Annual Review of Critical Psychology
Copyright © 2000 Discourse Unit
Vol. 2, pp. 3-16 (ISSN: 1464-0538)
EDITORIAL
Critical psychology and action research
Dan Goodley and Ian Parker
Abstract. ‘Critical Psychology’ and ‘Action Research’ are terms that look, at first
glance, to be easily linked. But the relationship between the two is not that simple. In
fact, what each of them is on their own is not simple either. We need to worry away
at the complexity of both critical psychology and action research, to ask questions
about where they have come from and how they might develop in such a way as to
make the complex relations between the two more visible. Or perhaps, more
accurately, to ask the kind of questions that create those complex relations, that make
it possible to develop action research in critical psychology and arguments for critical
psychology in action research. To do that we need to look first at the cultural and
historical context for this kind of endeavour, review some examples of good practice,
suggest ‘transitional’ strategies for working critically in psychology and laying the
basis for a ‘critical psychological praxis’.
Keywords: Critical psychology, action research
Mainstream psychology in the English-speaking world is still strongly wedded
to empiricist research. You only trust what you can observe and measure.
Most research has been underpinned by the crassest positivism, in which you
steadily accumulate what you have measured into a corpus of ‘facts’ about
human beings. And that is why it has also been, in the main, quantitative. That
does not mean that all quantitative research is necessarily positivist. The longstanding existence of the Radical Statistics Group reminds us of that (Dorling
and Simpson, 1999). But what it does mean is that positivism is the reason
here why psychology is predominantly quantitative.
The historical context is that we had varieties of alternative research in the
1970s and 1980s, which seemed to break from that positivist image of what
psychology, as a science should be like. The ‘new paradigm’ movements
looking at roles and rules in little social worlds and forms of discourse
analysis looking at patterns of language use smuggled in bits of sociology into
the discipline. But it turns out that the effect of these alternatives has been
paradoxical. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the fate of the
alternative research movements has been dialectical. For on the one hand,
they, the advocates of the alternative research perspectives, were caught redhanded; it was clear that they often had a bigger agenda than just ‘better
methods’. What was most radical was confiscated, and much ‘qualitative’
research in psychology now has been press-ganged into mainstream
empiricism and positivism.
Dan Goodley and Ian Parker
A qualitatively different critical space
On the other hand, the reason why some psychologists turned to these
alternatives was because they realised that something was deeply wrong with
the politics of psychology, with the politics of what psychologists do to people
either in professional practice or as researchers. It has been feminist
psychologists actually, and to an extent Lesbian and Gay psychologists, who
have been largely responsible for keeping politics on the agenda in alternative
research debates. Sometimes they too have been recruited into ‘qualitative
research’ or ‘discourse analysis’ and forced to speak that kind of language which is a very risky thing to do. You could not say that Marxist or other
leftist psychologists have been able to organise in the same kind of way,
though there has been a little of that. There was also humanist research, which
seems to be at odds with mainstream psychology.
So, we have a space, or contradictory spaces, emerging inside the discipline of
psychology. That makes it possible to think about critiques of psychology and
the politics of research. There is sensitivity to the ethics of interviewing, to the
process of accountability, for example. Those working in that space, in those
spaces, often look to sociology; again, to show the way forward, but they are
often unclear where exactly the arguments go in relation to psychology. And
psychology does not quite know what to do about these things happening
inside it. Sometimes it responds by demands that criteria for qualitative
research be clearly defined, defined in line with the way it already conducts its
research. Sometimes it contents itself with gratuitous attacks on Lesbians and
Gays in the new section in the British Psychological Society for being
‘nihilist’, or being in favour of ‘social constructionism’ or, a new charge now,
for links with ‘critical psychology’.
Critical psychology
What is critical psychology? We are not entirely sure. It has picked up on
some of the 1960s radical psychology and anti-psychiatry critiques and it has
short-circuited some strange connections with 1990s radical beryline social
constructionism or postmodern theory. It is friendlier than mainstream
psychology to feminism, and some qualitative researchers and discourse
analysts hang around it sometimes looking for approval from it in odd
moments when they think the discipline is not watching them. For sure critical
psychology is broad. Broad enough, for example, for us to agree that the
‘Status Quo’ is bad and the ‘Good Society’ is good; and broad enough for us
to disagree about what exactly each of those terms mean (e.g., Fox and
Prilleltensky, 1997).
