Critical Discursive Psychology

I. Parker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137505279
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Mouvements en psychologie

This book introduces key issues and historical contexts in critical discursive research in psychology. It sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts, arguments that can be made for qualitative research in academic settings, and arguments that could be made against it by critical psychologists.

1

Theoretical Discourse, Subjectivity and Critical Psychology

Where do we start, even when we start again? Often when we are faced with an insurmountable problem or we want to get somewhere when the route looks too rough, we think that it would be much easier if we could start from anywhere but here. I have that kind of thought when I’m working on issues of ideology and power in psychology. The discipline of psychology just does not seem able to tolerate a consideration of those kinds of issues. Or, when it looks like it is taking them seriously the discipline then engages in a thorough assimilative process that the Situationists used to call ‘recuperation’ (Debord, 1977). The Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s wanted to disrupt the machinery of capitalist consumer culture that they saw operating as a ‘society of the spectacle’, and so they were particularly sensitive to the recuperation of radical ideas into the spectacle, to the way that threats to power are neutralized and absorbed into the existing rules of the game.

So, psychologists can talk about ideology only when the term applies to belief systems assumed to be collections of attitudes and stereotypes existing as things inside the head, and they will study power only when it refers to the deliberate exertion of one’s will over others. Ideas and intentions are compulsively and relentlessly abstracted from social relations in psychological research; they are broken down and then rebuilt so that they will function independently of context. They are then juggled around as researchers try to make them social again by building their own model of society as one into which these kind of things would fit. Theodor Adorno, whose work has suffered exactly this kind of ideological mutilation at the hands of social psychologists working on prejudice, provides a succinct description of this process when he is commenting on the separation of high and low art in Western culture. We could say of the individual and the social in psychology, following Adorno (1967), that ‘Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.’

The trick is in the tearing, and just as a severed limb is so much more difficult to re-join to the body when there has been a clean cut, so the bits of mental functioning that have been removed from psychological studies cannot be patched together again properly precisely because they have been so efficiently sliced out of the social. This is also why the Cartesian separation of mind and body which haunts psychology cannot be remedied by those social constructionists who are now starting to talk about ‘embodiment’ (see Nightingale, 1999). Social constructionists in psychology once thought that the poverty of social explanation in the discipline could be solved by focussing on the way language works to make us human and make a culture (e.g., Harré and Secord, 1972), but they fell straight into the trap that structures mainstream psychology, which divides mental qualities from physical embodiment. You cannot just bring the body back in, as the torn half of the equation, to fill the gap left by a language-based account. If you do, then the result is simply ‘bourgeois ideology made flesh’ (in a phrase I owe to Terence McLaughlin).

Given this state of affairs – the systematic reduction of cultural and historical phenomena to the level of the individual in the discipline – how do we do ‘critical’ psychology? What might critical discursive psychology look like? Well, to start, we have to break some of the rules. I’ll mention at least three we have to break.

Situated knowledge

The first rule to break is, ‘don’t talk about yourself’. Now, there are always exceptions to rules of course, and occasions like this do permit even a psychologist to move out of third-person report mode. The problem is that these exceptions often function to confirm what usually goes on, and psychology is well practised at concealing the position of the speaker or writer. Research reports are often so difficult to evaluate because we have a detailed description of apparatus, subjects and procedure, and then a blank space, a kind of absent centre where we would expect one of the key actors in the story to be. This absence has been noticed by qualitative research, which is becoming more important now as a site of critique in the discipline and which encourages us to make the researcher, as a key actor, speak (e.g., Banister et al., 1994, 2011; Davies, 2000). A critical psychology should be a reflexive endeavour through and through, and it is often useful to include an account of the moral-political standpoint of the researcher in relation to what they may be observing and changing. We need a way of situating the production of knowledge, and that often means situating it in such a way that we connect biography with history (Young, 1988).

Postmodern themes filtering into the discipline encourage us to be suspicious of grand theory, but I must say that I have never believed psychology, neither the overarching models nor the little findings. Discourse analysis was not around in psychology when I started, but I came into the discipline already reading it from a particular set of positions.

