Ian Parker

• The University of Manchester

Un manifiesto es siempre un llamado urgente. Es una invocación a desentrañar una situación que la historia ha encubierto con diversas estrategias ideológicas. Por esta pendiente, lan Parker y David Pavón-Cuéllar han respondido a ese llamado por aquello que debe ser vuelto a escuchar. Escuchar y separar, en este caso al psicoanálisis, de sus distors...

This paper traces through the fraught relationship between psychology and Marxism through a reading of current critical debates in the discipline through Marx’s 1845 eleven ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. These theses enable us to grasp how Marxism tackles questions ranging from the relation between the individual and the social to social constructionism an...

Este artigo argumenta que Freud não aceitou a esfera da “psicologia” como algo dado, que poderia ser conhecido objetivamente. Tampouco ele a via como algo unitário que seria sempre o mesmo e em qualquer pessoa. Ao invés disso, ofereceu ideias valiosas sobre a natureza humana da miséria enquanto algo histórico, sobre o processo dialético através do...

Este capítulo explora la relación entre la teoría y la práctica de la psicología crítica, centrándose en la crítica del esencialismo, individualismo y el universalismo de la psicología social convencional y sentando las bases para un enfoque hacia la política y la justicia trabajando a favor y en contra de la disciplina. Argumento en este capítulo...

This chapter contends that if we are to grasp the forms of subjectivity in Objectivist writing that (whether Rand likes it or not), owe a discursive debt to Freud, then this writing has to be read psychoanalytically. Such a reading must be one that attends to the implication of psychoanalytic discourse in Objectivist texts rather than attempting to...

This chapter explores the connection between the theory and practice of critical psychology, focusing upon the critique of essentialism, individualism and universalism of mainstream social psychology and laying the basis for an approach to politics and justice working in and against the discipline. I argue in this chapter that contemporary ‘critica...

This paper briefly describes the formation, present-day functioning and problems facing the futuristic city ‘Auroville’ in the state of Tamil Nadu in south India. Founded in 1968 as a ‘universal’ city, and planned to have 50,000 inhabitants that would take the next step in human evolution to exist as a self-sustaining community independent of natio...

This paper draws on the 'social constructionist' approaches in psychology and allied disciplines which question the truth claims made by academics and professionals about how our minds work and the way we behave. Part of the project of critical research in psychology that is concerned with the social construction of psychological and psychotherapeu...

If the pervert’s fantasy is outside time, psychoanalysis also extracts something, the phallus as privileged signifier, from the narrative. Recent politico-historical time has seen a shift from focus on children’s rights, to their protection; those formerly identified as paedophile have become positioned as abusers. Against this backdrop Ian Parker...

Während kritische Psychologie in Großbritannien zeitweise als synonym mit Diskurstheorie, Diskursanalyse und diskursiver Psychologie gelten konnte, ist die Diskursanalyse dort inzwischen ein anerkanntes Verfahren der akademischen Psychologie. In diesem Etablierungsprozess hat sich der Begriff der Diskursanalyse so weit ausdifferenziert, dass er inz...

Das Feld der britischen „critical psychology“ unterscheidet sich von der deutschsprachigen kritischen Psychologie nicht nur durch eine deutlich stärkere universitäre Institutionalisierung, sondern auch durch andere theoretische und methodologische Schwerpunkte. Ian Parker liefert in seinem Beitrag daher eine Einführung in die vier bedeutsamsten Str...

This paper asks what psychology might tell us about Europe and the way in which we in Britain voted in the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016. I look back at five examples of psychological discourse that claimed to help us understand what we were thinking and feeling as we weighed up how to vote. The key question is how we might refuse where psychol...

This paper responds to a set of problems in contemporary psychology that cluster around the notion that the discipline might be “applied” to the real world, and that such application would thereby serve as the methodological and conceptual grounding for “political psychology.” The specific problems addressed comprise “interpretation” of material in...

This article explores the role of psychoanalysis in contemporary neoliberal management of higher education, as a critical resource and as an aspect of the problem it describes. The marketisation, privatisation and financialisation of the university sector is the context for a brief case example in which we see the logic of fantasy staged in a parti...

This chapter outlines some aspects of contemporary 'critical psychology' which attempt to locate the discipline of psychology in the 'psy complex' and in the context of present-day capitalism and the state. Conceptual resources that critical psychologists draw upon - most notably Marxism and feminism - alert us to the way in which the threat of sta...

This paper explores Podemos by way of the notion of 'event' as theorised by Alain Badiou, and addresses two questions that bear on the nature of Podemos as an 'anti-political' phenomenon. The first, the relation between academic discourse and political events, makes the point that both Badiou and the Complutense group around Iglesias intervened in...

This commentary reflects on the different innovative motifs introduced into psychosocial research by the contributions to this special issue: the risk of oversubjectification in research placing undue emphasis on the individual reasoning or feeling subject, the attempt to link the “feelings” and “talk” about emotion in one interpretative framework,...

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. P...

Recent years have seen dramatic changes in psychology. A discipline that was once wedded to positivist inquiry is now reaping the benefits of a series of objections to its paradigmatic limitations in the late 1960s and 1970s. Arguments about the importance of accounts and the role of language in the creation of psychological facts and subjective ex...

This chapter reviews recent work on the social construction of the self in counselling and psychotherapy, and argues that we need to attend to the ways in which the therapeutic self is fashioned (a) in relation to the ‘psy-complex’ as the network of theories and practices concerned with psychological governance and self-reflection in modern Western...

Fred Newman and Lois Holzman’s comment on my ‘Against Postmodernism: Psychology in Cultural Context’ neatly displays the very dialectical processes they want to deny. Their refusal of ‘critical distance’ exemplifies postmodern avoidance of a political assessment of theories and practices (academic or otherwise), and their complaints about the insti...

Postmodern writing has forced psychology to confront a series of problems pertaining to the nature of human consciousness, personal integrity and language. It invites us to re-think notions of undivided and unitary self-hood that have underpinned much orthodox empirical research and theory in the discipline, and it does so in the story-worlds of Pr...

Discourse (language organized into sets of texts) and discourses (systems of statements within and through those sets) have a power. To say this is not to attribute agency to a system, but simply to acknowledge constraining and productive forces. There are forces of institutional disadvantage and division, for example, which do not flow from indivi...

With the question ‘What is “discourse”?’ as the starting point, this chapter addresses ways of identifying particular discourses, and attends to how these discourses should be distinguished from texts. The emergence of discourse analysis within psychology, and the continuing influence of linguistic and post-structuralist ideas on practitioners, pro...

Wittgenstein’s writing offers to psychologists a series of critical perspectives on concepts regularly employed by the discipline, and it assists in the deconstruction of facile appeals to notions of ‘cognition’, ‘drive’ or ‘self’ in which traditional psychology trades. However, academic and popular representations of the Wittgensteinian focus on l...

The terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ often present problems for researchers from a psychology background coming across them for the first time. This is because the terms do not have an easily understood everyday meaning in the way that ‘personality’ or ‘development’ do. This is both a strength and a weakness for critical psychologists, as...

This book is assembled within certain conditions of possibility, and these conditions change over time as what we take to be ