Psychology through Critical Auto-Ethnography

Academic Discipline, Professional Practice and Reflexive History

Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367344184
• eBook ISBN: 9781000767940
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This unique book is an insider account about the discipline of psychology and its limits, introducing key debates in the field of psychology around the world today by closely examining the problematic role the discipline plays as a global phenomenon.

Ian Parker traces the development of 'critical psychology' through an auto-ethnographic narrative in which the author is implicated in what he describes, laying bare the nature of contemporary psychology. In five parts, each comprising four chapters, the book explores the student experience, the world of psychological research, how psychology is taught, how alternative critical movements have emerged inside the discipline, and the role of psychology in coercive management practices. Providing a detailed account of how psychology actually operates as an academic discipline, it shows what teaching in higher education and immersion in research communities around the world looks like, and it culminates in an analytic description of institutional crises which psychology provokes.

A reflexive history of psychology's recent past as a discipline and as a cultural force, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone thinking of taking up a career in psychology, and for those reflecting critically on the role the discipline plays in people's lives.

PART I

Studying psychology

1

EXPERIMENTS

Cold method

In which we encounter psychology for the first time, and discover how attached this strange discipline is to an experimental method which reduces personal experience to the link between cause and effect. We also make connections between the separation of the individual from context, and the isolation of people from each other outside in the real world.

I know this is a strange way to begin a psychology book, and in a textbook for students it is unthinkable to directly reference the author at the outset in the first person. Even though it is the case that as we go up the hierarchal structure of the discipline it becomes permissible for venerable professors to say ‘I think’ this or that, the message conveyed to students is that they must blot out what they think or feel in order to be more objective, more scientific. I learnt this from my first false start as a student of psychology, something I describe in this chapter.

Delusions

It is freezing here, and the rain drives us all into our homes, those who have them. We shiver inside, alone if we are unlucky or if we are new to the city, away from home. Psychology begins for me in Newcastle in September 1975. Here I am inside my lodgings. I am not sure why I chose psychology, but it had a lot to do with being with friends. This is paradoxical because psychology usually separates people from each other in order to study their behaviour. I arrived here to take a combined honours degree in botany and zoology. It was bitterly cold from the start. My oversize dark blue greatcoat and long thin hair were little protection against the chilly wind cutting through from Jesmond Dene in the east across to the university campus. Newcastle-upon-Tyne is a city in the north east of England, almost as far away from south London as you can get. I knew no one. I was in a strange city and I was lost.

I did not know what I was getting myself into. I was a year older than most of the other first-year students on my course. Maybe that helped, though I don’t think I would have been better prepared for life here in the far north if I’d come here the year before, if that had been possible. I hadn’t done well enough in school, and even now I had some catching up to do. It was a lucky break for me that biology was introduced as a new subject in my secondary school when I was thirteen, my third year there. I did well at the subject, and the new teacher liked me, I thought. I liked him, and even if he didn’t like me, he was willing to give extra lessons to two of us in the fifth year who sat the O-level exam. If I hadn’t passed that particular exam I would not have progressed into sixth form. Those two years of biology class meant at least that I had some attention away from the bewildering chaos that was my form, 4F and then 5F. The form letters ran from B to F. The A was missing, I guess, to disguise the ability grading system the school used to sort out who would make it through to A-levels and who would not.

I loathed school. I wanted to die. I still sometimes dream that I am trying to find my class in the empty sprawling modern buildings of Ravens Wood at Keston in Kent, not being able find my way around, anxious that I am late, lost. Biology was better. We sat side by side in the unnaturally quiet classroom when school was over, me and Johnson – second names were how we knew each other at school and outside it – while Mr Hocking, the biology teacher, guided us through the syllabus every Thursday afternoon. We both made it through, but when I went back in September after the summer’s O-level exams I was the only student carrying on. I took botany and zoology O-levels in the first year of sixth form and then A-levels the year after, in summer 1974. I wore a white lab coat. I dissected animals, even eventually Bertie rat who had become a little too plump after being pampered by the biology technical assistant, and whose lucky escapes from the knife did come to an end. I worked on assignments in the school library, on my own because there was no class to attend.

My other classes were disastrous, first mathematics and then English. I muddled through mathematics for a couple of weeks before transferring into English literature, scraped through a re-take of the O-level to be able to do that, and then failed the A-level. I could blame it on Mansfield Park, which I was supposed to read but didn’t, or Lord of the Rings which I did, but which was not on the syllabus. You will have got the impression so far, perhaps, that I wasn’t the most sociable or socially competent of boys. Psychologically difficult, perhaps, or stupid, or maybe there was just no psychological mindedness as such in me at all.

Ravens Wood was the new name for Bromley Technical High School and was in transition to becoming a Comprehensive, and so open to all abilities. Some pupils, those who had failed to get into a grammar school, made it through this one, and then to university. The biology, botany and zoology funnelled me in that direction, though it mystified other school friends that I might do this, that I could go on to take a degree.

