Abstract
I first saw Ian Parker when I was a doctoral student and he was the invited guest for an annual lecture. I later heard that an angry faculty member left halfway through. This book will inspire similar sentiments in most. Psychology Through Critical Auto-ethnography is a reflexive analysis of Parker’s life in Psychology where he shows how the discipline operates, in turn undermining its claims of expertise. Psychology here is not treated like a machine, to be opened for us to see its working parts; instead Psychology is revealed to be a living and breathing organism, and we get to see who it feeds on, where it hunts, why it migrates, and how to trace its effects by studying the shit it leaves behind. The book has two goals, and it achieves both—for Psychology’s insiders, it aims to make strange every assumption they held as natural. For the outsider, the book acts as a STOP sign, one that hits you in the face. One of the most prolific writers in the discipline, Parker’s expertise ranges from Marxism to discourse analysis, critical psychology, and Lacanian theory. Unlike the density of the work he tackles, this book remains accessible without compromising on the complexity of dialogue—here he keeps the promise of connection with the disciplinary novice. It is dangerously engaging, and you find yourself laughing, scowling, and cringing in response to a particularly ill-fated “reply-all” departmental email.
Throughout the book, Parker undercuts Psychology’s claims of neutrality and its apolitical stance. He reveals the discipline’s nefarious political allegiances, for example its role in apartheid in South Africa, and its coziness with racist theories and sexist ideas. This is not the case of a few bad apples. For example, Parker shows how biological and evolutionary psychology serve the capitalist–conservative enterprise which creates predetermined subjects, thus precluding any form of revolutionary disruption. History of Psychology is littered with examples of how popular biological theories were founded upon mountains of prejudice and molehills of evidence. Its claims of women’s low biological variability, or of men’s evolutionary unfitness for childcare, both shown to be false by historical figures such as Leta Hollingworth and Naomi Weisstein, lend further evidence to Parker’s assertion that Psychology is not merely a bourgeoise discipline, it has historically nurtured fascism.
Throughout the text, Parker targets academic performativity and the discourses that animate it. If you have bribed students with extra credit to attend a visitor’s lecture, or have groaned during faculty senates buzzing with words like “sustainability,” you will empathize. After all, academia and Psychology make great bedfellows as they are both sustained by language practices that obscure and thus garb Psychology in scientific validity (Boyle, 2002). This discursive opacity is neither a mistake nor is it deliberate, and it reflects the convoluted and bloated institutional bureaucracy. Here, the monolith of the unfazed and unbiased professor is challenged through examples of academics dissolving into tantrums, subtracting letter grades from students conducting qualitative research, and basing peer review on personal preferences over available evidence. This last one is particularly relevant as knowledge production in Psychology is already under suspicion for ghost-written articles, spins in abstracts, and pervasive industry influence.
As Parker reveals the insidious prevalence of the Psy-complex, the reader can observe how it creates frozen subjects—stencils of people—averaged ways of being we internalize to reproduce the statistically aggregated nonexistent individual. In larger culture it takes the form of MBTI-esque Harry Potter personality quizzes (Slytherin) or “Which 70s rock star are you?” tests (34% Robert Plant). Instructors play their role as we fold students into this language when we suggest psychological self-descriptors and self-disclosure to them. As students apply Psy-language to their lives, we could just as easily point to the numerous times these psychological concepts did not apply to their experience, but mostly we don’t.
Placing academia’s institutional crisis in a larger sociopolitical context, Parker makes a strong case that given Psychology’s underlying assumptions (individualism, meritocracy, materialism), its historical roots (Euro-American context), and its capitalist allegiance, it is almost impossible for it to initiate collective change. Others have similarly noted that Psychology ignores external circumstances for purported internal mechanisms, for example, “helping” Syrian refugees verbalize their depression (Cosgrove & Karter, 2018). It also distorts experiences of oppression into mental states of prejudice. Trauma theory is an example of this. Indigenous psychologists have long claimed that trauma theory is monocultural, necessitates a long-term psychological response, monopolizes healing by prescribing verbalization, and even when it attempts collective relief, it resorts to internal concepts of resilience and agency. It ranges from being ineffective to dangerous, as in the case of the drugging of street children in Cairo (Sweis, 2018).
Parker shows that every resistant discourse is neutered by Psychology’s neoliberal priorities—feminist psychology ends up using deceptive tactics; qualitative methods are used to discover people’s inner thoughts; and community psychology represents communities as homogenous, deficient, and in need of expert intervention. Psychology’s neoliberal foundations facilitate certain forms of management and self-management, and its corporatization has further marginalized the ways of the global South while simultaneously attending to them. Only the hubris of Psychology can help multinationals teach Indians Indianness (Bhatia, 2018). There are, after all, glaring similarities in how capitalism and Psychology operate. Both need newer markets or concepts to sustain themselves. Both leave devastation behind—the post-Walmart ghost towns, or the drugged and abused (ghosts) of Psychology (Campbell, 2018). Both absorb resistant discourses for their own benefit—from Dove’s beauty commercials to current forms of qualitative and community psychology.
There is an integrity in Parker’s endeavor, evident in his critiques of critical psychology, antipsychiatry, Marxist activism, and psychoanalysis themselves, and present when he shares his role as an apparatus of powerful institutions. Most importantly, it can be seen as Parker painstakingly avoids psychologization in his narrative. The reader is unable to find a villain except the new dean who threw out the resident ginger cat. In showing how people were positioned to respond to and reproduce certain discourses, he shows that psychologization can be avoided, and a different framework that does not individualize or interiorize, can provide a convincing narrative. For example, in a particularly vulnerable moment of breakdown, Parker shows how easy it is to think of stress as an internal state to be fixed within the individual, and thus to normalize crushing work pressure as just a part of modern living. Thus, when sharing how a faculty member could not fathom Patsy Hague (of the groundbreaking Hearing Voices Movement) being OK with hearing voices, Parker is not implicating this man’s personality. The man is pinned by the epistemological boundaries of his discipline which has historically ignored patient experience as an outcome measure and thus as legitimate knowledge.
Despite his criticisms, Parker places his tentative trust in the study of language, through which subjectivity is seen as perpetually constituted, and this rupture allows for revolutionary change. Along the way, he forms alliances with decolonial frameworks, Lacanian analysis, and Marxist theories. My only possible complaint is that at times he seems to privilege voice over silence which has long been mistaken as symbolic of oppression (Kurtis & Adams, 2015).
In this autoethnography, theory does not ground personal experience—theory is data. As other prominent figures in the discipline, such as Peter Gøtzsche, Allen Frances, and Robin Murray come forward with their scathing criticisms, Parker’s account is unmissable as it situates their specific concerns in greater sociopolitical and economic contexts, and weaves it all in a thrilling personal narrative.