Critical psychology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Critical psychology is both a critique of "mainstream" psychology and an attempt to apply psychology in more progressive ways (based, for example, on Marxist or feminist analyses) and contexts than have thus far been the case. There are a number of textbooks of critical psychology and a number of critical psychology courses and research concentrations, including the University of Manchester, Cardiff University, the University of the West of England in Bristol, the University of East London and the University of Adelaide. Compare: critical theory.
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[edit] Critical psychology around the world
[edit] Germany
Critical psychology started in the 1970s in Berlin at Freie Universität Berlin, and the German branch of critical psychology predates and has developed largely separately from the rest of the field.
Critical psychology here is not really seen as a division of psychology; it follows its own methodology. It tries to reformulate traditional psychology on an unorthodox Marxist base, taking up and developing ideas from soviet cultural-historical psychology, particularly Aleksey Leontyev. Holzkamp also incorporated ideas from Freud´s psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty´s phenomenology into his approach. The appeal of critical psychology to socialists is that it is an attempt to come to grips with the social and the historical "conditionality" of human beings.
One of the most important books in the field is the Grundlegung der Psychologie (Foundations of Psychology) by Klaus Holzkamp (Frankfurt a. M. 1983), who might be considered the theoretical founder of critical psychology. His last major publication before his death in 1995 appeared in 1993 and contained a phenomenological theory of learning from the standpoint of the subject, as well as an extensive analysis on the modern state´s institutionalized forms of "classroom learning" as the cultural-historical context that shapes much of modern learning and sozialization. In this analysis, he heavily drew upon Michel Foucault´s "Discipline and Punish"; in his learning theory, he was inspired by social anthropologists Jean Lave (situated learning) and Edwin Hutchins (distributed cognition).
Some years ago the department of critical psychology at the FU-Berlin was closed and was added to the traditional psychology department. Nevertheless, this approach of psychology is still alive.
[edit] South Africa
The University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, is one of few worldwide to offer a masters course in critical psychology. For an overview of critical psychology in South Africa, see Desmond Painter and Martin Terre Blanche's article on Critical Psychology in South Africa: Looking back and looking forwards. They have also now started a critical psychology blog.
[edit] United States and Canada
Critical psychology in the United States and Canada has, for the most part, focused on critiques of mainstream psychology's support for an unjust status quo. No departments of critical psychology exist, though critical perspectives are sometimes encountered in traditional universities, perhaps especially within community psychology programs. North American efforts include the 1993 founding of RadPsyNet Radical Psychology Network, the 1997 publication of Critical Psychology: An Introduction (edited by Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky), and the action-focused PsyACT (Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together).
[edit] Extensions
Like many critical applications, critical psychology has expanded beyond Marxist roots to benefit from other critical approaches. Consider ecopsychology and transpersonal psychology. Critical psychology and related work has also sometimes been labelled radical psychology and liberation psychology.
Various sub-disciplines within psychology have begun to establish their own critical orientations. Perhaps the most extensive are critical health psychology and community psychology (see the Monterey Declaration of Critical Community Psychology).
[edit] Criticisms of conventional psychology
One of the criticisms of conventional psychology raised by critical psychology is the inattention to power differentials between different groups - examples include between psychiatrists and patients, wealthy groups and the less financially well-off, or industrial lobbyists and the general public. This inattention to power has resulted in conventional psychology tending to assume that how things are is how they should be, that the current state of affairs is the natural state of things. As a result, conventional psychology has a tendency to uphold the status quo, victim-blame and situate problems within individuals rather than the social context they are embedded in.
[edit] See also
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Key Texts – Books
Prilleltensky, I & Nelson, G. (2002). Doing psychology critically: Making a difference in diverse settings. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
[edit] Additional material – Books
[edit] Key Texts – Papers
Prilleltensky, I. (1997). Values, assumptions and practices: Assessing the moral implications of psychological discourse and action. American Psychologist, 52(5), 517-535.
