Western and Africa Psychology

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what is the difference in Western and Africa Psychology?

-- Adebolanle Shittu (ombous@yahoo.com), March 08, 2005

Answers

It depends, I suppose, on what exactly you mean by "African psychology." The discipine called "psychology" is a modern European invention. Other cultures, of course, discuss some of the same issues, but they divide them up differently among "disciplines" (perhaps more neutrally, "areas of knowledge") that are indigenous to the cultures from which they arose (not those that Europe happened to develop). There are some interesting observations on this matter (though with respect to Indonesia, rather than Africa) in Kurt Danziger's _Naming the Mind_.

It is an interesting question whether it is ethnocentric to teach "only" the "Western view" of psychology or, rather, the ethnocentrism comes of assuming that non-European cultures must also have something equivalent to "psychology" and then trying to add aspects of that "discipline" to Western psychology courses.

This is one of the reasons that I entitled my book (w/ Philip Groff) on ancient accounts of mind and soul, _Early Psychological Thought_ rather than _Early Psychology_. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized no such discipline as "psychology." Topics of inquiry that *we* regard as being psychological in nature were scattered across half a dozen areas of knowledge that the ancient Europeans recognized.

One other thing, even if there was psychology in traditional Africa, there is unlikely to be an "African psychology." Prior to colonization, African was broken up into a large number of distinct cultures, each with its own traditions of knowledge and belief. Thus, inasmuch as there was any African "psychology," there are likely to have been dozens of such "psychologies," not one for the whole continent.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), March 08, 2005.


Hi Adebolanle, I am not an expert in this area, but I agree with Christopher that there may be more than one "African Psychology" and it may be difficult to compare them with "Western Psychology." My own bias is that since humans seem to be bright and genetically a fairly homogeneous species, I would expect their local psychologies to have considerable overlap, even in different cultures. This overlap would be even more so today in an age of extensive international communication. However, people like Edward Bruce Bynum and Wade Nobles, have theoried that there is something like an "African Psychology" with ancient roots, which has a particularly strong *family* emphasis to it. One psychological belief often seen in Africa is the belief in an intergenerational *family unconscious*. This concept sounds a little like Jung's collective unconscious, but typically involving shared ideas and values from ones family (the living and at least the recent dead), instead of the whole history of humankind as Jung suggested. The family unconscious, however, may go beyond a Jungian-type collective unconscious, in the sense of a believe that deceased family members (and possibly other spirits) can directly and concretely influence living members. Therefore feeling better for many Africans may involve combining a physical approach like taking medicine, a psychosocial approach involving improving self-esteem and interpersonal relations, and a spiritual approach that involves respect or duty to past and present family members. Therefore the three terms I would particularly associate (but not uniquely associate) with "African Psychology" are spirit, family, and community. I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (prk@frontiernet.net), March 08, 2005.

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