Here is another paradox. For some reason Britain is seen as a hotbed of critical
psychologists. However, we could not have developed critical psychology
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here without an international context of debate, arguments and examples from
colleagues in different countries. We would go so far as to say that critical
psychology would not have been possible without email, for it allows a speed
of communication and organisation of networks that have not been possible up
to now. But we have developed something here that seems quite specific, even
parochial, disconnected from the experience of radical psychologists in other
places. Critical psychology here, for example, is quite different from the
tradition of German Kritische Psychologie or from Central American
Liberation Psychology. What have we learnt from those examples? What can
we learn?
Family resemblances and critical relations
We need to be working in and with and questioning three different kinds of
relations, dare we say dialectical relations: first, a relation between theory and
practice (and it would be too simple to say that this means that we need a
theory that is practical and a practice that is theorised); second, a relation
between the inside and the outside (and this isn’t just to say that those inside
psychology need to reach out and those outside need to have a voice in the
discipline); and third, a relation between different traditions of work in
different places (and the task is more complicated than admiring them as a
differentiated assortment or squashing them together to create a perfect blend).
The only thing we can be sure of is that what we think critical psychology ‘is’
is limited, culturally located, historically situated. We start here because we
have to start somewhere. We will give a sharper definition of what critical
psychologists are trying to do though. Maybe you will disagree with this, but
we are doing this because it is essential to give some kind of definition of key
issues in order to pose questions to any kind of research practice, including
action research.
Critical psychology stands at the margins of psychology, philosophy,
sociology, politics, history, literary theory, anthropology, education and social
policy. Proponents are brought together under this counter-paradigm rubric to
challenge the Western psy-complex. This complex at best trivializes human
experience (through, for example, adhering to the taken-for-granted
assumptions of a positivistic approach to research) and at worst controls and
oppresses (through, for example, conceptualizing mental distress as the
product of a disorder of the unitary individual subject). In this sense then,
critical psychology is inherently political, though it is often presented as yet
another postmodern and anti-foundationalist intellectual project.
Critical psychology needs to include the following four points of focus: first,
the way psychology as a discipline privileges its own accounts over all of the
other explanations people give about what they do; second, the way particular
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everyday psychologies may either challenge or confirm mainstream
psychological accounts; third, the way psychology operates throughout culture
to regulate people as efficiently as the discipline of psychology does; and
fourth, the way the discipline of psychology, for good or ill, rests on
commonsense assumptions about action and experience (Parker, 1999).
Of course these points of focus are contradictory. Human beings are
contradictory, culture is contradictory. That is why some critical psychologists
turn to dialectics and some to deconstruction to develop theoretical accounts
which are as fragmented and multi-sided as the realities they want to
understand and change.
Critical theory, Marxism, feminism and humanism have historically been
resources for ‘critical’ psychologists and action researchers. The question
critical psychology asks now is whether those resources are able to take the
power of the psy-complex seriously, and by psy-complex we mean that dense
network of theories and practices which make up the apparatus of psychology
inside and outside colleges and clinics, including its power to define what
people think about themselves and their own personal resources for change.
That is, we insist on asking whether humanism (but we are only singling this
out first as an example so you get the point about the problem of taking at face
value individual experience and psychological explanations and selfresponsibility for change) along with feminism and Marxism and Critical
Theory generally and any other pretender to be a radical resource reproduce
the worst of psychology when they seem to be alternatives to it.
Whatever critical psychology is exactly, the discipline of psychology does not
quite know what has hit it, for we put questions of politics and power on the
agenda in theoretical debates about what psychology is. It could be
incorporated as another loyal opposition, maybe even as section 497 of the
American Psychological Association, maybe as an academic movement of
self-critique in the history and philosophy of psychology - and we already
have a section for that here in the British Psychological Psychology - and that
incorporation could spell the death of radical work. But it could radicalise
those other spaces of resistance inside psychology.
Action research
To do that it must turn to action research. Well, maybe not. At any rate critical
psychology must move from the sphere of academic argument into the
methodological process and into the realm of praxis. We use the word ‘praxis’
here to capture the dialectical interlinking of theory and practice, a theory
which has its roots in practice and a practice that is always already theorised.
In fact the relation between critical psychology and action research also needs
to involve that kind of dialectical interweaving.
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What is action research? There are many overlapping characterisations of
action research and participatory action research. We will briefly set out
eleven key points from one account from Colombia (Granada, 1991, pp. 176177). Each point is, from certain angles in critical psychology, problematic.
