The Gaptangle

For a while now, we’ve been interested in pursuing a degree in psychology—a PhD, if we’re lucky. That’s mostly driven by our collective deep interest in plurality (obviously), but we have a fairly broad range of psychology interests. Since virtually all graduate degree-holding experts in the field regarding plurality are psychologists (or occasionally bioethicists), it seemed like the obvious choice.

Anyway, cut to us about a week ago, grabbing a spoon out of the cutlery drawer and then realizing we didn’t have any reason to grab a spoon and then putting it back, after which Crow& realized that fey was weirdly unbothered by how much more attention feyr joke art got to her serious work on Tumblr, because fey was just so interested in the social factors in that happening. So we walked out to our parents in the living room (two arts management professors who teach at a uni we might transfer to) and asked if their university had any sociology and art classes—which, of course, it did.

And then we realized that we've always liked sociology, and got to thinking about why we even wanted to study psychology in the first place.

Our motivation for pursuing a psych degree for the past couple of years has been an interest in neurodiversity and plurality, and a general sense of interest in how people think, but we're primarily interested in how those function socially and within identity, as well as being staunchly antipsychiatry. One of the most important aspects of antipsychiatry to us is refusing to let psychology define plurality. So why exactly were we so ready to throw ourself into seven years of study toward the end of defining plurality through psychology? (To be clear, we know there are antipsych psychologists, we planned to be one of those.)

The obvious thing is what we said earlier—that all our examples of academics focusing on plurality are psychologists. But we aren't that interested in the psychology of plurality anymore, and haven't been in years. We're pretty well-informed about it, but we're so much more interested in what makes personhood than we are in what makes a brain develop a person. And anyway, psychology can only carry us as far as the medical model and individual care. It doesn't cover culture and history and philosophy, which is our true love here.

We're not entirely sure why it's taken so long for this to occur to us, but we're glad it did before transferring out! (And the psychology special interest remains, but the desire for the PhD might not. We're taking developmental psychology this semester and waffling on whether we want to enter social psychology. Luckily, there's a good amount of time to decide when all your options overlap so heavily!)