Concepts for Critical Psychology series preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Knowledge production and practice
Part I: Angles on the psy complex
1. Autoethnography of psychology as education
2. Applied psychology as consent and adaptation
3. Decolonising psychology’s maps and territories
4. Psychiatric diagnoses and alternatives
5. Therapeutic discourse as psychologisation
Part II: Arguments as dialectical critique
6. Dialectical methodological critique
7. Eleven theses on subjectivity and realism in psychology
8. Capitalism and psychotherapy
Part III: Activism for anti-psychology
9. Nationalism as enclosure
10. Climates of anxiety
11. Cis-realism and cis-psychology
12. Solidarity in times of genocide
References
Biography
Ian Parker is co-founder of the Discourse Unit and Managing Editor of Annual Review of Critical Psychology, author and editor of numerous books and articles about critical psychology, an anti-psychologist and revolutionary Marxist.
'As one of the preeminent scholars in the Critical Psychology tradition, Parker once again invites us to interrogate the social, political, and economic background against which ideas surrounding human thought and behaviour emerge. Taking us through the process of critique, Parker provides us with a robust foundation for collectively fashioning our world outside and against the psy-disciplines.'
- Dr. Michael Arfken, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
'Critical Psychology: Angles, Arguments, Activism revisits critiques of the discipline and its commonsensical representational claims as introduction to students discovering key concepts and debates in Critical Psychology. It is also a reminder to old stalwarts that psychology as professional and academic practice happens at the intersection of the political and cultural-historical context. Anchored within open intersectional Marxist frame of reference, the critique offered here problematises the taken-for-granted role of psychologisation and the broader social and political worlds within which we do psychology. The book is a rendering of Critical Psychology as more than orientation and praxis but also as archive that centres imaginative and critical examination of psychology’s political emergence, composition and effects.'
- Prof Peace Kiguwa, Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
'Critical Psychology is a process that allows the rupture with the historical trajectory of a science focused on the control and prediction of behaviors, bringing the possibility of a focus on important social conditions for the development of people, in addition to the impact of ideology on everyday life. This book offers an opportunity to review arguments and foundations that provide psychology with an active militancy in improving the social and economic conditions that impact human life. For many years psychological science has reinforced rather than questioning the ideological representations of individuals as separate from social relations, so the main argument underpinning critical psychology is the need to clarify the political role of psychology. Both practice and psychological research have covert political agenda and the commitment of the critical perspective is exactly to highlight this relationship between psychology and politics, so faded in the dominance of a conservative psychology.'
- Dra. Raquel S. L. Guzzo, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Brazil.