I discovered when I began to think about this next step, that I needed chemistry O-level to get into university. Newcastle’s offer of a place for the following year gave me time to pass that exam while still living at home in Bromley and working in a furniture shop. I would walk in to work and spend the day arguing with the manager who was in the Communist Party. I would work on my chemistry lesson book in the lunch break and walk home at the end of the day to work on coursework assignments for the correspondence course. No classes and no experiments, but plenty of brown paper envelopes. That year, 1975, I turned from being pretty clueless politically, conservative even, to being shocked by the brutality of US imperialism in Vietnam and inspired by victory there. I wasn’t impressed by the Soviet Union or its satellite states, but I was reading about Marxism and up for finding out more about politics. Newcastle would be the place to do that.

The rain is busy outside, and here I am in the sitting room of my terraced-house lodgings off Heaton Road beyond Jesmond Dene. It is just after breakfast. We were in the house in September, were served a cooked breakfast every morning, which always began with porridge, porridge which made me retch but which I struggled to eat because I had not told the landlady the first mornings that this was something I really disliked. I didn’t want to upset her. She is a Geordie, a local of Newcastle. She is perhaps in her seventies, with tightly-curled grey hair, wire-rimmed spectacles and a flowered pinafore. She has looked after generations of medical students, she says, and I think she is disappointed with us. She likes medics. She doesn’t hear about what they get up to in the university. She brings trays with toast and tea and in the afternoons she sometimes sets the table for home-made scones. She hooks her foot around the door to pull it closed behind her when she leaves the room. The yellowing flower-pattern china is assembled on doilies and they compete for attention with the lace tablecloth. By the side of my sitting room chair I have a few books on the sideboard; some Thomas Hardy and then, a little later, there will be a couple by Lenin.

At least I now have a bedroom to myself. At the beginning of term I was sharing a bedroom with Dave from somewhere near London. He had two lime-green check shirts that he hung to air at night in the wardrobe. Dave studied civil engineering, had soldier-style Brylcreemed-hair, short-cut and shaved at the back of his neck, buck teeth and acne. He looked like a giant spotty rabbit. We shared the bathroom, which has a big cold bath and coughs out water as brown as the tea along with little bits of pipe. The other guy is from Leeds, has his own room, and he has a girlfriend from Manchester here at the university who is living nearby. They are Nigel and Sandra, they study psychology and they both wear duffle coats. Here are my first friends in Newcastle.

It seems like psychology could be interesting, they say, though they don’t know much about it yet. The main selling point is that you can do experiments on people. You apparently measure people doing different things and study what they are thinking. It does sound fun, white-coat stuff, and, most important, it is something to do as a third subject. That’s what it is for Nigel and Sandra, something they have chosen alongside their other main degree interests. It’s not exactly psychiatry, they say, which is about dealing with mad people. I knew that already, about psychiatry. My mother and then school classmates used to joke about who might end up at Colney Hatch, the old mental asylum in north London. That’s where they locked people up who acted too weird and bothered other people. And that was it, though even that didn’t connect with or threaten my own weird sense of myself because I had learnt not to be too weird around others and not to bother them too much. Neither psychiatry, which was one of the names for prison, nor psychology, which was a complete mystery, had anything to do with me. Psychology itself doesn’t at all seem to be about helping people. If anything, it seems close to astrology, perhaps with a harder edge, for it is about spotting personality types, working out how different people behave, guessing how they think. Now I’ve arrived here I realise I need to find a third subject to study for my first year of the degree course alongside botany and zoology. It is not going to be chemistry.

There is another possible option. That is anatomy, which will be taken alongside the medics and will specifically focus on the hand. It will involve dissection of a hand. Within a few days of arriving in Newcastle we hear stories about two of the most obnoxious upper-class gangs at the university, students of agriculture and medicine, these are the ‘agrics’ and the ‘medics’. They fight, usually with each other, which is fortunate. But it reminds us who is in charge of the place. Newcastle is a city divided along class-lines, between the town and the gown, and between the university and the Polytechnic, which does not, we assume, have gowns. And the university is also internally divided, between students from privileged backgrounds who are more likely to end up in agriculture or medicine, to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and some of us who are here on sufferance to study the lesser and less serious subjects. So, would it be a year of the hand, anatomy in a part of the university that I don’t know and guess I won’t like, or could I go in to campus the following morning with two new friends who have told me that they think there are still places on the psychology course? It’s a no-brainer, it seems. I have the idea psychology is about people, perhaps like the Marxism I was into, and that it is a science, so I could study plants, animals and human beings.

This is what I said the next day to Professor Max Hammerton in the psychology department during his brisk assessment of new applicants. I didn’t mention the Marxism. He let me in. Hammerton had close-cropped hair, an amazingly big chin, a buttoned up tight check shirt and looked at me in a funny way, which, I realised in the first lecture of the course, was because he had one eye. He had delivered his inaugural lecture at Newcastle the year before on psychology as, the title had it, ‘A science under siege’, and he was quick in the first-year lectures to tell us who the enemies were. Many people believe that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, he said, but they have no proof that these little beings exist, which sounded fair enough, true even.

