Paper short abstract:

I analyse the idea that examining individuals as problems –rather than studying individual psychic life- is a richer task for psychology. Such a proposal, I claim, faces psychology with exciting prospects, but it should not simplify the questions of what does ‘individuals as problems’ entails

Paper long abstract:

This presentations experiment with the proposition that, rather than understanding 'individual psychic life', psychology should devote itself to the analysis of 'individuals as problems' (Tucker, 2012). Such an invitation, made under a Deleuzian framework, seeks to provide psychology with a non-reductionist and processual understanding of experience. Moreover, it encourages efforts to deploy the specific patterns of processes of heterogeneous relations that compose specific and perceivable forms of individuation. It is tempting to celebrate this new way of understanding the possibilities of psychology since it avoids what can be understood as the 'illusion of subjectivity' (Duff, 2014), i.e. it's evanescent and mediated character. Under that scope, subjectivity is an illusion psychology frequently grounds in an equally illusory reified, single-bounded, autonomous subject. What this paper seeks to propose is that along with embracing the idea of psychology as the task of experimenting with individuals as problems -and the new forms of subjectivity that might entail- we would do well by asking what kind of problems individuals are, and what does it mean to cultivate 'individuals as problems' as the raison d'etre of its work. This question becomes more relevant if we consider that a connection with the problem of individuation is implied and that Deleuze himself intriguingly stated the following formula: each individual -human or not- is a singular essence that expresses itself in characteristic relations of the differential relation type, differential relations under which infinite collections of infinitely small bodies belong to the individual.