Difficulties for Radical Psychology
Talk given at National Community Psychology Conference, Newcastle 2005
As an applied discipline, psychology presupposes the centrality to human conduct of reason,
even where (as in psychoanalysis, for example) it appears to be concerning itself focally with
unreason: ‘Where id was, there shall ego be’ (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden).1
The core belief of just about all psychological enterprise that claims to be in the widest
sense ‘therapeutic’ is that once the fog of self-deception, misunderstanding, misjudgement,
mystification, scrambled cognition or noxious narrative has been cleared, people will act
rationally in accordance with a new-found understanding of the ‘truth’ (however small the
‘t’). ‘People are not belittling you, talking behind your back’; ‘not everyone is like your
father/mother – you are over-generalizing’; ‘you are not worthless, but a victim of class
oppression’. It is as if clarifications such as these, once they have truly sunk in, clear the way
for the individual to follow a new, error-free path.
This view accords well with folk psychology (we pretty well all like, in almost all
circumstances, to persuade ourselves that our conduct is justified fundamentally by its
accordance with a reasonable appraisal of the facts). To put this another way, reason
(accordance with truth and/or right) is the ultimate authorisation for conduct. Appeal to the
authority of reason – of the variety that can be derived from personal reflection - is what lies
at the root of pretty well all our disputes, public as well as private. The art of political dispute
is to persuade the populace that it is the opposition that is lying, just as marital bickering seeks
(almost always unsuccessfully, of course) to prove that the partner’s position is factually (as
well as morally) unsound (‘I never slammed the car door on your foot last Wednesday. And
anyway, it was Thursday’).
1
1933 New Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis
This philosophy – that sane and acceptable human conduct is founded on reason justifies the practice of by far the greater part of conventional psychology. But it is as a
philosophy extremely naïve and very inaccurate.
At the moment the world is in the hands of people who have a much better
understanding of what makes us tick. They know that reason informs only a tiny part of
human conduct, and only in the most exceptional and protected of circumstances. They know
that most of the time we don’t act in accordance with reason, but with our interests, and that
the most effective way of changing people’s behaviour is to manipulate their interests –
preferably obscuring the whole process behind a fog of rationalization.
When it comes to understanding human conduct, the fundamental role accorded to
reason thus constitutes a kind of Original Spin. Only in relatively small and peripheral
branches of social and therapeutic (e.g. community) psychology have we begun to eschew
some version of personal reasoning as the primary explanation for conduct, and even then we
do not always manage entirely to de-centre the individual, but rather see societal influences as
being transmuted into psychological constructs such as self-esteem, ‘responsibility’, etc.2
Precisely the usefulness of the concept of interest to an understanding of behaviour is
that it doesn’t operate as we suppose that reason does. At the centre of the process of
reasoning, the individual stands as an agent of choice – appraising, weighing, deliberating and
deciding. A full repertoire of behaviour lies at his or her command, ready to be applied in
whatever course of action the deliberative process arrives at. The aim of therapy in this kind
of situation is to liberate the individual from error in such a way that there is opened up to
him/her the full range of possible human action. We do of course recognize some of the
limitations of embodiment, etc., (e.g. not everyone can run 100 metres in less than 10
2
Smail, D. 2001b. Commentary. De-psychologizing community psychology. Journal of Community and Applied
Social Psychology, 11, 159-165
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seconds) but we also tend to assume that anything within the scope of what we consider
normal volition can be achieved, and if people don’t achieve it, it is because they don’t want
to or are in some way resistant to an extent they have possibly failed to recognize. At the
banal folk level, this is reflected in the idea that anyone can achieve their dream (as attested
on TV by many a celeb from a disadvantaged background, not to say a variety of
psychobabbling gurus).
An analysis which takes account of interest, however, places the individual in a rather
different position. Instead of being at the control-centre of a range of personally selected
options, he or she is caught up in a vast social network of powers which are transmitted by
and at the same time exploit, manipulate and to an extent determine his or her interests. I
should of course stress that this, though it often is, does not have to be a malign process –
interests may be satisfied as well as frustrated. It is, however, a process that cannot be
avoided: it arises necessarily out of the fact that we are members of complex societies which
have to be structured somehow.