Psychology isn’t fooled by such ridiculous beliefs, he continued, and as he warmed to his theme in the first lecture he mentioned other enemies of reason that sounded a good deal more interesting. A “French punk” called Jean-Paul Sartre was especially dangerous. Hammerton spat out the word ‘punk’; this was clearly his party piece, one that he probably always opened the course with, and he was evidently enjoying himself. The existentialist Sartre, he told us, was not only a lousy philosopher but a lazy novelist. In one of his “so-called novels” he wrote of a character with one eye unable to detect the murderer who was standing very still and blending into the wallpaper. Hammerton finished off his tirade with a killer blow which combined scientific expertise with what he himself knew. Science plus professionalised personal experience gave him the edge in dispensing with Sartre. Anyone with the most basic understanding of perception would know that this storyline was quite impossible, he said, for a one-eyed man would be well able to distinguish figure from the background. This was where we began our search for knowledge about the mind: in the land of the blind where the one at the front of the class was king.

Here was a double hook. It was thrown out for all of us in the class, and it sure was for me. One message was that psychology can tell you the difference between what is true and what is false. Here is the science, and the Marxist classics I was reading also promised to dispel superstition. Lenin often cites Tolstoy who writes of a confusing scene in which it seems as if a madman is crouching and gesticulating in the street, but when he comes closer he sees that the man is sharpening a knife on a stone. The message is that the closer you get, the more you know. Many people believe things that are false, and even this famous French philosopher I’d barely heard of was fooled. It seemed now that Sartre not only had a lazy eye, but was also a lazy novelist, though I couldn’t track down the story of the killer hiding in the wallpaper. What I did know of Sartre was that he was an atheist who questioned what we can know of reality. I’d been taught at home to scoff at religious ideas, even to be wary of religious people when they came together in groups. That much had been brought home to us by my mother who embarked on a teacher-training degree when I was in my teens. Existentialism had been a seminar topic on her course, and we picked away at it around the kitchen table. Hammerton’s attack on Sartre at least acknowledged his existence, and that made psychology as a subject immediately more attractive to me. The idea that there was a nauseating nothingness to our little lives was one I had obsessively circled around in various dramatic suicidal fantasies. I declared myself to be a ‘solipsist’ at school, by which I meant that this world around me and all the other beings in it were figments of my imagination, that only I existed. Buried in this claim was the glimmering paradox that this should also mean something to the few friends I had, even when I was boring them to death.

My mother used to comment scornfully whenever there was a disaster reported on television, that she bet the families would all be praying again, clearly out of their minds. When my sister had a brain tumour, my mother would return home from the convent school where she taught and mutter contemptuously ‘they’re praying for her again’. I was given licence by my parents to be late at school and so to miss the Anglican mass assembly before classes, and that again separated me from the rest of the dangerous deluded religious fools, a separation I liked. Sometimes, if I timed it right, I could make it to Ravens Wood in time to pick up the class register that had just been delivered to the main reception office, tick my name as present, and then sit and chat outside the assembly hall with the one Catholic and one Jewish pupil excused from attending assembly.

At the same time, there was a second message in Max Hammerton’s tirade, which was that psychology could key into your own sense about what might be true about yourself. Here is an appeal to personal experience, another hook that is closely attached to the scientific one. Psychology is not just brute science, but latches into something deeper, and that’s what makes it seem so magical to so many of those who encounter it for the first time. Even in a university department like Newcastle’s which prided itself on scientific method as the basis of psychology, there was an appeal to what someone might feel about the matter to ground knowledge in reality, to give an objective account the stamp of approval. Who that someone was, whether they were a professor who was able to make that connection and give it some authority, or whether they were everyday folk who turn out to be mistaken about fairies at the bottom of the garden, was unclear. This double appeal of psychology – that it combines objective truths built from scientific experiments that all psychologists should know about combined with what each individual might feel to be true – was a winning combination, but sometimes an unpleasant one. And that’s where I was up to, attracted and repelled.

Here we three are then. The rain is picking up speed, and back in the sitting room in Heaton this morning, we are chatting after breakfast. Here’s how psychology works, an example. This is now me and Nigel, and Sandra just arrived from her place before we get the bus together into class. Dave has left these lodgings now, and this is just before we will disappoint our landlady again, abandoning her house to move in together into a tiny downstairs flat on the other side of the city in Benwell near the old shipyards on the River Tyne. The evening before, we had picked up a Scientology leaflet and had a long argument about it with one of their flock. Scientology is one of the other worlds running in parallel to the discipline of psychology, and some psychologists are attracted to it because it looks like it does the same kind of thing, linking science with personal experience. It is a rival approach but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: control and confession
• PART I Studying psychology
• PART II Psychological research
• PART III Teaching psychology
• PART IV Going critical
• PART V Institutional crises
• Afterword and acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index