Abstract
Psychology has long been a problematic science. The history of the critique of psychology is almost as long as the history of psychology itself. Since Immanuel Kant’s argument that psychology can never become “a natural science proper” (1786/1970, p. 471), Franz Brentano’s (1982/1995) and Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1894/1977) ideas and methods for a descriptive psychology have had far-reaching impact on the initiation and formation of alternative approaches to psychology. Even within the natural scientific orientation of the discipline represented by Auguste Comte, Wilhelm Wundt (at least in 1860s), and other practitioners of the “new psychology” of the 19th century, there have been widespread in-depth reflections on the nature of psychology. These thinkers and their successors provide us with some of the core ontological, epistemological, and ethical frameworks that can be used to reconceptualize psychology and, further, its connections with capitalism. They also unshackle the liberating power of our psychological imaginations. Those of us whose imaginations struggle to make sense of the nature of doing psychology and its relevance to the wider society can find our inspiration in their endeavors. As proposed by Lev Vygotsky, “psychology is in need of its own Das Kapital” (1997, p. 330). Such a psychological version might be entitled Psyche: Critique of Psychology.
An erudite and gap-bridging book that covers almost every aspect of critical psychology, Handbook of Critical Psychology delves into “the development of a critical perspective on different elements of the host discipline of psychology” (p. 2) around the world. It is a remarkable collection of essays that deals with the core of critical psychology’s ways of thinking and doing. This is a book of great importance and a must-read for anyone who wants to think deeply about the present and future of psychology and its practical relevance. The Handbook also features an informative and accessible bibliography of printed and web-based materials for further study. I was so immersed in the rich content and deep thinking of Handbook of Critical Psychology that I was not able to finish reading it in one sitting. It reminds me of a classic philosophical joke, “No one ‘finishes’ reading Hegel!” For such a brilliant book, you can get to the end of it, but you have to unavoidably dive back in by way of a hermeneutical circle. Handbook of Critical Psychology gave me an opportunity to broaden my horizons both from a professional and personal point of view. After reading the book, you might come to the realization that all that seemed solid in mainstream psychology has melted into air, and at this “critical moment,” “[humankind] is at last compelled to face with sober senses, [their] real conditions of life, and [their] relations with [their] kind” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1978, p. 476).
Forty-seven articles (including the introduction) are divided into three main parts: Varieties of psychology and critique; Varieties of critical psychology; and Standpoints and perspectives on psychology and critical psychology. Part I is further divided into three sections: The mainstream; Radical attempts to question the mainstream; and Adjacent parts of psy-complex. Part III contains two sections: Perspectives and Places.
In the first section of Part I, the authors lay bare the gist and limits of mainstream psychology and the alternatives to them. They make the case that the dominance of quantification in the mainstream is problematic because as “a particular version of science” it fails to appreciate our lived experience and helps produce social injustice in a naturalizing way. An articulation between cognitive psychology and political economy reveals that cognitive psychology is but “an institutional expression of the alienation of labour under the capitalist mode of production” (p. 30). Further, the concepts emotion and personality function as individualistic constructs and discourage us from changing the world “as a socially embedded relational whole” (p. 50). This also applies to developmental and social psychology, which have tended to emphasize the singular developing child or groups within organizations instead of the contexts for children’s diverse developments or “the relationship between broader societal ideologies and organizational life” (p. 79). Contrary to mainstream forensic psychology, which is often complicit with disciplinary power and simply reproduces socially structured inequality, critical forensic psychology considers offending behavior as the production of a particular psycho-political space and refuses the “too-ready individualization and internalization of criminality and mental disorder” (p. 98). In addition, like the concept of “criminality,” “normality” is also socially constructed and embodies the modernist pathologization and medicalization of the “other” in abnormal psychology.
The second section of Part I introduces attempts to radically question the mainstream. The evolution of qualitative research, despite its diversity and fragmentation, together with theoretical psychology, has often offered critical frames of reference to prompt social change and reflection on “ontological, epistemological, ethical-political, aesthetic, and substantive issues” (p. 117). These issues are echoed in humanistic psychology’s affirmation of subjectivist approaches to psychology, critical political psychology’s denouncement of power being the natural and necessary privilege of a particular group, community psychology’s critique of “the … victim blaming approaches; the medical model of disability; and the hegemonic psy construction and reproduction of the decontextualized individual” (p. 147), and organizational psychology’s reconnection of psychology to the materiality, sociality, and institutionality of places. Moreover, the critical possibilities of counselling psychology and health psychology lie in focusing on relational values to situate problems in their socio-political conditions, rather than reduce them to technical problems of manipulation and control. The last three chapters of this section offer a critical rendering of the psychologies of blackness, women, and LGBTQ as reactions against mainstream, white, male, heterosexual psychology.
