Abstract
Issues regarding the “relevance” of the discipline of psychology have persistently raised concerns for researchers, practitioners, patrons, and lay people alike. The cleavage between academic knowledge and real-world application signals different understandings of the value and purpose of scientific research as well as accompanying funding mechanisms. The impulse of “giving psychology away” (Miller, 1969, p. 1071), the popularity of positive psychology and self-help literature, and the growth of community psychology and participatory action research stem from varied motivations that range from professional entrepreneurialism, neoliberal culture, and political activism. Captivating films, novels, and images featuring the mystery of the unconscious mind, multiple personalities, micro expressions, and Gestalt optical illusions attract millions of college applicants to the psychology major, who are later trained to prioritize methodological rigor over relevance to everyday experience. In light of the history and the vast scope in which psychologists have struggled with issues of relevance, it requires no exaggeration to say that Long’s monograph is much overdue.
In this monograph, Long theorizes and traces the history of “relevance” in South African psychology since 1948—the year when South Africa started veering into apartheid and when the first national psychology association was founded—till the present day. Long’s historical analysis is based on 45 presidential, opening, and keynote speeches. Long’s choice of data as well as interpretive strategy are influenced by Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis, which involves situating textual representation in discursive practice and sociocultural structure. Long is further inspired by narrative theorists such as Wetherell and Potter to treat talk of “relevance” as rhetorical. Diverging from popular claims that advocate making psychology relevant to certain aspects of human affairs, Long resists the temptation to adjudicate whether relevance is an intrinsically desirable goal. Instead, he takes a step back to investigate how talk of relevance has been historically mobilized to embody particular Habermasian cognitive interests—whether the empirical-analytic interest in the scientific tradition or the emancipatory interest in social activism, for instance. The contestations between different versions of relevance, Long argues, often occurred at times of sociopolitical change, which called for an alternation of cognitive interests. Theoretical relevance and social relevance, for instance, often expressed the aforementioned empirical-analytic and emancipatory interests respectively. The other two notions of relevance theorized by Long, cultural relevance and market relevance, were each associated with an awareness of indigenous culture and the ascendance of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. It is important to note, though, that Long refuses static, reductionistic pairing. For example, differing from the stereotypical perception of applied research being more relevant than basic research, Long identifies several historical incidences that demonstrate the contrary. While unsettling fixed epistemological and value attributions, Long aptly prevents his historicist and rhetorical approaches from culminating in a radical relativism that evades judgement. From his critical realist position, no matter how metamorphic notions of relevance can be, the social world that produces them is very real.
The first four chapters serve as a roadmap that orients readers to the entire monograph. Following the introductory chapter that outlines the monograph’s thesis, approaches, and structure, Long dedicates the second chapter to a survey of historical discussions about relevance in international psychologies. In Chapter 3, Long explains his theoretical and methodological decisions as mentioned above, before entering South African psychology in Chapter 4. The latter chapter makes Long’s monograph reader-friendly, as it summarizes three dominant themes that may otherwise be hard to discern in the convergence of nationalism, racism, postcolonialism, and disciplinary institutions. Here, Long’s analysis shows that leaders of South African psychology frequently lamented the discipline’s failure in achieving relevance and invented various remedies that revolved around either the antinomy between individual well-being and social welfare or that between scientific research and professional advancement.
In Chapter 5, the first chronological chapter, Long touches on the watershed event in the history of South African psychology, the breaking away of the whites-only Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA) from the South African Psychological Association (SAPA) in 1962. Centering on this schism, Long analyzes the contrast between the PIRSA president’s justification of the associational separation in terms of ethnic-national relevance and the SAPA president’s call for liberal individualism to fend off political influence from truth-seeking activity. In Chapter 6, Long turns the clock back to examine how the 1962 split was conditioned by intellectual/political preferences in the 1950s. In the earlier decade, while Afrikaner psychologists attempted to create social relevance through delivering public service, Anglophone psychologists with a theoretical bent restrained themselves from political involvement. In Chapter 7, Long observes that after the 1962 split, the PIRSA leaders magnified appeals for psychologists’ active involvement in ethnic-national service. However, in the 1970s, this discourse lost prominence along with the disintegration of the apartheid rationality amid a series of economic, cultural, and political upheavals. In Chapter 8, Long discusses how in the 1980s, leaders of the Psychological Association of South Africa (PASA), which resulted from the unification of SAPA and PIRSA, elaborated on various professionalist, disciplinary, and cultural notions of relevance while circumventing racism. The Organisation for Appropriate Social Services in South Africa (OASSSA), in contrast, promoted an alternative liberationist discourse that highlighted the impact of apartheid on mental health. Chapter 9 examines the post-apartheid years after 1994. Long argues that, amid rampant neoliberalism, a forceful market discourse has arisen that capitalizes knowledge and pressures South African psychologists to join international competition. This trend has been criticized by a number of psychologists who emphasize psychologists’ civic responsibility to intervene in the country’s unresolved apartheid trauma. In the final chapter, Long reflects on the cognitive interests and sociopolitical implications of various discourses on “relevance.”
With expertise in theoretical psychology, history of psychology, as well as clinical psychology, Long is very well positioned to contribute insight to the discussion of “relevance,” which he has successfully demonstrated. For one thing, Long’s application of critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis to historical speeches is a novel approach that fruitfully reveals the malleability of “relevance.” For another, true to a historian’s sensibility, Long substantially situates each speech in social networks, institutions, cultural heritage, and domestic and international politics, while rendering this vast scene intelligible even to readers less familiar with the history of South Africa. Last but not least, Long’s dexterity in interweaving theoretical insights into his historical account makes the monograph potentially inspiring to not only psychologists but also readers from outside of psychology.