Annual Review of Critical Psychology
Copyright © 2000 Discourse Unit
Vol. 2, pp. 55-71 (ISSN: 1464-0538)
On the psychologization of critical psychology
Ángel J. Gordo-López
Abstract: This paper argues against the recuperative aspects of critical psychology.
In particular I will argue against the renewed critical psychological concern with
action research, namely those that are limited to clinical and psychotherapeutic
spheres. I will also argue against the renewed psychologising interests that have
focused on new forms of subjectivity, often ‘liberated’ from institutional and
international socio-economic orders. Drawing upon influential critical traditions,
the final part of the article advances related lines of possible action. The first
suggests that we continue to scrutinise historical and material processes in order to
understand the ways psychology prevents us from thinking about its ethical and
social investments in both local and international spheres. The second line of
action indicates concrete ways of reflecting upon the market and political
conditions of possibility of current critical psychological issues and trends. The
third line discusses the pros and cons of identifying research subjects inside and
outside the boundaries of the discipline of psychology including ‘critical
psychology’. These complementary approaches are discussed as reference points,
rather than tantalising promises, for resisting the increasing recuperative aspects of
critical psychology and its possible reformist dangers.
Keywords: action research, neo-liberalism, psychoanalysm, subjectivity
The ‘psychoanalysm’ of British critical psychology: an example of
psychological recuperation
After a long decade of deconstruction, recently there has been a revival of
debates on ‘how psychology needs to change to be up to the task of
changing the often oppressive and abusive uses of psychology’ (CPAR,
1999). These debates are taking into consideration the difficulties
practitioners and professionals face when trying to work alongside critical
psychology research. What does it mean for critical psychology to take these
difficulties on board? To what extent may action research provide a common
ground for theory and practice? What correspondences can be found
between the expanding role of psychology in culture, the attempts to accord
critical psychology a sub-disciplinary status and the decline of the welfare
state? I will argue that, in order to address these issues, it may be helpful to
consider once more current critical psychological rapprochement with both
psychoanalytic theory and action research, and the sub-disciplinary status of
critical psychology itself in the light of the profound socioeconomic
transformations which are taking place world-wide.
Ángel J. Gordo-López
‘Critical psychology’ is a term often used to refer to a group of voices
opposed to experimental and positivist psychology. The early foundations of
critical psychology coincided with the so-called ‘crisis’ of psychology,
founded in the insufficiency of social representations and social cognitions
to account for social reality (Durmaz et al, 2000; Parker, 1989, 1996a;
Parker and Shotter, 1990). Under positivist and experimental domination
throughout the seventies and eighties, psychoanalytic resources, as much as
feminism, Marxism and post structuralism, contributed to the
problematization of the individualising self by recuperating the notion of
subjectivity within psychology (Adlam et al, 1977; Henriques et al, 1984;
Parker, 1996b). As Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers (1997, p. 44) note,
critical psychology, and in particular critical social psychology ‘absorbs a
salmagundi of critical, perturbing and radical thought to which one can
attach such labels as: feminism, French theory, neo-Marxism, poststructuralism, post-phenomenology, postmodernism and the sociology of
scientific knowledge’.
Beside the many tensions and distinct approaches which can be found under
the critical psychology umbrella (as appreciated in Gordo-López and Linaza,
1996; Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997; Ibáñez and Íñiguez, 1997; Sloan, 2000),
there is an increasing engagement with psychoanalytic theory, mainly in
British spheres (for the relations between psychoanalysis and British critical
psychology see Burman, 1994; Parker, 1997a; Walkerdine, 1988). In
previous decades psychoanalytic accounts, mostly in their Freudian-Marxist
form, were devised as a venue for social analysis and transformation (e.g.
Adlam, et al, 1977; Henriques et al, 1984). For their part, the nineties
witnessed widespread concern with the understanding and incorporation of
Lacanian theory - and more recently Zizek’s (1989) work - into critical
psychology (e.g. Georgaca and Gordo-López, 1995; Parker, 1997b). In the
realm of British critical psychology, psychoanalysis, and more recently
psychotherapy, has become the rather than a theoretical and critical
resource, as can be seen in the production of many influential works (such as
Hollway, 1989, 1997; Walkerdine, 1990; Parker, 1997b; Billig, 1997, 1999).