Most psychological studies are carried out on white, male, American undergraduate students (Sears, 1986), and so it is hardly surprising that the findings from these studies do not translate too well to other populations. The advantage for us here in the UK is that this also makes them a little easier to decode, and we are then alerted to the way culture always frames research. I shared the same kind of cultural privileges as most psychologists in the sense that I am also white and male, but this privilege was mediated and problematized by the obvious hegemony of North American, mainly US, psychology through glossy undergraduate textbooks, and is so all the more now through a peculiar definition in citation counts and funding indices of what counts as an ‘international’ research journal. It was tempting for a while to react to this by imagining that European psychology was necessarily a progressive alternative to American varieties (Parker, 1989/2014). The so-called ‘crisis’ in social psychology over the place of the laboratory-experimental paradigm was a minefield of misunderstanding (Burman, 1996), with reverberations that continue to the present day (Parker, 2015b). That was a mistake, and we need to be sceptical about European research as well as connecting with critical work in the US (e.g., Prilleltensky, 1994; Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997, Fox et al., 2009; Sloan, 2000, Hammack, 2015). The opposition between Europe and the US does draw our attention to the fracturing of whiteness into different kinds of power that our Western psychology enjoys (Bulhan, 1981; Howitt and Owusu-Bempah, 1994). This includes the fracturing and reintegration in postcolonial (Hook, 2011) as well as Black feminist research and ‘intersectional’ analysis (Nayak, 2014). We need to be careful not to abstract the psychology we study ‘here’ from cultural context, and with rapidly increasing globalization that means an international context. We should not abstract it as if it could be torn from the relationship with the psychology of others that helps define it (cf. Sampson, 1993).

Like other academic disciplines, psychology is structured by social class divisions, and this affects who conducts research on those outside the academy and how that research is interpreted and published (Sennett and Cobb, 1972). A kind of lower middle-class background and a first degree in a polytechnic helped sensitize me to how psychological theories were embedded in a way of looking at the world that was at best driven by a liberal concern with helping people to fit comfortably and at worst led by idle curiosity. At the same time, research and publication success are linked to class through systems of patronage and exclusion, something that studies of the fate of resubmitted journal articles from different institutions indicate quite clearly (Peters and Ceci, 1982). There have been some interesting reflections on how this bears on the position of working-class women in higher education which also show how class positions mark the subjectivity of those subjected to them (Walkerdine, 1990).

Something I realized quite recently was that my curiosity about the way that psychology operates is stereotypically male. Men still dominate teaching and research in psychology when most of the students are women (Burman et al., 1995), and men tend to go into it to find out about the mind and behaviour as if these were properties of other people. Women, on the other hand, more often want to learn something about themselves and relationships with others (Kagan and Lewis, 1990). Noticing this is valuable, but there is a danger of romanticizing this willingness to participate body and soul in psychology and, if we did that, we could end up supporting a more efficient recruitment of women and men into the machinery of psychology. Such romanticizing and essentializing of other places that might resist and cure the ills we suffer in psychology appears in many forms. Sometimes it is necessary, but it is always risky, and I will return to this issue later.

I studied the stories told about child development, the diagrams of bits of memory and the tales of Americans doing things in groups. I didn’t go into psychology to discover the things that psychology thought it was discovering, but to discover how the discipline of psychology itself worked. When you are doing psychology critically, you need to watch the psychologists. In a sense I did choose where to start from, then, but all choices are conditioned by local sets of circumstances that it might be possible to move in and out of, and perhaps even to control, and these sets of circumstances are also woven into cultural-political environments that constitute where it is possible for us to move, and what it is possible for us to think. This ‘modern’ culture revolves around the illusion of free choice and the fantasy that you can step outside the social to view the world and give a neutral objective account. So, when we look at where we are, we need to be aware of the position and theoretical frame we adopt as we step back. There are two ways of stepping back and looking at the map.

