without doing anything to change these conditions is a disservice to social justice.”

That seems to fit well with what you’re saying here. Given psychology’s deep entanglement with neoliberalism—and its long history of focusing on the individual at the expense of social and economic conditions—where do you see the discipline’s role in all of this? Do you think there’s still a path forward where psychologists could help push the field in the direction you’re describing? Or do you feel that psychology, as a discipline, is already too far gone?

Sugarman: Donald Napoli wrote a book in 1981 with a great title: The Architects of Adjustment. If you look at psychology’s historical role in society, it has largely been about helping people adjust—adjust to social norms, to institutions, to the demands of the world as it is. How did psychologists get the discipline off the ground? We went into institutions—schools, hospitals, prisons, factories—that were trying to function more efficiently. We studied what people did and established norms for how these institutions were supposed to function. When an institution—or an individual within it—wasn’t operating within those norms, we developed tests to detect the problem and interventions to correct it. Psychology, in that sense, has often functioned as a discipline of social maintenance, a field devoted to keeping things running as they “should.”

Psychology might be the most conservative of all disciplines in this regard. If you’re expecting radical transformation from psychology as a whole, I think that’s an unrealistic expectation. That’s not to say there aren’t brilliant and transformative movements within the field—liberation psychology, critical psychology, the work being done in the theory and philosophy of psychology. There are people doing vital, revolutionary work. But they are a small minority. The mainstream of psychology remains highly conservative.

Take Vancouver, for example. There’s an area called the Downtown East Side, home to some of the poorest communities in Canada. How many psychologists do I see working down there? Not many. But if I walk into a nice office in an affluent part of the city, I’ll find plenty of psychologists charging high rates to help middle- and upper-class people navigate their suffering. And let me be clear—people do suffer, and that work is meaningful. But if we’re talking about social transformation, psychology is not where I would look.

Psychologists are trained to help individuals change, not to push for large-scale political or economic change. If we want that to shift, then psychologists need to be educated differently. Not just politically, but broadly. They need to read more, to understand what’s happening in the world around them, to move beyond a surface-level understanding of social justice—where the term functions like pleasant background music in a dentist’s office, something that makes us feel good but doesn’t ask much of us. Real social justice work is risky.

And I don’t see many psychologists taking that risk. Look at what’s happening in the United States right now. How many psychologists do you hear speaking out? Not many. And I get it—people are afraid. They don’t want to face the consequences of taking a stand. But if we’re asking whether psychology, as a discipline, will play a major role in reshaping society? I don’t think that’s fair. That’s never been psychology’s role, and as it stands, most psychologists aren’t prepared for it.

Beck: Thank you for summarizing that so well. Before we wrap up, I want to give you the opportunity to share anything we haven’t covered—whether it’s a topic we didn’t get to, a project you’re working on, or something you’d like to highlight for our listeners. Now that you’ve stepped back from full-time teaching, what’s next for you?

Sugarman: I’ve actually stepped back from teaching entirely—I officially retired at the end of August this past year. Though some mornings, I look at what I’m doing and wonder, have I actually retired?

I don’t know if you’re aware of David Goodman’s project at Boston College to establish an institute for the psychological humanities, but I’m involved in that. I think it’s an important and much-needed initiative, particularly as a counterpoint to the push—especially from the APA—to position psychology strictly as a STEM discipline. In fact, I read a 2010 report where the APA explicitly argued that psychology should be considered a STEM field, primarily because that’s where the funding is.

What I find so vital about the psychological humanities is that it offers a necessary juxtaposition to psychological science. It affirms the value of the humanities—literature, art, history, philosophy—as essential for understanding human psychology. Too often, these disciplines are dismissed by those who believe psychology should be purely empirical, yet they provide some of the most profound insights into the human condition. If I want to understand people, I’ll read a great novel before I sift through journal articles filled with group aggregates that only apply to group aggregates. I want to know about a person, about an individual life—how they’ve been shaped by their relationships, their social and cultural milieu, their history. Literature and art have long been invaluable tools for capturing those nuances in ways psychology too often overlooks.

I also have a piece coming out soon on the Enlightenment and Foucault, which was a fascinating project I worked on with Thomas Teo—who, I believe, you’ve interviewed. He’s a brilliant scholar in the theory and philosophy of psychology, as well as critical psychology.

Beyond that, I’m still engaged in several projects, but, to be honest, what I really want to be doing in retirement is feeding the birds and going for long walks.

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