Therefore, if the turn to language and the study of subjectivity was the
hallmark of diverse forms of critical work in psychology till the midnineties, the turn to psychoanalysis and endless versions of psychotherapy
are now saturating the self of British critical psychology.
Such hegemony of psychoanalysis comes alongside the institutionalisation
of qualitative research in the social sciences as indicated by the burgeoning
number of handbooks and journals on qualitative research launched
throughout the nineties. The distinguished role psychoanalytic theory and
practice is achieving in this critical psychological spheres corresponds to
other process which undermine the current subsuming of psychology in
culture. Among, and in relation to, these psychologising processes I would
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like to stress (i) the impetus for more action research oriented critiques
instead of more deconstructive and destabilizing theory/action debates; (ii)
the possibility of according critical psychology a subdisciplinary status; (iii)
the listing, categorisation and marketing of good critical psychological
practices and values; and (iv) the strong emphasis on individualising forms
of ‘subjectivity’ instead of process of ‘subjectification’, a term which
designates ‘all those heterogeneous processes and practices by means of
which human beings come to relate to themselves and others as subjects of a
certain type’ (Rose, 1996, p. 25).
We should insist on the important contribution of psychoanalytic resources
in the development of critical understandings of subjectivity against the
unified and often reactive subject of mainstream psychology and, among
other positive contributions, in the development of critiques of what is
referred to as the ‘psychological complex’, a term defined in the field of
critical psychology or critiques of psychologies as ‘the network of theories
and practices which elaborate and implement psychological knowledge’
(Parker, 1996, p. 6) (see also Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985). These valuable
contributions do not prevent us though from thinking about the increasing
presence of psychoanalytic theory in our discipline, and therefore, in the
psychological complex. The expanding influence of psychoanalysis in
critical psychology might soon invalidate and neutralise other no less
subversive theoretical resources that also inform other useful critiques of
psychology or critical psychological work. Moreover, the prevailing
visibility of psychoanalytic resources and accounts in critical thinking might
unleash new attacks, and therefore, further exclusion of critical uses of
psychoanalytic theory from our research and educational establishments.
In order to prevent critical psychology from the recuperative dimension
inherent to critical resources as psychoanalytic theory, I found useful to
revisit sociological critiques of politics of psychoanalysis and psychiatric
movements (in France) as Castel’s (1973) (as well as Deleuze and
Guatarri’s, 1977). In Le psychanalysme [psychoanalysm] Castel understands
the effects of psychoanalysis is ‘not just [as] an ideology... but [as] an
incomparable system of production of ideology’, endowed with the capacity
to ‘dissimulate and occult... its socio-political impact’ (cited in Gordon,
1977, p. 110). Besides such diminishing views, this text, and the
genealogical tradition it represents, has been important for many of us in
critical psychology to understand the psychologising danger of espousing
political psychoanalysis (or any other theoretical resource critical
psychology draws upon) as an alternative to politics. It is worth reproducing
a paragraph from Gordon’s (1977) review of Le psychanalysme which
allows us to see Castel’s understanding of the politics of psychoanalysis and
its recuperable and recuperative nature:
psychoanalytic theory has an intrinsically revolutionary value, and that
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this value needs to be preserved or restored from the effect of its betrayal
or recuperation within a reactionary therapeutic practice... ‘it is totally
out of the question that psychoanalysis could ever furnish a model of any
political practice whatever’; ‘Freudo-Marxism’ is ‘Illusion in Freud’s
sense, and ideology in Marx’s’; the belief in psychoanalysis as inherently
political, contestataire or subversive is ‘one of the greatest contemporary
mystifications’ (Gordon, 1977, p. 110).
The bolstering presence psychoanalysis has gained in British critical social
psychological publications needs to be understood with respect to the also
recuperative dimension of qualitative-subjective research in the social
sciences as identified above. And, both the recuperative and psychologising
dimensions of qualitative research and the hegemonic role of psychoanalysis
in, but not only, influential British critical psychology needs also to be
understood in the context of broader socio-economic transformations such
as neo-liberal thinking and practices. Before moving to understand these
changes in the light of what present itself as irreversible despite the many
resistances and work required to impose the advanced capitalist logics of
neo-liberalism, I will focus on both the local and international effects of the
psychologisation of critical psychology (Cabruja and Gordo-López, 2000).