Section three of Part I deals with psychiatry, psychotherapy, education, social work, and self-help and popular psychology “so as to answer the question how these adjacent parts of the psy-complex use and reinforce mainstream psychology” (p. 250) to maintain the status quo. Implicated in the psy-complex, psychiatry and psychotherapy “help to guarantee that revolutions beyond the private, individual sphere remain nothing but a forgotten and ridiculed dream” (p. 229). Topics covered include resistance to the institutionalized forms of education, the instruments used by traditional social work, and psychologization and neurologization in self-help and popular psychology.
Part II takes up various forms of critical psychology to demonstrate how critical psychology benefits from its creative link with various historical and theoretical origins and resources such as versions of activity theory, Marxist psychology and dialectical method, German Kritische Psychologie, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Deleuzian perspective, and discursive psychology. Karl Marx, Lev Vygotsky, Klaus Holzkamp, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, among others, are recognized for their contributions to critical psychology. One tenet shared by these diverse approaches is their attention to social relations. Regarding “the social dimension of human activity,” the “social relations of production,” the “societal nature of human existence,” and “the persistence of human desire and the logic of human passion in relation to sociality” (p. 294), a set of theories, tools, and methods such as practical deconstruction, schizoanalysis, and discursive research can be employed to concretely and systematically analyze power relations which permeate all relational structures of society and to better examine how they operate in the everyday and mundane manners.
The first section of Part III demonstrates how like-minded colleagues in neighboring fields of critical psychology, including feminist psychology, queer theory, liberation psychology, indigenous psychologies, postcolonial theory, critical global disability studies, and critical spirituality studies have made positive contributions to the critiques of psychology. Their productive alliance helps to confront forms of oppression based on gender, sex differences, exploitation, colonialism, and race. People (including those with disabilities) living in the global South and psychologies on the margins are taken into account to explore the possibilities of a psychology that is both “globally aware and locally appropriate” (p. 354). In this vein, it will further our “understanding of the universal mechanisms and dynamics of oppression and how to combat it while being flexible enough to respond to the particularities of oppression and liberation in diverse social and political settings” (p. 354).
The final section of Part III documents the geopolitical distribution of the critical engagements with the discipline of psychology. Examples include Africa, the American continent, the Arab world, Asia, different European countries, and the South Pacific. Albeit varied and marginalized, these emerging alternatives to the normalization of mainstream Western discourse in neoliberal times have “the potential to make contributions to the emancipation and liberation of marginalized communities” (p. 415). But it is also necessary for us to remain politically aware that the cultural critique, which tends to focus on the tension between globalization and locality within these geopolitical analyses, is far from enough for a critical psychology which bases itself on the critique of political economy.
Psychology is considered by the mainstream to be a taken-for-granted territory and subject. Like Ahab in Moby-Dick, with his obsession that he can strike through the white whale, which to him is a wall since, “truth hath no confines” (Melville, 1851, p. 181), seemingly “it is possible to be entirely clear about precisely what it means to study the psychological, and that, moreover, the project of a social psychology is both clearly mapped and entirely realizable” (Brown & Stenner, 2009, p. 2). Convictions of this kind, which represent the forgetting of limits by the mainstream, are not rare in the psy-sciences. “Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it … We are limited in how we can start even if not in where we may end up” (Quine, 1960/2013, pp. 3–4). This is echoed to some extent in the work of Michel Foucault (1994/1997), in which he argued that “criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits” (p. 315). We need to question the limits and conditions of possibilities for the (re)production of knowledge about our psychological form of life. “In teaching spiritual truths the Buddha always uses these concepts and ideas in the way that a raft is used to cross a river” (Johnson, 2016, para. 6). This quote reminds us of the uncomfortable fact that both methodologies in the mainstream and the weapon of criticism in critical psychology are like a raft to carry one to the other shore and then to give away. The raft of critique belongs to expedient dharmas that we should not cling to forever. As concisely suggested by the Handbook, “all practices which disarticulate what is normative are good for critical psychology” (p. 345).