Critical Psychology

An Introduction

Dennis Fox,Isaac Prilleltensky,Stephanie Austin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446242056
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

`Do read this book - it will refresh you if you have not come across critical psychology before. If you are already "critical", this is an excellent, up-to-date overview of the area? - THE (Times Higher Education)

?An excellent book in all respects - compulsory reading for scholars interested in a socio-political contextual analysis of complex human behaviour? - Professor David F Marks, City University, London

?The arrival of a Second Edition of this classic is an exciting event. The editors have assembled a world class array of authors to bring students to the forefront of critical scholarship today. Adding to the work?s lustre are fresh new chapters on critical social issues, along with a set of new pedagogical aids. Bravo!? - Kenneth J. Gergen, Senior Research Professor, Swarthmore College

The Second Edition of Critical Psychology extends the original?s comprehensive and accessible critique of mainstream psychology. Fully revised, reconfigured and expanded, the Second Edition explores critical psychology?s continued growth and diversification, offering practical advice, and noting significant theoretical and political dilemmas confronting critical psychologists today.

While other texts focus on narrower specialties within critical psychology or on specific theoretical or methodological perspectives, Critical Psychology retains its focus on critical psychology as a whole.

Key features of the new edition include:

- each chapter now also includes a summary of main points, a glossary of important terms, suggested readings and Internet sites, and questions for discussion

- the book?s contributors - most of them new - have thoroughly updated the original chapters and provide multiple perspectives on critical psychology?s core concerns

- reflecting recent developments, Parts Three and Four are completely new to this edition. Part Three provides in-depth coverage of critical psychology?s relevance to social justice, focusing on the issues of race, class, gender, disability, colonization/globalization, human rights/social justice in post-conflict settings, and oppression/empowerment in mental health systems. Part Four examines critical psychology practice, from theory, methodology and therapy to community organizing and the politics of resistance.

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Part 1

Critical Overviews

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1

Critical Psychology for Social Justice: Concerns and Dilemmas

Dennis Fox, Isaac Prilleltensky, and Stephanie Austin

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Chapter Topics

Central Concerns and Relevant Core Concepts

Individualism and Meaninglessness: The Level of Analysis

Inequality and Oppression: The Role of Ideology

Intention and Consequence: The Trap of Neutrality

Central Dilemmas

The Nature of Human Nature

The Scope of Social Change and Political Action

Organizing Matters

Critical Psychology: An Introduction presents an array of approaches that challenge mainstream psychology in fundamental ways. By mainstream psychology we mean the psychology that universities most often teach and that clinicians, researchers, and consultants most often practise. It is the psychology you probably studied in your introductory course, presented as a science whose researchers use objective methods to understand human behaviour and whose practitioners help individuals cope with distress. Building on their research findings, mainstream psychologists who recognize the societal sources of that distress sometimes propose institutional reforms to help people function more effectively. In short, most psychologists expect to do good. And often they do. Critical psychologists, in contrast, see things very differently. We believe that mainstream psychology has institutionalized a narrow view of the field’s ethical mandate to promote human welfare. That narrowness leads to many negative consequences, as this book elaborates in some detail.

As we see it, the minor reforms to smooth out society’s rough edges that mainstream psychologists most often endorse simply don’t go far enough. Dominant cultural, economic, and political institutions exhibit two fundamental problems especially relevant to psychology: they misdirect efforts to live a fulfilling life and they foster inequality and oppression. What concerns us as psychologists is that these institutions routinely use psychological knowledge and techniques to maintain an unacceptable status quo. Instead of exposing and opposing this use, however, mainstream psychology strengthens it. Its prevailing conceptions of human needs and values and its image of scientific objectivity too readily accommodate harmful institutional power. Furthermore, as a powerful institution in its own right, psychology generates its own harmful consequences that fall particularly hard on those who are oppressed and vulnerable. Instead of tinkering with the edges, thus, critical psychologists from a variety of critical traditions advocate not just minor reform but fundamentally different social structures more likely to lead to social justice and human wellbeing. We imagine and explore alternatives. We think psychology can do better.

