What is psychology and what is ideology?

People are telling me my thesis project is unclear. I will now address one area of possible confusion: what do I mean by a "psychological" approach anyway, and how does that differ from the "ideological" approach that was so much practiced at the end of the last century (or whenever)?

Firstly one major problem (which is not my fault) is that ideology is an unclear concept whose definitions sometimes contradict. Clifford Geertz' influential model makes it something like a language (a system of metaphors) which contains an implicit politics or world-view. Now I have already talked about the role of metaphor in my project. To this extent the two concepts are very similar then.

However there seems to me a key difference, although a potentially problematic (and interesting) one. It is that ideology is constructed publically, and psychology privately. You can already see that this depends on the contestable notion of a separate public and private. To admit that is to admit that ideology (in this reading) shares some of its nature and explanatory power with psychology. But the emphasis of my project is on the strong role of the closest and most closed structures of life (i.e. the family) on the production of political thought, whereas I read ideology as being concerned with more distant and open structures: for Geertz perhaps e.g. economic life; for Skinner, very clearly, intellectual discourse.

So a Skinnerian approach to the Federalists would try to find the main strands and forms of their engagement with intellectual traditions and (Pocock's) 'political languages': so far so obvious. Contrastingly, my project will ignore (or touch only obliquely) many of these rhetorical engagements, instead consciously looking for echoes of the family and coming of age in Federalist thought, in the belief that these points are inherently important to notions of politics and social life.

If an ideological approach deals with the relationship of a group's thought to the thought of past groups, a psychological approach deals with the relationship of that group's thought to its own (private) practice and experience.