Mapping the ground plan

One helpful critical review by Perry Anderson (1968) of the ‘ground-plan’ of British culture in 1968 located psychology in an intellectual climate in which empiricism – close observation and correlation – was so ingrained as to be a style of research rather than mere methodological preference. The psychologism which underpinned contemporary aesthetics and historical research at that time found a champion in psychology in Hans Eysenck who was one of a number of key conservative émigrés from continental Europe who found in Britain a comfortable intellectual home and who were influential in the development of a constellation of academic subjects after the Second World War. These subjects were designed to revolve around what Anderson terms an ‘absent centre’; that is, the lack of any sociology as a distinct discipline which could reflect upon the cultural totality. Critical psychologists have specific concerns about what our discipline is doing to people, but we are nourished by inter-disciplinary research, or trans-disciplinary research (Curt, 1994), and we need to develop our intellectual work now in the context of the human sciences. These human sciences include cultural studies, literary theory and women’s studies, and it is difficult to imagine how we could work without those, let alone without social theory.

That academic cultural landscape described by Anderson has been rapidly transformed in the past 40 years partly as a result of the political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and partly by the growth of higher education, as he acknowledges in a later review (Anderson, 1990a, 1990b). Psychology is briefly dispatched by Anderson in that later review with a reference to the Cyril Burt fraud and Eysenck’s dabbling in astrology, but it has seen some extraordinary changes in the late 1980s and since 1990. Psychology does still need to be conceptualized in relation to other academic disciplines, in relation to sociology and cultural studies which now operate as some kind of ‘centre’. They provide us with intellectual resources for locating and unravelling accounts of mind and behaviour, something we now see in the ‘psychosocial’ turn (Parker, 2015g), even as they still also carry with them normalizing functions which complement psychology (Therborn, 1976).

Psychology is also structured by its relation to philosophy as the study of ordinary language in the British analytic tradition and now as a sustained reflection on what extraordinary metaphorical work language performs in the continental European deconstructive and hermeneutic traditions. It also exists in relation to psychoanalysis which has moved from what Anderson describes as being an exceptional and marginal Kleinian psychoanalytic ‘technical enclave’ in the 1960s to cultural centre-stage. I will return to this picture of the relationship between academic disciplines and to the role of psychoanalysis later. For the moment, though, we can take from this mapping of disciplines an image of academic psychology as constituted as an empiricist endeavour that thinks it is the centre when it is really trapped between two other absent centres – reflection on society and reflection by the researcher – centres which it repeatedly disavows as it enforces their absence.

Mapping the psy-complex

The other way of mapping psychology is to focus on the relationship between what it says and what it does, the inside and outside of the academe or clinic. I moved into psychology because it saturates Western culture. I remember being told by fellow Marxists that this was a mistake because it was such a quintessentially bourgeois discipline. But is it not so important, I thought, to study it precisely because it is so essential to bourgeois discipline and so powerful in its essentializing naturalizing reduction of problems to the individual?

The years of Thatcherism and Reaganism and the rejuvenated ideology of free enterprise as capitalism rolled over the new markets of Eastern Europe fuelled postmodern fantasies of unfettered choice and the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992), and they further fuelled individualism and psychology, and encouraged the delving deep into individuals to find genetic causes, cognitive mechanisms or true selves. It is difficult to avoid all the talk there is around now about people’s minds and internal emotional states and relationships. At every turn we meet the practices that specify how we should adapt to problems and reason about them and which govern how we should understand our feelings about others. The therapeutic discourse in magazine advice columns, radio counselling phone-ins and day-time confessional television is producing an emotionally literate public. Some radical activist-therapists would like to encourage such emotional literacy (e.g., Samuels, 1993; Psychotherapists and counsellors for social responsibility, 1996), but we need to ask what regimes of truth that way of talking locks us into (Gordo-López, 2000; De Vos, 2012, 2013).