But we do need some definitions in order to pose questions from action
research to critical psychologists. Each of these points does conflict with
certain lines of work in ‘critical’ psychology, let alone mainstream
psychology.
 the construction and constitution of knowledge is social;
 agents who intervene have particular skills and experience;
 it is important for researchers and participants to share mutual
perceptions about what well-being is;
 the researcher’s and community’s ‘knowledge’ and the knowledge
process needs to be made explicit so that values may be examined;
 researchers must adapt modes of communication and discussion to the
needs of local communities;
 interdisciplinary self-help develops through a concept of the community
as an active subject (rather than as a target group);
 the participatory process also involves informal education in which
community and researcher learn, and this facilitates the ‘expansion and
democratisation of knowledge’;
 its philosophy is centred on community development and improvement
of quality of life, with certain political and social values as central;
 the focus on problems and projects contributes more effectively to an
inter- and multi-disciplinary perspective;
 knowledge is ‘not found or taught. It is created by means of a dialectical
interaction’;
 ‘there is a move to create projects that are increasingly organic, interinstitutional, interdisciplinary’ with an effect on official policies
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Actionable research
Research is often accounted for in ways that reflect the deliberations of
researchers upon research projects that they have initiated themselves, at their
discretion where they have had ultimate control (Swain, 1995). Accordingly,
research that attempts to adhere to the principles of action research alongside
recognition of the importance of radical critical theory creates dilemmas. Take
for example research in the disability studies field in Britain. A major
theoretical development that has emerged from the activism of disabled people
has been the social model of disability (see UPIAS, 1976). In one way this
model celebrates radical theorising (picking at the contradictory social
conditions that exclude people with impairments), though in other ways it
questions the rights to authorship and ownership of the theorist (where are
disabled people in the doing of research that impacts positively on their lives?)
Recent writings by key contributors in the field (Oliver, 1996; Oliver and
Barnes, 1997; Barnes and Mercer, 1997) have further highlighted the tensions
between being theoretically radical and being accountable to disabled people
(and their organisations) in the doing of disability research.
Showing parallels with feminist research of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Oakley,
1981; Stanley and Wise, 1993), the social model calls for an all-embracing
though contradictory relationship between theoretical developments and
political ambitions of the disabled people’s movement. First, often heard are
critical voices against the role of the non-disabled (academic) researcher.
Exactly why and how do these researchers contribute to the development of an
alternative disability culture that breaks down, deconstructs and eradicates
disabling society (see Finkelstein and Stuart, 1996)? Moreover, why are so
few disabled people involved in disability research, particularly when they
boast ontologically privileged access to incidents of disablement and
resistance (Barnes and Oliver, 1997)? Second, and in contrast, (non-disabled)
researchers working alongside disabled people have drawn attention to the
critical distance and theoretical skills that they bring along to disability
research (Goodley, 1999). Indeed, researchers involved with people with the
label of learning difficulties have argued for the authority they hold in
exposing disablement and encouraging resistance in the lives of people whose
own ambitions have been consistently suppressed (Booth and Booth, 1994;
Gillman et al., 1997).
Research projects capture as, societal microcosms, ideological and
interpersonal constructions of disability, intervention, policy and practice.
Interrogating the conditions of research production contributes to a critique of
wider disabling practices.
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Commodification, parody and false domains of research
Research that attempts to adhere to the radical potential of the social model of
disability sits uneasily with the current climate of research production that
mirrors the modes of production of late capitalism. In particular, the
commodification of different research domains separates research
communities. One consequence is the distinction created between different
‘theory’ and ‘action’ research commodity domains. Lost is praxis (where
theory and practice are dialectically linked) and in its place are separated
marketable fields of knowledge and expertise. Disability studies are not
exempt from this commodification. Indeed, it is possible - through parody - to
represent these created social spaces to consider the challenges facing
disability theorists and activists. These parodies aim to capture a particularly
cynical view of the distinctions between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, a cynicism
that is augmented by and a reflection of in the current climate of research in
late capitalism.
First, a parody of the ‘disability theorist’ and their involvement with ‘nonparticipatory research’. Here disability theory delves into abstracted
examinations of the complex relations of disablement. While the social model
can be viewed as the disability movement’s ‘big idea’ (Hasler, 1993), much of
the literature of the social model fits neatly into an academic scholastic
tradition (Marx, 1845). Here the academy is exploited for its space and
relative intellectual freedom. Theories of disability are brought above ground,
from crude activism to intellectual knowing, to assessment from the top-down.