In this relational attempt we should keep in mind that the situated character
of British critical psychology has not hindered their methodologies and
theories from gaining a growing international resonance during the last two
decades.
Local And international contexts of psychologisation
During the few last years we have noted in various critical psychology
research groups in the UK an increasing demand to speak clearly in order to
make critical psychological arguments meaningful in real life. Such a use of
‘real life’ in these contexts stands for institutionalised practice in mental and
educational institutions. Although debates around theory and practice are
most worth taking into consideration in these research contexts, they often
position critical psychologists as providers of good knowledge and methods,
and professionals and practitioners as those who do not know how to be
critical or performing their jobs critically. Moreover, these debates usually
distinguish and categorise expert and non-expert knowledges and,
individualise positions, knowledges and ideas. Similar categorisations
resonate with the differentiations between those who are seen as too much
engaged in developing sophisticated critiques of the functioning of the
‘psychological complex’, and those who wish to think of themselves and
their research as overtly acting upon it (see, for instance, Goodley, 1999;
Cromby and Standen, 1999).
Devising ways of acting critically is, or should be, a central concern for any
critical endeavour. It does not follow whatsoever that different levels of
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action or even action per se are immune to problematization. Without
destabilizing views, theories and political imagination historically,
materially and internationally informed, as argued below, action can be at
best, pointless. Moreover, confining ‘action research’ to psychological and
mental health establishments, and critical networks organised around and
outside them, may bolster the fantasy that psychology can divorced from the
functioning of the ‘psychological complex’. Such a move, therefore,
ideologises logics that are currently being more politically and
socioculturally disseminated.
We then face here the strategic issue of whether to articulate and support
critical action research inside institutionalised psychological settings or in
the most dispersed, changeable and shifting arenas of ‘psychological
culture’, a term that designates the way psychology operates ‘beyond the
boundaries of academics and professional practice’ (Parker, 1999, p. 14). As
Parker (1999, p. 14) further notes, illustrating the subtle psychologising
workings of psychological culture:
When radicals in psychology look to what is going on outside the
disciplinary boundaries, to the thing that psychology shuts out
because it is too different or to the things that psychology draws in as
if they were the same, they then risk falling into the arms of
psychological culture.
This brings us to the question of how these psychologising processes are
affecting local networks and affiliations. Such psychologising dynamics
intensify tensions between critical stands when limiting practices,
(self)analyses or political ‘positionings’ to the realm of psychology, critical
psychology or psychological culture (Burman, 1999, personal
communication).
It is important to remember at this point that for some research groups in the
eighties and throughout the nineties being critical was seen as an
opportunity to mobilise and promote basic social values. Being critical in
many cases was paramount to a sound distrust of psychologically-informed
practices (Cabruja and Gordo-López, 2000). Critical work in psychology,
mostly developed from the margins of the discipline, was perceived as an
ephemeral strategy, a deconstructive spanner, an event to bring together
different resources and associations against all sort of oppressive issues,
including psychological ones (Parker and Shotter, 1990). Although different
disciplinary and social investments seem to co-exist across radical groups
under the umbrella of critical psychology, the current proliferation of
debates about action research comes hand in hand with discussions about
what is a ‘good’ critical psychological practice and knowledge (see, for
instance, Prilleltensky, 1994). As Ibáñez notes regarding social critical
psychology:
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It seems that there are those among us concerned with making social
psychology ‘critical’, but does this make any sense? Is it worthwhile?
How can it be made possible? What should it criticize? What effects
are we looking for? Why get caught up in such a project? Why should
a ‘critical’ social psychology be better than a ‘non-critical’ one?
(Ibáñez, 1997, p. 28).
