Matthew Giobbi

Matthew Tyler Giobbi (born 1974) is an author, photographer and educator in the fields of science criticism, philosophy, media theory, psychoanalysis and psychology. He is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey and an adjunct Lecturer at Rutgers University, Newark. He has written "A Postcognitive Negation: The Sadomasochistic Dialectic of American Psychology" and is the Editor of The International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology

Biography

Giobbi was born in Easton, Pennsylvania and received his BS from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, his MA from The New School for Social Research in New York CIty, and his Ph.D. from The European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Giobbi is the Erich Fromm Postdoctoral Research Associate at The European Graduate School. Giobbi has studied under Wolfgang Schirmacher, Victor Vitanza, Helene Cixous, Bracha Ettinger, Judith Butler, Nick Humphrey, and Claire Denis. Currently he works and lives in New York City.

Science and Psychology Criticism

Giobbi draws on the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Psychoanalytic traditions of cultural criticism. Centering around the work of Erich Fromm and Martin Heidegger, Giobbi has called for a "postcognitive psychology" one in which a transdisciplinary approach replaces the current positivist domination of experimental psychology.

Postcognitive Psychology

In his first book "A Postcognitive Negation: The Sadomasochistic Dialectic of American Psychology" (Atropos Press)[[1]]) Giobbi outlines the history of the "media event of experimental psychology" and the future course he feels the field must take. In a review Victor VItanza wrote:

"From an upstart position to a restart opportunity, Giobbi argues for and provides a well-documented background check on the modern paradigm of cognitive psychology--with all of its scientistic and positivistic presumptions. Systematically, yet paralogically, Giobbi turns his readers toward seeing what still remains concealed and hidden in modernist thinking: namely, the "sadomasochistic event" of mind-body split, master-slave relations, and subject-object dualisms. Giobbi prescribes a post-cognitive psychology of unconcealedness by way of a Heideggerian philosophy of Dasein."

Psychology as a Media Event

Giobbi describes the history and systems of psychology as mediated manufacturing for the need for psychology. Primarily through American media moguls and entrepreneurs like James McKeen Cattell and German Wilhelm Wundt (who published the first psychology journals) psychology was promoted and sold as a necessity in corporate, military, education, and eventually mental health markets. Giobbi views the split of psychology from philosophy as a media event that created the artificial need for experimental psychologists to train more experimental psychologists. Giobbi takes up the argument where Michel Focault, R.D. Laing and Friedrich Nietzsche left off.

Transdisciplinary Psychology

Giobbi is the editor of the International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology. The IATP is made up of an international editorial board and is a peer-reviewed journal. The IATP features articles by scholars who take a transdisciplinary approach to psychology. The journal has been granted an ISSN with the Library of Congress (ISSN:2156-0269). In an article, "A Beginner’s Guide to Cultural Media Criticism of The History of Psychology" Giobbi outlines the transdisciplinary approach to scholarship.

The Sadomasochistic Dialectic

Giobbi argues that American psychology has become the battleground of a sadomasochistic power structure between positivist, experimental psychology and ontological, existential, phenomenological psychology. Giobbi argues that The American Psychological Association has damaged the exploration of the human condition by implementing a homogenizing accreditation system for American graduate programs in psychology which privileges a certain dialectical language game. According to one reviewer: American psychology exists in a pathological state where a sado-masochstic relationship between experimental and non-experimental approaches risk devaluing both endeavors. To confront this problem head on, Giobbi masterfully narrates the "power-structure in which experimental psychology maintained its dominance through a self-promoted legitimation structure that ensured its predominance as the legal way of doing psychology" (267). With his formidable command of psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and transdisciplinary psychology, this meditation/analysis/manifesto explores many unspoken (and feared) questions from within the field.

POSTCOGNITIVE NEGATION is not yet another critique of psychology from the outside (humanities, literature, etc.); it's a revolution staged from within the event of thinking which is rightly described as postCartesian. Giobbi focuses his attention on the events of scientific psychology which the power/knowledge S&M institutionalization of the field conceals. In order to dislodge the experimental paradigm from its position of privilege, POSTCOGNITIVE NEGATION then deterritorializes the field of psychology by way of a deployment of hybrid forces: Reich, Fromm, Foucault, and Lyotard. His analysis of the apparent power structure of American psychology confronts the quagmire of ideology, one which pits empiricism against empiricism itself in order to deconstruct the inherent pathologies which each expression of empiricism discloses.

Giobbi's clear willingness and unmistakable ability to encourage experimental psychologists to let go of (in the Heideggerian sense, to allow for new possibilities of) their own privileged center and experience the ideology of a non-experimental paradigm envisions a more useful science. His vision extends beyond the narrow definitions and S&M obsessions of this stifling empiricism. Furthermore, POSTCOGNITIVE NEGATION proposes a radically transcendent model which seeks to achieve not a new empiricism but an authentic acquisition of knowledge.

Forgetting momentarily Giobbi's painstakingly detailed and unique historiography of the problem itself; beyond his radical re-readings of established source materials; and for the moment bracketing his symphonic command of multiple disciplinary problems, needs, solutions, and "unthought" haeccities which exceed and overwhelm the problem at hand--what could be called his negation remix of empirical sciences and rearticulation of Newtonian obsessions within Lyotard's differend and Heidegger's mitzein in and of itself would mark POSTCOGNITIVE NEGATION as a wholly individuated and masterful study of contemporary psychology. Combine his accomplishments just described with the empirical deconstructions and Giobbi has achieved the near impossible: a first book whose challenges go beyond the contemporary debates within psychology and restages the history of the problem itself without losing site of the vitality and necessity of a radicalized transdisciplinary psychological model." -Dr. Robert Craig Baum, PhD

External links

• [2] Faculty News Mercer County Community College, MCCC.
• [3] CV. Biography, bibliography, photos, quotes and video lectures.
• [4] Personal Website.
• [5] Trenton United, story on Giobbi.
• [6] Faculty Listing, MCCC, New Jersey.
• [7] International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology.
• [8] Rutgers Universtiy, Ratemyprofessors.com on Giobbi.