Interests are not part of what we usually think of as our cognitive machinery, and only
in relatively exceptional circumstances are they calculated in cold blood; rather, they are
rooted in our nature as embodied beings and hence, if recognized at all, may be felt rather than
verbalized (see Cromby 20043, and forthcoming). Interests, I would suggest, are much the
same as what we are more used to calling needs, but considered from a social rather than
individual perspective.
We have very little choice about the nature, extent and strength of our interests, and
probably even less about the powers and influences that hook into and exploit them. When the
3
Cromby, John. 2004. Between constructionism and neuroscience. The societal co-constitution of embodied
subjectivity. Theory and Psychology 14, 797-821.
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individual does have some degree of freedom, this is not so much a matter of choice as of
providence.
Effective action is thus underpinned not by sound psychological machinery (accurate
appraisal, choice of strategy, etc.) so much as by the flow of powers and interests which are in
very large measure beyond the individual’s sphere of influence.
So far as making a difference to people’s lives goes, this cuts down the psychologist’s
role pretty dramatically. This is of course recognized among community psychologists who,
in advocating, for example, solidary action to influence social structures directly, are likely
very quickly to encounter the resistance such structures almost inevitably put up.
And there are further difficulties.
For applied psychologists themselves are not operating professionally within a rational
sphere where, for example, theories are tested and empirically valid solutions established (the
myth of ‘evidence-based practice’). Psychologists cannot be scientist-practitioners if only
because science and practice are not necessarily compatible: there is no guarantee that truth –
what is the case – accords with what is convenient or even essential for professional survival,
and indeed very often truth and professional necessity point in opposite, or at least conflicting,
directions.
Just as an aside, it’s sobering for someone like me, with a fairly long experience of
clinical psychology, to observe how little the development of our field has depended on the
basis of evidence and how much on professional interest. For example, decades of research in
the psychotherapies revealed, I think pretty unequivocally, that talking treatments of any kind,
insofar as they have any effect at all (which is not much) do so on the basis of non-technical
qualities of human relationship which cannot be professionalized. However, all this research
has been steadfastly ignored, and the received view is that practice can confidently be based
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on automated research procedures of proven validity. Again, despite years and years of
devastating critique of the medical model of psychiatric disorder, the ludicrous nosology of
DSM looks, as far as the mainstream culture is concerned, more secure than ever.
It is in this kind of context that radicality is so difficult. Anyone whose professional
status stems from being on an official payroll; even more so, anyone whose job title depends
on a statutory register is immediately caught up in powerful skeins of interest that are almost
bound to shape and constrain his or her activities, and can only be resisted at the risk of huge
personal loss.
It may of course be that, for instance, a community psychologist is able to operate in a
context of power that allows him/her to act in accordance with his/her radical principles, but if
so this is probably most often because the employing authority doesn’t know or hasn’t noticed
what he or she is up to. More often, ‘radicality’ for a psychologist working against the
interests of institutional power can only be maintained a) by acting subversively or b) by
foregoing the title ‘psychologist’.
For example, in a context in which research activity and/or types of clinical
involvement are dictated by an essentially political agenda enforced by management, a
psychological employee wishing to pursue an incompatible line can do so only through
deception.
Again, any psychological critic of established power wanting to act as a truly free
agent on behalf of the oppressed majority would ultimately be forced into a kind of barefoot
role, stripped of the authority conferred by an official title and dependent for his/her
livelihood on the generosity of his/her clients; it could even be illegal for him/her to call
him/herself a psychologist. Much of the time, of course, such stark dilemmas are avoidable
by exercising a little common sense and compromising where necessary with the system. The
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real difficulty arises when or if it becomes apparent that the system can or should not be
compromised with.