These distinct concerns come alongside the possibility of opening up critical
psychology to cultural diversity, specifically to New Age forms of
subjectivity, including ‘the personal and political transformation to
spirituality’ (Announcement of the International Journal of Critical
Psychology, 1999). This diversifying attempts could be well understood as
instances of liberated subjectivity dispossessed of the dynamics of power
whether in its structural, institutional or international dimension (Burman et
al, 1996; Castel, 1973). More worrying than the recuperative psychologising
danger inherent to critical psychological incorporation of these new forms of
subjectivity, is the ongoing debate about the possibility of according critical
psychology a subdisciplinary status (as discussed in the Millennium
Congress, 1999, and more recently referred to in the plenary session of the
CPAR Conference, 1999). Similar disciplinising yearnings can be taken as
an emerging effect of the good health of critical psychology as indicated by
the two recently founded postgraduate programmes on critical psychology in
Bolton Institute, UK, and University of Western Sydney Nepean, in
Australia, and the new journals, including the Annual Review of Critical
Psychology (Bolton/Manchester, 1999) and the International Journal of
Critical Psychology (Sydney, 2000) (Cabruja and Gordo-López, 2000).
The new issues and trends in, mainly Anglo-Saxon critical psychology
identified above come at a moment, which as Parker (1999, p. 3) notes,
critical psychological work ‘stretches to the limit the self-critical reflexive
activity that should characterise any good mainstream psychological
research’. In addition, any body of knowledge which claims criticality might
want to reflect upon asymmetric international relations and, as far as critical
psychology is concerned, the correspondence between new forms of
psychoanalysm, the return to action-research and the current inflation of
psychology in cultures and emerging hegemonic neo-liberal order worldwide.
In this respect critical psychology’s psychoanalysm, renewed interests in
action oriented research and new age forms of ‘liberated’ subjectivity
resonate with those of the liberal democracies, who, as Rose (1996, p. 122)
argues, are more concerned with the way ‘conducts, desire and decision of
independent organization and citizens could be aligned with the aspirations
and objectives of government’. Thus, this perspective invites us to ‘rethink
the constitutive links between psychology [...] and the dilemmas on the
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government of subjectivity that confront liberal democracies today’ (ibid.,
66). It also invites us to reconsider the constitutive links between the current
trends in critical psychology, its international projection and
institutionalisation, and the transnational neo-liberal order. Otherwise, as I
shall argue below, the questionably transgressive, but hegemonic role of
psychoanalytic theory in the no less hegemonic British critical psychology,
the shift to action research, or even the ongoing sub-disciplinising of critical
psychology might be masking the very socioeconomic and ideological
conditions that render them possible. It follows then that acting upon,
between or outside psychology involves necessarily the reconsideration of
the ways our actions participate in the wider context of current neo-liberal
democracies or in any other context without necessarily vaunting our ‘good’
values, methodologies and direct actions in the name of critical psychology.
Critical psychology in the neo-liberal order
While it is unclear how the psychologising correspondences identified above
respond to wider socio-economic transformations, they are, however,
indistinguishable from the devastating effects of the dissolution of the state
as a central feature of the developing neo-liberal order. Although there is no
need to go into a detailed description of neo-liberal rhetoric and practices, it
is worth remembering here some of their outstanding features.
In the neo-liberal order social, political and cultural values are rendered
open to quantification and exchange. This mercantilisation of qualitative
basic values and social relations entails that the dialectics between ethics and
politics are supplanted by the notion of ‘spontaneous functioning’ (ÁlvarezUría, 1998a; Lowy, 1998; Muguerza, 1998). Nevertheless, neo-liberal
discourses and practices do not confine themselves to the mercantilization of
the social sphere. What is expected from the (dissolving Welfare) State is the
production of the conditions that render possible and warrant the free
functioning of the transnational markets and their efficiency (Hernández
Monsalve, 1998, Naredo, 1997; Ramonet, 1998). From a neo-liberal
perspective, state intervention is seen as interfering with the community
affiliations (Álvarez-Uría,1998b). In essence, neo-liberalism is characterised
by
the ongoing dissolution of the welfare state, the ascent of deregulation
and market ideologies in the seventies and eighties (...) and the
increasing role of transnational institutions and multinational
companies which undermine the primary role of the state in the
organization of distribution policies (Papadopoulos, 1999, pp. 5-6).
