Concerning the impossibility of neutrality inuniversity formation in psychology

Abstract

This article raises concerns about the idea of neutrality in university-level psychology education, not as an unquestionable epistemological principle, but as a historically produced and pedagogically reproduced myth. Rather than merely asserting the presence of ideology in the discipline –a trivial claim– the text examines the mechanisms through which psychology constructs the appearance of technical, objective, and depoliticized knowledge, as well as the formative effects of this appearance on teachers and students. From a critical perspective, neutrality is understood not as the absence of position or stance regarding political matters, or even of one’s ideology (as is typically presented), but rather as a specific relation to knowledge that becomes naturalized through institutional, curricular, and evaluative practices. Drawing on the analysis of discourses and experiences within the university classroom, the article shows how the separation between theory and practice, the emphasis on technique, and the systematic avoidance of social conflict, reinforce a technocratic conception of the psychological profession. In dialogue with critical pedagogy and the sociology of education, it is argued that psychology education actively participates in the production of professional dispositions –a habitus– more oriented toward adaptation than toward critical interrogation. Finally, the article contends that what is at stake is not only an epistemological debate, but a political dispute over the meaning of psychology formation, situated between the reproduction of the existing social order and the possibility of an emancipatory formative practice, capable of explicitly assuming its political character without reducing it to slogans or neutralizing it under the language of technique.