Volume 5, No. 2.
Constructing a Perspective: Epistemology of the Psi Sciences
What does it mean to produce a gaze within the psy-sciences? How does the psychic become observable: for the researcher — in the form of data, descriptions, and classifications, and for the subject themselves — in the form of familiar languages of self-description? Which techniques of observation and self-observation, criteria of truth, and institutional procedures render the psyche visible — and thereby constitute it as an object of knowledge and therapeutic intervention?
The special issue “Formation of the Gaze: Epistemology of the Psy-Sciences” was conceived as an inquiry into precisely these mechanisms: into the ways knowledge about the psychic emerges, becomes stabilized, transmitted, contested, and — perhaps most importantly — transforms its own objects in the process. Our concern is neither the rivalry of schools nor the history of the search for the “best method”, but rather the organization of regimes of observation and regimes of discourse that determine what will count as a fact and what as an error, what as care and what as violence; where the boundary between description and evaluation is drawn; and how evidence, authority, and responsibility are configured within the spaces of the therapeutic office, the laboratory, and the clinic.