While the movement boasts its organic intellectuals (e.g., Oliver, 1990, 1996;
Barnes, 1990; Morris, 1991, 1993; Shakespeare, 1993), dangers exist in
research moving away from action and activism, with the consequent loss of
disabled people in a grand narrative.
As Marxist critiques dominate then accusations abound of the structuralist
victimisation of disabled people (Corker, 1998). Abberley (1987) suggests that
physically impaired people, in contrast to the non-impaired proletariat, are
surplus to revolutionising practice in the work of Marx and Engels. People
with impairments are therefore either conceptualised as products of
exploitative, dangerous working conditions (as argued by Engels) or
considered to be unable to offer non-alienated value as workers in socialist
societies. Elsewhere, interpretive research that engages with the ‘lived
realities’ of disabled people - ‘giving voice’ - can so easily slip back into an
objectifying gaze as these ‘voices’ are swallowed up in analysis (e.g.,
Ferguson, Ferguson and Taylor, 1992). Here, as the researcher enjoys a free
reign in relation to analysis, the individualised, rational, bounded individual
survives in positions of subject and object. In search of ‘voice’, the researcher
moves nearer and nearer to the therapeutic subject, playing around with a
variety of strategies to gain the individual’s authentic voice (e.g., Goodley
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1998a).
In contrast, a rejection of pseudo-humanistic attempts to ‘empower’, has
invited theorists to ‘turn to the text’. Postmodernists start to enjoy a
fashionable position in research, where ‘voice’ is redundant and
deconstruction is employed to pick at the ‘psy-complex’ that pathologises and
creates abnormality (e.g., Corker, 1998, Shakespeare, 1998, Hughes and
Paterson, 1997). Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida occupy
almost ‘Third Way’ Blairite positions here in social scientific discussion,
palming us off in response to our requests for political alternatives. The
character of this paralysis, ‘never knowing’, standing in the naive landscape
between individualism and society promises us everything but provides
nothing.
Second, a parody of the ‘disabled activist’ and their attempts to employ
‘emancipatory disability research’. Disability activism resonates with the
materialist destruction of micro and macro relations of disablement. The social
model was and is the disability movement’s ‘big idea’ (Hasler, 1993), though
disability studies literature so often loses touch with the daily experiences of
oppression and resistance (Barnes, 1997). Here in the ‘real world’, outside of
academia, spaces of resistance are demonstrated and the disability
movement’s organic intellectuals and activists are thrown together as
comrades in order to self-organise. Practice and politics are thrown forward,
theories denounced for their fictional and abstracted nature. A model of
emancipatory disability research is espoused, where disabled people take the
reigns and direct the research process in ways that contribute to emancipation.
It is far more than ‘giving voice’. Instead, research is about doing, acting,
changing and contributing - activism masquerading as research. Often there
appears to be little to distinguish action, politics and research.
Where discussions of disability theorists centre around postmodernism or
Marx, here action researchers consider questions put forward by participants:
alternative frameworks of meaning are drawn together and celebrated
(Vincent, 1998); service provision is re-appraised (Whittaker, Gardner and
Kershaw, 1993) and professional practice is critiqued and informed (e.g.,
Goodley, 1998b). While emancipatory research has its own vocabulary and
style of presentation, a lot of emphasis is placed on accessibility, meaning and
relevance. People First groups, for example, have carried out their own
appraisals of professionalism and engage in educating the public about the
rights of people with learning difficulties. Here a new ‘third way’ is created, in
between revolutionary and party politics, a politics of positive identity. The
position of the theorist in all of this becomes opaque: as Marx (1845) would
have it, the theorists’ work is the stuff only of the scholar and not the
revolutionary, though it is to the latter we should always turn.
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These parodies do a disservice to the participants of each camp who attempt to
bridge the divide and engage in ‘praxis’. However, parody is never far from
the truth, directly reflecting the false separation of ‘theorists’ and
‘practitioners’ as commodities. This separation leads to acrimony between the
two camps, one arguing for the virtues of theory over practice, the other the
opposite. At times, guilt is expressed by those theorists working from the ‘topdown’ - ‘theorising the oppressed’ - though offering no direct political
involvement or alternative to discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, those
working from the ‘bottom-up’ - ‘working with the oppressed’ - appear unable
to move beyond common-sense understandings of the world or to stand
outside of their very work in a critical-reflexive manner. The separation of
camps in contemporary disability studies threatens to simplify and deny the
cross-fertilisation of ideas. However, this area of research raises questions for
all other areas of ‘action research’ trying to go critical in psychology.