We also know firsthand how uncomfortable it can be to read criticism of values, assumptions, and practices that we think are basically sound. Mainstream psychology courses typically do not scrutinize in any serious way the social, moral, and political implications of research, theory, and practice. Partly because critical psychology rejects the underlying perspectives taught in those courses, our critique might strike you as ‘too political’ or ‘ideological’. Unfortunately, psychology’s fragmentation and overspecialization reduce exposure to fields such as political theory, sociology, and anthropology that more often explore critiques of the status quo. Students planning to work as psychologists and psychologists already in practice may misinterpret as a personal attack our critique of the system. As critical psychologists see it, however, justifications for our own roles within that system sometimes reflect political or ideological values too often left unexamined.

You will discover in the chapters ahead that, despite our overlapping analyses, suspicions, generalizations, and conclusions, critical psychologists do not know all the answers. You will also discover that most of us occupy traditional professional roles as therapists, researchers, evaluators, consultants, teachers, students, or advocates. What makes us different, or so we like to think, is our effort to raise questions about what we and others are doing. We want to be agents of social change, not agents of social control. We move ahead despite knowing that we cannot always succeed, or be entirely consistent, or even always know for sure what success might look like.

Reflecting our varied backgrounds and interests, critical psychology’s intersecting approaches differ from one another in philosophical justification, methodological preference, political strategy, favoured terminology, and ultimate priority. It would not be too far off the mark to talk about a range of critical psychologies rather than a single approach. To make this even more confusing, many critical psychologists do not even use the term critical psychology, and sometimes psychologists do important work that advances progressive aims despite being steeped in mainstream assumptions and methods. That’s why, when inviting colleagues to contribute to this second edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction, we did not insist upon a single perspective. We focused instead on central themes that are common to a variety of critical traditions: pursuing social justice, promoting the welfare of communities in general and oppressed groups in particular, and transforming the status quo of both society and psychology.

In the remainder of this chapter, we first introduce core concepts related to critical psychology’s central concerns and internal dilemmas. We then explain how the rest of the book explores these concerns and dilemmas in greater depth.

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central concerns and relevant core concepts

We have already touched on three interrelated concerns drawing significant critical psychology attention, which we can summarize loosely as follows:

1. by focusing on the individual rather than the group and larger society, mainstream psychology overemphasizes individualistic values, hinders the attainment of mutuality and community, and strengthens unjust institutions;
2. mainstream psychology’s underlying assumptions and institutional allegiances disproportionately hurt members of powerless and marginalized groups by facilitating inequality and oppression; and
3. these unacceptable outcomes occur regardless of psychologists’ individual or collective intentions to the contrary.

In this section we describe these concerns in more organized fashion. In the process, we explain the relevance of three central concepts: mainstream psychology’s restricted level of analysis; the role of ideology in strengthening the status quo; and psychology’s false claim to scientific objectivity and political neutrality. Although these are not the only relevant concepts, they are the ones you will encounter throughout this book.

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individualism and meaninglessness: the level of analysis

In every society, economic, educational, religious, and other institutions inculcate into their members preferred views of human nature and social order. Those views, and the institutions they support, vary from society to society much more widely than we often realize. The enormous normative diversity among the world’s thousands of historical and currently existing cultures often astonishes people who grew up assuming their own beliefs and preferences represented ‘normality’. In contrast to anthropologists, whose field most directly studies the world’s diverse behaviours, institutions, and power arrangements, psychologists too often forget that many of the behaviours they and others around them engage in every day reflect culture and history rather than universal inevitability. Thomas Teo notes in Chapter 3 that mainstream psychology shows little awareness of psychological perspectives from other cultural traditions, or that Western psychology itself is a ‘local psychology’ – or, as Ingrid Huygens puts it in her discussion of colonization, an ‘indigenous psychology’ (Chapter 16). ‘No culture has all the answers’, Tod Sloan adds, ‘but our theories … should at least not universalize the values of the culture from which they arise’ (Chapter 19).

Despite globalization’s expansion and corporate efforts to homogenize human experience, it is important to keep in mind that traditional Eastern cultures do not share the West’s dominant individualistic underpinnings, and that colonizers trumpeting individualist, nationalist, Christian, and capitalist values have routinely dominated and decimated indigenous cultures. Knowing that our values reflect our own cultural assumptions, critical psychologists pay particular attention to dominant institutions in Westernized societies – the societies within which most psychologists live and work and mainstream psychology developed. From childrearing advice and school curricula, to work and consumption, to media coverage and political decision making, these institutions encourage people to seek identity and meaning through individual and competitive pursuits instead of through collaborative or community endeavours. Watching television and surfing the Internet, advancing in careers, keeping the lawn green, and shopping for fun are only some of the things many people do that divert attention and energy from constructing more meaningful friendships, participating in community life, or recognizing and working to end injustice. It is no coincidence that a self-focused mindset offers more benefits to those who control corporate capitalism and other members of relatively privileged groups than to the vast numbers who congregate in shopping malls and football stadiums or search for anonymous on-line community.