Bearing this wider context in mind and that neo-liberal dynamics are not
necessarily highly coordinated (as shown recently by the Seattle Conference
and the critiques that the International Monetary Fund has recently devoted
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to neo-liberalism), irreversible or all-powerful (as epitomised by the EZLN’s
--Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional-- cultural and armed insurrection
that since 1994 resists in the Lacandona jungle to abdicate to the globalising
excluding neoliberal forces-- for an updated overview of EZLN’s claims see
Vázquez Montalbán, 1999), I propose that we need to continue to focus on
the way these wider relations are played out in local and international critical
psychological contexts and trends.
Acting against neo-liberalism, acting against psychologisation of culture
Do the turn to psychoanalysis and action research, the psychologisation of
‘good’ theory and practice in critical psychological realms, arise from a
commitment to a better, improved psychological state, or, do we still believe
in the possibility of suppressing Psychology and the State or, at least,
resisting the recuperative dimension of psychologisation of critical resources
and practices? I have got the impression we are not merely talking about
psychology here but rather that we are pointing to the profoundly socioeconomic driven nature of any form of psychological knowledge since its
early scientific formulation (Rose, 1996).
Many historical resources and material possibilities would be diminished if
the turn to a more action-oriented critical psychology is not also taken as a
resource to understand the psychologising and the reformist psychologising
dimensions which fuel wider neo-liberal complexes. As Goldberg (1999, p.
363), notes ‘before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction
was already at work in the social efficacy of the market’. Following this line
of thought entails that ‘psychology must not only be vigilant in identifying
existing [acting, psychotherapeutic, in short, psychologising] needs, but,
more important still, it must also be active in the creation and propagation of
new ones’ (Goldberg, 1999, p. 363). What then are the logics underlying the
correspondences found between the turn towards action research and the
concerns with new age forms of psychology in the developing sub-discipline
of critical psychology?
I would like to suggest three possible lines of action. Firstly, we can
continue to scrutinise historical and disciplinary processes in order to
understand the ways present day psychology, including critical psychology,
prevents us from thinking about its ethical, social and ideological
investments on both a local and international level. Secondly, to contribute
to the internationalising perspective by indicating concrete ways of
reflecting upon the market and political conditions of possibility of any sort
of psychological work, whether critical or not. The third line is concerned
with identifying psychological research subjects not necessarily falling
within the scope of interests of mainstream psychology or critical
psychology. Let me briefly discuss in turn each of these lines.
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Genealogical referents for acting upon psychological culture
With regard to the historical line of action, there is a longstanding tradition
that suggests that the increasing participation of psychology in culture, the
psychologisation of culture, should be understood as an added effect of
modernization. This tradition has emphasised the correspondence between
discontent in culture and the increasing success of psychological culture as
already noted in Durkheim’s analysis of modern society and its emerging
individuation process. This research tradition was later developed by
processual sociologists such as Norbert Elias (1982) and Michel Foucault
(1971, 1977, 1980) whose work provide influential analytical tools for
understanding the processes and codes for the increasing processes of selfgovernment and individualisation. Especially relevant in this genealogical
tradition of research, as already mentioned, are Castel’s work on Le
Psychanalysme (1973) and, in Castilian language, the co-authored work by
Álvarez-Uría and Varela on Las Redes de la Psicología [The Nets of
Psychology] (1986) and Sujetos Frágiles [Fragile Selves] (1989). The
common preoccupation of this research tradition is to analyse the social
conditions which have rendered possible ‘the undoing of subjectivity in ever
expanding populations, and to demonstrate how the perceived discontent in
culture is bound up with the increasing success of psychological culture’
(Álvarez-Uría, 2000, pers. comm..).
This line of thought, which can be also found in Deleuze and Guattari’s
AntiOedipus (1977), a key text for the understanding of the correspondence
between capitalist thinking and the politics of desire. The approach in
AntiOedipus can be seen, as Castel (1973) does, as complementary to his
own social and institutional critique of psychoanalysis as well as ‘a
“salvation” or redemption of psychoanalysis rather than a thoroughgoing
transformation or subversion’ (Gordon, 1977, p. 126) (see also Homer,
1998, for a well argued analysis of this key text and Jameson’s critique of
capitalist rationality).