Strategies for action research for psychologists
We want to set out some different strategies for change in psychology that
follow the activity of critical reflection. This is schematic, but we think it is
useful in thinking through the ways we conceptualise what we are up to when
we complain about the oppressive nature of psychology, and when we try to
do something about it. You will recognise some of these strategic moves,
perhaps, from the language of politics. We do not want to pretend that
psychology is like the State apparatus, and that we can simply transpose ways
of engaging with Politics with a big P into the micro politics and personal
politics of coping with and challenging the psy-complex. However, these
approaches might be useful for thinking through how we might want to tackle
the discipline.
Maximum action
The first strategy would be to attack everything about psychology, and to
repudiate the whole enterprise. People do sometimes leave the discipline in
disgust and decide that there are better things to do with their lives, and better
ways to help other people. There is a warning in foucauldian writing about the
ways in which such strategies lead to the ‘perpetuation of the present’ that we
do not think we can just write off. This strategy of maximum opposition can
lead advocates into something that pretends to be an absolute alternative but is
really an absolute reproduction, sometimes in caricature of what it tried to
escape. Those who thought they could find a complete progressive alternative
in Soviet psychology, for example, often ended up doing psychology which
was just as oppressive as Western bourgeois varieties. Those who turn to
spirituality as an alternative to psychology, as another example, often end up
with a system of concepts just as mystifying and disempowering.
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Minimum hopes
The second strategy is at the other extreme, as a most cautious minimum
process of debate and refinement of concepts and methods. The most
grandiose wishes for a more humane and better society in which psychology
was entirely unnecessary might fuel this strategy, but worry at the counterproductive effects of destructive criticism leads to the most careful possible
expression of it. At some safe moments we might confide in each other what
our hopes are, but we must recognise, so this narrative for change goes, that
we will not be taken seriously unless we speak psychology’s language. We
may even have sympathy with the new foucauldian line that the best strategy
is no strategy, that open challenge defines power structures all the more
sharply and that it in turn defines us as mirrors of what we oppose. Neither of
these first two strategies works.
The middle way
Let us turn to a third strategy. It does seem like the most obvious and sensible
middle course. The parameters are very broad, and we might adopt different
stances of defiance or consensus depending on the situation and what we can
personally bear in terms of conflict. Different committee meetings call for a
certain level of give and take, public meetings for rhetorical flourishes, and
seminars and academic papers allow some margin for reasoned polemic.
Much of what we do will look as if it lies in this third middle way between
immediate revolution and far off reforms.
Tactics
We can anticipate two responses to what we have said so far, and perhaps we
should address these before turning to a fourth strategy. We leave aside the
standard positivist reaction that simply claims that we need to be more
scientific and wipe away all traces of ideology from the discipline. That is a
rather optimistic hope, and is itself a deeply ideological view. The illusion that
there is value-free knowledge about human beings and the stories they tell
about themselves is responsible for much harm in psychology.
The first response comes from colleagues who have some political
commitment to change in psychology, but who are worried about the
relativism of discursive approaches. An emphasis on critical reflection upon
the way psychology is structured is, to them, dangerous, for it encourages
psychologists to abandon any hope of using psychological knowledge
helpfully or progressively. We have heard discourse analysis, for example,
described as a virus that is eating psychology away from the inside. The
worry is that it only eats. It gives nothing in return. We need to address that
seriously. The second response comes from colleagues in discourse analysis
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who would like discourse analysis to be taken seriously in psychology, and
hope that this can be achieved if the politics is screened out. We know we are
on the edge of engaging in what some colleagues in discourse analysis see as
‘finger-wagging discourse’ here, so we will try and be a little more
constructive. We want to argue that there is a particular dynamic that drives
the type of critical reflection we are arguing for here, and that it leads us
toward a political engagement with psychological institutions.