That mainstream psychology’s Westernized, individualistic worldview accepts and even endorses isolating, self-focused endeavours has not gone unnoticed. A surprisingly large literature explores the serious consequences (for a sampling of perspectives in the psychological literature, see Bakan, 1966; I. Prilleltensky, 1994; Sarason, 1981; Teo, 2005). Of particular concern is that an individualistic worldview hinders mutuality, connectedness, and a psychological sense of community, partly by leading people to believe that these are either unattainable or unimportant (Fox, 1985; Sarason, 1974). It also blinds people to the impact of their actions and lifestyles on others who remain oppressed, on the environment, and even on families and friends. Overall, psychologists fit too comfortably within a capitalist democratic system that gives lip service to both individual freedom and political equality but in practice prefers political apathy and the freedom of the market over participatory democracy and distributive justice (Baritz, 1974;Fox, 1985, 1996;Pilgrim, 1992).

Psychology’s embeddedness in capitalism, Teo suggests (Chapter 3), conflicts with its potential as an emancipatory science. Capitalism is not the only destructive force at play in the world, but its assumptions are perhaps the most dependent on an individualistic worldview that sees economic class as a natural rather than constructed state of affairs (see Heather Bullock and Wendy Limbert’s Chapter 13). Of course, mainstream psychologists defend their field’s individualistic orientation by defining psychology as the study of individuals, contrasting it with disciplines such as sociology and anthropology that examine larger groups. Although this explanation seems reasonable, it oversimplifies. Psychologists trying to make sense of why an individual behaves in a certain manner, holds certain views, or seeks certain goals inevitably confront the direct and indirect impact of other people. But even mainstream social psychology, the traditional discipline most likely to address interaction and social context, has become increasingly individualistic, as Frances Cherry recounts in Chapter 6.

Imagine a therapist whose client suffers from the kind of ‘work stress’ Jeanne Marecek and Rachel Hare-Mustin describe in their critical discussion of clinical psychology (Chapter 5). Should the clinician investigate the client’s long-term psychological difficulties? Teach stress-management techniques? Try to change the stressful job situation or advise the client to get a new job? The psychologist offering therapy (or teaching students about this topic, or conducting research on it) might consider a number of factors, one of which – an important one – is the therapeutic setting’s constraints. Is the psychologist in private practice helping an upper-management professional cope with subordinates? Does she or he work at a clinic, providing therapy for an overloaded working-class secretary with relatively few options? Or at a factory, hired by corporate management to make sure workers keep up the pace?

Different roles lead to different interpretations of the problem and, as Scot Evans and Colleen Loomis emphasize in Chapter 22, different problem interpretations lead to different kinds of solutions. Evans and Loomis pay particular attention to the relevant level of analysis, as do Bullock and Limbert in their discussion of social class (Chapter 13). Thus, in the case of our stressed-out client, a critical therapist might step back from the client’s individual personality and habits (the individual level of analysis) and even from the specific work setting (the situational or interpersonal level) to consider the societal level of analysis. Gazi Islam and Michael Zyphur point out in their discussion of industrial/organizational psychology (Chapter 7) that treating work stress as a medical problem means solutions focus on individual rather than systems change. Learning to relax or finding a less-stressful job, even when successful, does nothing to change the system generating so much stress to begin with. Individual therapy may still be warranted; Isaac Prilleltensky, Ora Prilleltensky, and Courte Voorhees describe in Chapter 21 how critically minded therapists can adopt approaches less restricted by mainstream assumptions. But the critical psychologist simultaneously aims higher, at the level of community change Evans and Loomis describe and at broader political efforts such as those which Vicky Steinitz and Elliot Mishler describe (Chapter 23), among others.

George Albee (1990) pointed out the absurdity of defining as ‘individual’ any problem that confronts thousands and even millions of people. Beyond the absurdity lies ‘blame-the-victim’ politics (Ryan, 1971). Blaming individuals for their widely shared problems and legitimizing only individual solutions such as therapy, education, or stress-management training makes people less likely to advocate social change. Psychology’s reconfiguration of social problems into psychic maladies thus reinforces the conservative notion that there’s no nee...