In the UK some of the works concerned with the psychological complex
(Rose, 1985, 1996; Ingleby, 1985), discourse dynamics and psychoanalytic
culture (Parker, 1992, 1997a,b) and international development and gender
relations (Burman, 1994; 1995) are also key sources enabling a departure
from a psychologising critical psychology. From a different front,
psychological and psychoanalytic codes were also questioned by the
Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse, Adorno and Fromm. The Berlin
school, known by its research on the ‘science of the subject’, and its new
formulations in Denmark (Nissen, 1999), has drawn widely upon this critical
thinking tradition in their own version of Critical Psychology (Tolman and
Maiers, 1991). It is in this respect that useful resources can be also identified
outside psychology for the understanding of psychologisation processes in
the work of Taylor (1989), in The Sources of The Self, the work of Sennet,
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The Fall of the Public Man (1977) and Lasch’s (1979) book on The Culture
of Narcissism.
Internationalising subjectification processes
To overlook the wider relations which in our globalising time inform any
form of subjectivity writes off any possible criticality. But abstracting theory
as much as privileging models of actions may mean risking obscuring and
detracting our attention from the co-workings of wider relations. Moreover,
in the attempt to internationalise ways of addressing subjectification
processes, we are indebted to gender and international relations, postcolonial
feminist research and queer transnational approaches to subjectivity that
suggest that abstracting sexuality, and therefore, subjectivity from its wider
forces and relations risks reproducing binary logics such as theory and
practice in critical psychology (as representative of this approach see Berlant
and Freeman, 1993; Braidotti, 1994; Mitter, 1986; Morton, 1996; Spivak,
1999, 1989; Steans, 1998; Stockle, 1998; Warner, 1993). From this
perspective, thinking through the processes of subjectification means
thinking internationally (Cleminson and Gordo-López, 1999; Gordo-López
and Aitken, 2000, forthcoming). Therefore, binding subjectivity, and
subsequently critical psychological action to wider sociopolitical concerns
can provide us with careful theoretical coalitions as much as action-oriented
perspectives.
A representation of the interplay between processes of subjectification and
international sociopolitical programmes can be seen in the intellectual
trajectory of Anthony Giddens, Director of London School of Economics,
and considered to be the intellectual brain of British New Labour and its
leader, Tony Blair. Specifically, in what follows I will take the development
of Giddens’ research interest as an example of the first and second line of
action suggested here.
Giddens’ publications move from reviews of classic sociological work and
critiques of functionalism and structuralism (1960s, 1970s), critiques of
modernity (1980s, 1990s), and, following his personal analysis, to the
analysis of the transformation of intimacy and sexual relations (1990s), and
more recently to the formulation of political and economic programme
known as the Third Way (mid, late 1990s) (Martínez, 1999). What is the role
of psychology in Giddens’ work? In which ways might diverse forms of
psychological accounts and be at the centre of theories and politics, which
like the Third Way entail a socialist reform without structural changes
(Giddens, 1998)? In other words, what accords psychology such a central
part in centre-left reformism that use capitalist logics and infrastructures to
aim socialist values?
This Social Democratic reformism, its increasing investments in the
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participation of psychology in culture, works alongside a complex set of
transformations of intimacy. Folk and specialised psychological knowledge
and practice, therefore, are seen as a resourceful pivotal dimension for the
co-workings of micro and macro socioeconomic transformations. According
to Giddens (1990, 1991), psychology contributes with its reflexive potential
to enhance more reflexive selves willing to establish more democratic and
symmetric relations. This psychologising reflexive and transformative
potential is held to contribute to the elaboration of dialogical subjects, as
well as people able to establish structured relations around intimacy,
authenticity and mutual commitment that are more adjustable to different
identities and life styles (Giddens, 1991, p. 224) (for a critique of Giddens’
psychologism, see Varela and Álvarez-Uria, 1997).
The autonomy of advanced dialogical capitalist selves is a fragile one,
however. Life is experienced as a succession of discrete and discontinuous
life events. Any social event determines a multifrenetic happiness or a
sudden episode of depression (Gergen, 1991). In such a fragile postmodern
condition, psychotherapy has become the answer to any crisis in personal,
professional or moral life (Rendueles, 1998). In addition, as Rose (1996)
argues, psychology, and in particular therapeutic ethics, play such a central
part in contemporary socio-political arenas by contributing to a
simplification of authority and, among other mediatic values, by conferring
scientific value to its adjustment programme for the efficient functioning of
individuals and social systems. As Rose (1996, p. 97) notes, ‘therapeutic
ethics promises a system of values freed from the moral judgement of social
authorities. It governs while allowing to construct ourselves through the
choices we make, and to shape our existence according to an ethics of
autonomy’.