There are good reasons for not adopting any particular model, method or
approach. We want to keep in mind strategic issues, but foucauldian discourse
analysis leads us, in addition, to think tactically against power. It does this on
two counts. First, no model of psychological activity is necessarily
reactionary. Take the example of social psychological theories of collective
behaviour. Mainstream theories of crowd behaviour treat it as a pathological
hypnotic regression to animal impulses and herd instincts, and so any
collective activity is seen as suspect (Le Bon, 1896). It has been important to
argue in response to this, and to demonstrate through good empirical
qualitative research, that people do not lose their minds in crowds, but that
they act with a purpose, achieving things that are denied in everyday life
where experience is separated from others and individualised (Reicher, 1984).
However, when Black South Africans were charged under Apartheid for the
crime of ‘common purpose’ for murder after riots, simply for being a member
of the group in question, it was necessary to wheel out the standard social
psychological accounts in court as mitigating factors to save their lives. There
were some sharp debates around the values and dangers of this for
stereotypical images of the crowd, but the issue boils down to the tactical use
of psychological theory.
The other side of the coin is that no model of psychological activity is
necessarily progressive. Take the example of phenomenology, which might be
thought to provide a good basis for a respectful humanist approach to the
different psychological realities of people’s life-worlds. This view was
connected to the rhetoric throughout the crisis in social psychology that
claimed that we needed to find more social conceptions of psychology. There
was, in fact, a very strong very social psychology in Germany in the 1930s,
which developed a notion of the person as, rooted in an organic relationship
with their community, and talk of the Volk was underpinned by social theories
of goodness of fit between an individual and their racial and cultural group.
In South Africa, Afrikaaner psychology drew upon the phenomenological
tradition to reinforce the idea that distinct groups had quite separate
psychological realities, and good psychology would involve an exploration of
these other life-worlds so that they could be supported. The use of
phenomenology during the crisis critiques of experimentation did, as a
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consequence, jar on the sensibilities of radical psychologists in South Africa,
and they had good reason to feel happier with positivism, which did at least
reveal some hard truths about inequalities in the country (Dawes and Donald,
1994).
Perhaps it is not surprising that these tensions between reactionary and
progressive uses of psychology should be brought to the fore in a charged
political climate. Maybe it is only what is going on outside psychology that
will force us to think though what psychology does in terms of power and
ideology. Maybe the biggest ideological problem that we face is when people
generally give up on politics, and see anything other than reflexivity in
psychology as fanatical, manic or otherwise pathological. At any rate, we
should be reflecting on how psychology functions in particular places, rather
than looking to replace the whole lot with something which will then stand us
in good stead for all occasions. As well as working strategically and tactically,
we have keep to context.
This does not mean that we simply adopt a postmodern ironic stance toward
psychological techniques and carry on using them as we did before. Some
social constructionists have sent out this reassuring message when they lurch
from adopting the role of virus in the discipline to that of critical friend
because they fear being heard as being destructive. One of the dangers of
relativism, and of reflexivity without some critical standpoint is precisely that
of folding back into the arms of psychology because if anything goes, then
psychology can go on with business as usual too.
A transitional strategy
We want to suggest that there is a fourth strategy, which can move us along in
and against psychology. A theoretical assumption and a political question
together guide this fourth approach. The assumption is that there are structural
limits to change, and these structural limits are reflected in, and reinforced by
patterns of discourse. Or, better to say that discursive practices are in place
that prevent us from thinking and acting against power, and that encourage us
to think and act with it. The political question is how to bring people up
against the limits so that they feel those patterns of discourse, those discursive
practices as coercive, so that they are then able to shake them and break them.
The most extreme maximum position misses the point that people can
critically reflect on the limits and must themselves challenge power for
progressive change to occur, and the most cautious minimum position fails to
bring people to the limits. Most initiatives that simply work in between, as a
middle path, accomplish some change, but without people being brought into
an awareness of how those changes also accomplish, to borrow a situationist
term, the ‘recuperation’, that is the neutralisation and absorption of resistance.
This fourth path is one that is, of necessity, conscious of its line of attack, and
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that marks it as a variety of critical reflection, of course. It is tactical as well as
strategic.
Critical Psychological Praxis
In our research and teaching, we have often been faced with charges from
peers that critical psychology only offers epistemological, theoretical,
methodological and analytical alternatives. While we recognise these
alternatives as essential to challenging what may be called the ‘psy-complex’
(and its associated applications), it is our contention that critical psychological
praxis has a long history in a variety of local and global contexts. Our task is
creating interventions that straddle critical theory and practice in ways that
aim for social and individual change. This change may be defined as
revolutionising in the sense that various individuals and collectives have
worked together towards different ways of theoretically and practically
conceptualising the role of psychology in the lives of societal members from a
variety of cultures.