These difficulties are, perhaps, likely to make themselves felt particularly acutely in
the case of community psychology as the political implications of their role are likely to be
more apparent to community psychologists than to more conventional practitioners. The
insight that social factors are responsible for much of people’s psychological ills pushes us in
the direction of advocating if not implementing political action, but at the same time
occupancy of the role of, so to speak, licensed employee, means that we will be induced as
well as restrained by various kinds of employment practice and clinical and research
‘governance’ to stay in line with managerial aims. In other words, our radicality is likely
always to be tempered by our interest, and we may find, for instance, that we are more
inclined to encourage personal empowerment through instruction, exhortation and insight
than to foment social revolution.
I do not meant to suggest by this that for our activities to be valid they have to be
morally unimpeachable – the context of human action is almost always grey rather than blackor-white – but at least it behoves us, I think, to observe a degree of modesty and to avoid
rushing for the moral high ground on the basis of our critical radicality.
If we are to understand what is happening to us, to explain the frustrations of our
practice, the acrimony of our academic and clinical disputes and, not least, the inadequacies of
our theories as well as our therapies, I think it would help to explore the concept of interest a
little further.
For those of us (I can only speak for British clinical psychology) with experience that
stretches back beyond 1979, it may seem that we used then to inhabit a different professional
world where we had considerable independence, could pursue whatever line of research
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caught our attention as possibly fruitful, develop therapeutic approaches according to our own
insights – even invent new ones if we felt like it. (It seemed perfectly legitimate to me, for
example, to spend a day a week writing if I felt I had something to write about!) In all this we
would give our chief justification, if we had to, as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, a
pursuit we were authorized to engage in by virtue of passing the appropriate exams, gaining
the necessary experience and agreeing to the appropriate conditions of employment.
Furthermore, it may have seemed to us that such exams and conditions were professional
requirements that we could freely endorse, not moulds into which we had unwillingly to force
ourselves in order to make a living.
Since then, of course, our activities have become constrained by what seems an
entirely new set of rules, and rather than pursuing disinterested knowledge we now find
ourselves ruled by the profit motive – and, just to make it all the more bitter, much of it other
people’s profit to boot. What felt then like academic and professional independence has
become for most clinical psychologists now comparatively low-level labour managed in
accordance with ends we cannot even clearly articulate. The profit-related interests that we
serve now are not of course explicitly proclaimed as such, and mystifying concepts like
‘evidence-based practice’ (a derivative of original spin) still appeal to a mythology of Reason,
but the controlling influence of the bottom line is not hard to discern, even if only dimly.
It is important to realize, though, that, like the ‘objectivity’ that positivistic science
claimed to monopolize, ‘disinterestedness’ does not as a concept stand up to close
examination. It is not so much a question of lofty disinterest on the one hand and crude,
greedy vested interests on the other, but of what kind of interests inform our conduct. The
German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote about this way back in 1968 in his book
Knowledge and Human Interests, but very few of us (clinical psychologists) have heard of
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Habermas, let alone read the book. In it, among other things, he distinguished between the
technical, practical and emancipatory interests that inform the pursuit of knowledge. I doubt
if it occurred to him then quite how much these were all about to be subordinated to crude
economic interest (and in particular the capitalist market model), but however that may be, the
point is that interest of one sort or another underlies whatever we do. There is, in other
words, no such thing as knowledge pure and simple, unsullied, so to speak, by the human
mind. But there are greater and lesser degrees of constraint on what, for example, a scientist
is allowed to investigate.
Scientific enquiry and debate in which an effort is made to investigate the world
undistracted by the kind of market pressures that now dominate almost everything requires a
very special and unusual kind of patronage, reflected to a degree in what used to be thought of
as academic freedom. Society, whether in the form of a Renaissance prince, a stable system
of heritable wealth, or a government-supported university faculty, accords the individual
researcher the personal economic freedom to pursue whatever line of enquiry looks fruitful to
him or her. It is recognized that the advance of knowledge is not specifiable (in the way
beloved of Business management), and that people – in this case scientists – must be trusted
to apply their creativity to good effect, even if it looks to outsiders that they spend too much
time staring into space or having prolonged liquid lunches. There is no doubt that such trust
can be betrayed and that the patience of patrons can be exhausted, but the alternative of
directly manipulating people’s interests in order to get them to deliver goods in accordance
with management specifications is to kill off the possibility of arriving at truth – i.e. of
discovery - altogether.