From the historical materialist and internationalist approach to subjectivity
outlined above, it is essential to realise that discontentment has an
isomorphic relation with market laws and fluctuations. The most damaging
effects in this encounter between the inflation of psychological culture, the
sociodemocratic politics present in the neo-liberal state is the way
‘therapeutisation’, following Rose’s (1996) line of thinking, is one of the
most versatile and transferable means for thinking and acting upon
ourselves; a thought and action that is facilitated by the conception of
interiority. These psychotherapeutising technologies of the self, moreover,
are the most economic and effective way of mobilising and perpetuating the
liberal democratic discourse of freedom, choice and identity, while
promoting psychotherapeutic answers to problems derived from the crisis of
the social state, and its growing social inequalities (Hernández Monsalve,
1998).
Inside-out psychology: transit zones for action
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The third line of action involves identifying and working on subject matters
placed in transit zones between dominant psychology, critical psychologies
and psychological culture. These transit zones, like Giddens’ analyses, make
complex use of the notion of risk. On the one hand, there is a notion of risk
associated with the increment of our reflexivity which, according to
Giddens, is premised upon us becoming more autonomous people able to
negotiate and cope with the increasing social, personal and working
demands. In Giddens’ own words:
Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects (...), but it
is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising
the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum
of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with
structured reflexivity, means that on the level of everyday practice as
well as philosophical interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted
(Giddens, 1991, pp. 133-134).
A positive attitude towards acquired risks might help us to deal with the
limits of autonomous self. Even better, it might also work to question the
reformist trajectories of well-disciplinised and institutionalised critical
psychology. The more we know ourselves, the more aware we are willing to
perceive what makes us ‘good’ critical psychologists, the risks involved in
different types of ‘critical’ psychological relations, life styles or politics.
Research interests and fluctuations found in and between critical
psychology, psychological culture and beyond, should show also a complex
acceptance of risk. Developing this sort of risk involves, from this
perspective, enjoying the historical and material conditions of those nonplaces, transit zones which support and fuel the dispersed, the moving and
the transforming psychological culture (see Augé, 1995). Such an increment
of risk-taking whether inside mainstream psychology, critical psychology or
even psychological culture could contribute to visualising, denouncing, and
confiscating psychologising, and most importantly, neo-liberalising spaces.
It is in this respect which we also understand, as one of the anonymous
reviewers of an earlier version of this paper states, that
The danger is then not so much from divisions of critical
psychologists but from espousing a political psychology as an
alternative to politics. The problem of course is in defining a position
that is both inside and outside the [psychological] boundaries.
(Anonymous Reviewer of Annual Review of Critical Psychology,
1999)
It would be mistaken to understand risk-taking practices inside and outside
critical psychology as something which is destined to define the New Age
(or subdiscipline) of critical psychology, or a way of knowing ourselves
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better or even the self of psychology (Gordo-López and Parker, 1999). The
ways Anglo-Saxon critical psychology seems to be enjoying critical
reflexivity, as Ibáñez puts it,
..is all very comforting, but if everything continues along these lines, I
fear that... the defining criteria of what constitutes legitimised
psychosocial knowledge will have changed but the only rules of the
scientific game which will have changed will be the rules of
disciplinary working (Ibáñez, 1997, p. 28-30).
To sum up, whatever it is that some of us are doing, under whatever label or
within whatever or across disciplinary enclaves, we should prevent our
analysis from (i) bringing psychology up to date by, for instance,
recuperating New Age forms of subjectivity often identified as ‘liberated’
from their institutional and international conditions of possibility, (ii)
presenting critical psychology as an alternative to politics by, for example,
stretching the boundaries of actions under the ideologising illusion of a more
empowering action-oriented psychology, (iii) making our works more
accessible or compatible with dominant discourses of intelligible usability
by, for instance, fuelling the recuperation/incorporation of critical
psychology in mainstream psychology.