An article in the British Psychological Society house journal The Psychologist once had the title ‘The rising tide of psychology’ in which it was celebrating, with no apparent irony despite that rather sinister title, how the numbers studying and practising psychology are still increasing rapidly (Messer, 1996). The dramatic expansion of popular psychology in recent years has been made possible by the accumulation and diffusion of state welfare policies and practices in a variety of institutions from the end of the last century. The careful observation and regulation of mental hygiene in families and schools proceeded through the proliferation of apparatuses of knowledge and self-knowledge such that individual pathology would not only be represented in policy documents and professional training, but that individuals should also be able to represent to themselves how they should be (Rose, 1996). Self-help movements function here as a paradoxical meeting point for tendencies for emancipation and regulation. This process has been usefully described by work on the ‘psy-complex’. The ‘psy-complex’ is the network of theories and practices which elaborate and implement psychological knowledge. The psychiatric system is the most evident and often the most obviously oppressive sector of the psy-complex (Parker et al., 1995, Burstow et al., 2014; Parker, 2014b), but psychiatry functions as part of a dense matrix of assumptions about normality and abnormality through which psychologists in clinical practice, education and social work observe people and make them speak.

There is a powerful double-bind operating in this matrix, a double function of the psy-complex which so often sabotages the attempts of those psychologists who are trying to empower people by using psychology. This function has been analysed well by Michel Foucault, whose work has inspired studies of the psy-complex (Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985; Parker, 1995a; Hook, 2007). Power cannot be handed over to the subjects of the psy-complex, because power does not exist as if it were in packages that psychologists have a lot of compared with their ‘disempowered’ clients (Riger, 1993). Rather, power operates through the psy-complex by recruiting subjects who will do the work themselves, so that the disciplinary panoptical function of observation that Foucault (1975/1979) described as operating in most concentrated form in the modern prison system is sustained by the confessional structure of care which incites us to speak and to believe that the more we speak, the freer we will be (Foucault, 1976/1981). This means that we are the most thoroughly invested subjects of the psy-complex, and what psychotherapists like to call ‘psychologically minded’, when we learn to look for the truth in ourselves and when we simultaneously understand that we need a real expert to become, as narrative therapists would put it, ‘experts on our own lives’ (White, 1995).

Confessing my own history and position here is also to participate in the webs of the psy-complex. That is also a risk we take when we encourage researchers to engage in a reflexive analysis, and so we must be clear that we are not trying to uncover unmediated experience but, rather, developing a theoretical reflection on what we are doing. This brings me to the second broken rule.

Theoretical critical distance

The second rule to break is, ‘don’t work with theory’. Psychology has, as I’ve noted, been thoroughly empiricist in style, and has developed theoretical models very cautiously, keeping speculation under tight rein as it slowly links together its little findings in different combinations using ‘intervening variables’ and ‘hypothetical constructs’ (Hyland, 1981; Parker, 1987). However, a new wave of theoretical work developed toward the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s (Parker, 1999a). An influential strand of theory which has sometimes pushed the tolerance of traditional academic psychologists to breaking point has been discourse. There are three crucial aspects of the turn to discourse in psychology. The first is empirical.

Empirical discourse

Discourse-analytic approaches are helpful at the moment because they cue us into looking at how the little findings that the overarching models build upon are constructed, fabricated, narrated (Parker, 1992/2014). Accounts of experiments, for example, are treated as texts which look at first glance like windows onto the world but which we discourse analysts read as screens that hold representations of what a world might be like, and what people and things inside them might be like if the account were true. There was a study, for example, in a Japanese psychology research journal which looks quite interesting called ‘Effects of stroking horses on both human’s and horses’ heart rate responses’ (Hama et al., 1996). But instead of picking up the data from this study and putting it alongside other data so that you then imagine you are accumulating facts about physiology, touching and empathy, a discourse-analytic reading would focus on how the facts are storied into being in the descriptions and observations of the body in specific experimental and cultural settings. You have to be sure not to let your eye slip from the text, not to be lured into looking right through it to where you imagine you are really seeing, in this case, horses’ heart rate responses. The facts are stor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Theoretical Discourse, Subjectivity and Critical Psychology
• Part I  Enlightenment, Realism and Power
• Part II  The Turn to Discourse as a Critical Theoretical Resource
• Part III  Critical Discursive Research, Subjectivity and Practice
• References
• Index