Popular psychology functions as licensed exceptions that remove the onus of evil

Evidence

Here is where I think that clinical psychology and psychiatry fit in. I want to tread carefully here. More accurately, here is where I think that ordinary people’s conceptualizations of psychology and psychiatry fit in. Although psychologists and psychiatrists sustain complex perspectives on these issues, I think that a frequent cultural use of the everyday equivalents of concepts in those fields is to provide alternate accounts of evil actions that attribute the act to other than an evil person. For instance, a culturally accepted form of the psychodynamic perspective, popularly thought to trace adult thought disorder to experiences inflicted on the person as a child, and inaccessible to current conscious control, removes the onus of evil from the individual who commits evil actions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3887

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the prior paragraph’s ‘licensed exceptions’ mechanism and generalizes it: the cultural use of psychology/psychiatry is itself a quantum-of-evil protection device, not a scientific account.