Finding praxis
We may suffer from being so closely connected to the academy and in its
attempts to provide a scholarly, some could argue, idealistic alternative to the
psy-complex as evidenced in action research. In Theses on Feuerbach (1845),
Marx challenges the contradictory separation of contemplation (idealism)
from activity (materialism). We are reminded that idealism is particularly
apparent in scholarly bourgeois writing; celebrating itself over practice, the
latter which is conceptualized as outside, alien to thought. Marx notes that as
all social life is practical, then those idealistic or contemplative materialist
positions that fail to recognize this fact or always prone to only contemplate
individuals.
Much space is given in critical psychology to assessing the actions and stories
of ‘people’ or ‘subjects’ and readers of critical accounts are often taken
through a bizarre journey from pathologised objects (noting how people are
often excluded by a variety of social barriers enforced through practices of the
psy-complex), to resilient subjects (demonstrating their resilient tales and
actions through, for example, qualitative description) back to subjectified and
objectified objects (phenomena to be analyzed and understood: back to the
psy-complex). Research so often re-creates the very difficulties it is mean to
challenge (Clough and Barton, 1998). However, to conclude so pessimistically
is to leave a victimized image of the human subject. ‘Co-researchers’
necessarily complicate matters, by providing ways of bridging the artificial
divide between theory and practice, conceptualization and activism, idealism
and materialism. Their actions violate the distinction between commodities,
stressing how theory and activism emerge together in places where one would
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Dan Goodley and Ian Parker
perhaps not expect such actions to take place: putting forward ideas for future
research agendas.
For some this has led to a process of deconstruction, where the role of the
psychologist and psychology have been so consistently undermined that their
position is considered to be one of occasional ally. In this sense then, critical
psychological praxis aims to reject many (if not all) of the advances made by
psychology into the lives of participants involved. Instead, the expertise of
activists reign supreme and reignite interest in (and feed into the development
of) critical theory. For others, engaged in a process of reconstruction, a critical
psychology is an essential part of the interventions that are made. Here,
critical psychological praxis attempts to offer change from the inside, to
revamp existing practices in ways that are sensitive to critical theory and
critical activism.
Conclusions
The relationship between action and ideas is crucial, and the dialectical
formation of theory and practice enable activists, practitioners and researchers
to reconsider their often seemingly contradictory and counter-productive
positions. In conclusion we need to raise the following questions: What are the
practical consequences of critical theory in academic psychology? What are
the theoretical stakes in progressive practice in the real world? What
connections between radical theorists, practitioners and activists might be
forged to understand and change oppressive conditions? How are attempts to
connect theory and practice played out a local level in specific cultural
conditions?
The argument which frames critical psychological praxis is that (i) critical
theory must be practical, (ii) that critical practice is always theoretical and (iii)
that specific cultural conditions mediate the development of forms of critical
theory and critical practice and the connections between the two. ‘Critical
psychological praxis’, then, is an historically and culturally specific endeavour
that takes distinctly different shapes in different conditions.
Due to the commodification and splitting off of various forms of work, in late
capitalism, critical theorists and activists are faced with a constant problem of
separation. In particular, ‘academic theory’ is often contrasted with
‘atheoretical practice’, with members of each distinct group at best
misunderstanding and at worse rejecting one another. It is our contention that
there is much overlap between progressive theorising and radical practice.
Working with this overlap dialectically in a critical psychological praxis may
be the way we can connect critical theory and action research.
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Dan Goodley and Ian Parker
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Ian Parker is Professor of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan
University: Address: Discourse Unit, Department of Psychology and
Speech Pathology, The Manchester Metropolitan University, Elizabeth
Gaskell Campus, Hathersage Road, Manchester, M13 OJA, UK. Email:
I.A.Parker@mmu.ac.uk
Dan Goodley is a member of the Disability Research Unit at the
University of Leeds. A forthcoming book explores activism in the lives
of people with the label of ‘learning difficulties’ (2000, Politics of
Resilience, Open University Press) Recent research projects have drawn
upon narrative, ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches. He is
especially critical of clinical psychologists. Address: Disability Research
Unit School of Sociology and Social Policy University of Leeds Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK. Email: D.Goodley@Leeds.ac.uk
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