It is not that the pursuit of such ‘truth’ is disinterested, but that it may be informed by
interests of the Habermassian kind (e.g. aimed at solving technical or practical questions of
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great social importance) and not simply driven proximally by the individual researcher’s need
for personal survival in the market and distally by the priorities of a global corporate
plutocracy.
Although I never found the environment of university psychology departments a
particularly comfortable one, I can still remember the change that overcame the atmosphere in
the coffee-room as managerial Thatcherism displaced the social-democratic patronage that
preceded it. Where colleagues used publicly to dispute (not always totally amicably, it’s true)
the conflicting points of their positions, they suddenly fell silent. This, I speculate, was
because the nature of the competition had changed. Pre-Thatcher, academic tenure gave
people the confidence to reveal their intellectual hand while relative scarcity of senior jobs
meant they needed to demonstrate intellectual competence as publicly as possible. PostThatcher, survival as well as advancement became a matter of fulfilling management goals,
and a version of commercial confidentiality became central – the best hope of building an
empire was to keep your thoughts and activities secret from your rivals.
There is now, it seems, no corner of cultural life that is not infected by Market
ideology. It’s in the air we breathe, and people who have grown up without knowing
anything else don’t even notice it. So insistent has it been that it speaks of the ‘real’ world,
even those who did experience other ways of doing things tend now to accept its reality
without challenge.
Within our own little world the ironic contradictions this creates could nowhere be
more apparent than in Prilleltensky, and Nelson’s, book Doing Psychology Critically. Making
a Difference in Diverse Settings4 which in my view makes just about the most uncritical bid
for market share imaginable. Market dominance enforces competition, which in turn breeds,
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among other vices, dishonesty, self-deception as well as self-inflation, and secrecy. These
erode professional solidarity and are certainly not conducive to the production of reliable
knowledge.
The difficulty may seem to be: how do we escape the powerful influences that
determine our interests? Well, I don’t think we can, nor do I think we should or even could
act against our interests. But I do think we could and should become clearer about what they
are so that we can maintain a distinction between professional survival in the market on the
one hand and accurate understanding of how psychological distress comes about on the other.
I realize, of course, that I am largely preaching to the converted here, and I suppose what I
want to do is to encourage as far as I can community psychologists to keep on going in the
direction they’ve already taken – and which was very well stated, I believe, by Jan Bostock
and Bob Diamond at the Exeter conference last year and published in a recent Clinical
Psychology Forum article5.
It seems to me that community psychology is just about the only reasonable direction
for clinical psychology to take as a practice based on an accurate understanding of distress.
But in taking this direction there are two fatal dangers to be avoided.
The first is to try to establish a new applied psychological brand – rather as
Prilleltensky and Nelson seem to be doing for ‘Critical Psychology’ in the book just
mentioned. To do that would ultimately mean an abject and no doubt thoroughly dishonest
compromise with power in order to advance professional interests. Any community
psychologist who finds him or herself earning the praise and support of officialdom should
immediately start worrying about what they’re doing wrong.
4
Prilleltensky, I. & Nelson, G. (2002) Doing Psychology Critically. Making a Difference in
Diverse Settings. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
5
Bostock, J. & Diamond, B. 2005. The value of community psychology: critical reflections from the NHS.
Clinical Psychology Forum, 153, 22-25.
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The other danger is to try to gain the moral high ground (and shoulder more or less
everyone else off it) by avowing and advocating an increasingly purist radicality. That simply
results in impotent moral posturing and endless bickering over who is holier than whom.
The role that remains between these two extremes is not, I admit, a terribly
comfortable one, for it is more likely to incur official suspicion than earn worldly recognition
and reward, and at the same time be lambasted for moral dubiety by the purists. Steady
nerves and thick skins are probably useful attributes for community clinical psychologists, but
at least they can be fairly sure that they’re doing something socially worthwhile.
David Smail
Newcastle, October 2005
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