From this perspective, to take action research seriously means to struggle,
not for a more empowering psychology but for its suppression. This
suppression would not come from any psychological action programme
itself or from any critical networks too much preoccupied with the
centripetal forces of the psychological complex (i.e. mental, psychological
and/or establishments). Any action, whether inside or outside psychology,
whether within critical psychology or sociological critiques of psychological
culture, in the last instance, might support ways of negotiating ways of
opening up and according complexity to our disciplinary relations and
referents and, in so doing, to the resources available in culture to think and
act upon our selves and others. In short, this perspective requires us to
rethink the mediations between institutional and subjective levels (as some
critical psychological collective publications have done, such as Burman et
al, 1996; Henriques et al, 1984), as much as between international
socioeconomic dynamics and subjective ones (Papadopoulos, 1999; Morton,
1999). The latter is still a pending subject for critical psychology.
Nevertheless, there have been some isolated attempts to work on those lines
(for example, Burman, 1994, 1996; Bowers, 1989; Íñiguez, 1999; Reicher,
1996). The recent workshop on ‘War and Psychology’ in the CPAR
Conference is also promising (Willig and Durmaz, 1999).
At the present conjuncture in the discipline of psychology, putting to work
the lines of actions above, will be achieved neither by critical psychology
nor projected by any single disciplinary concern and practice, however
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critical they may be. It necessarily involves moving between disciplinary
practices and the sociopolitical transformations which punctuate them, as
shown by the correspondences found between, for instance, developmental
psychology and world development (Burman, 1995) and, between world
wide transnational forces and processes of subjectification (Papadopoulos,
1999).
Conclusions
While psychological resources permeate all sorts of sociocultural spheres,
critical psychology and associated action oriented networks have been so far
too much confined to centripetal psychological forces, discourses and
establishment in the clinical, educational and research sector. Other sectors
of critical psychological practice, as epitomised by the new Critical
Psychology Centres are incorporating, marketing and psychologising (new
age) resources and practices available in culture, resources which somehow
resonates with the pop psychology of previous decades. This two-fold
orientation co-exists with the almost obsessive interest to systematise what is
good practice in critical psychological research to profile what is to be a
good critical psychologist in the dominant mainstream North America
psychology contexts. Such preoccupations have often resulted in a lack of
acknowledgment of more diversified scenarios where different forms of
subjectivity and self-government are drawn upon. It has also entailed more
reflexive, disciplinary and psychologising critical psychological twists,
which in turn become indistinguishable from the transnational conditions of
possibility for a more action-oriented endeavour.
The above are, in my view, some of the additional turning points, which
enable critical psychology to be developing into a new sub-discipline. Such
a shift necessarily involves legitimising our own epistemological
psychological doxa. It would be mistaken though to stigmatise or displace
these turning points. On the contrary, we must also take them seriously as a
way of reflecting upon and grasping the wider socioeconomic frame in
which psychological culture is played out and, just as important, upon ways
to organise and coordinate our already existing resources and interventions.
These sorts of debates are most helpful if we are able to understand their
complexity by moving away from psychology and the recent trends in
critical psychology.
Taking a step away from the discipline entails gaining a wider understanding
of psychological participation in culture. It also means moving away from
humanistic and psychologising concerns around subjectivity to reclaim a
more processual, historical and material understanding of the processes of
subjectification. In the current neo-liberal scenario, these subjectification
processes can be barely distinguished from international politics and
economic relations, and the participation of psychological culture in these
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international and transnational spheres. If critical thinking sought to
incorporate subjectivity as a resource for understanding power relations, as a
resource for carrying our research in the social, in the current therapeutic
state, subjectivity can no longer be confined to self-reflection or disciplinary
reflexivity.
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Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the ARCP’s annonymous
reviewers and Richard M. Cleminson for their insighfutl comments
and corrections to an earlier version of this article.
Ángel J. Gordo-López is Assistant Lecturer in the Department of
Sociology IV at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology at the
Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is co-editor with J.L. Linaza
of Psicologías, Discursos y Poder (PDP) (1996) and with I.Parker of
Cyberpsychology (1999), co-author with E. Burman et al. of
Psychology Discourse Practice (1996). Address: Departamento de
Sociología IV (despacho 3320), Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y
Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de
Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain. Email: ajgordol@cps.ucm.es
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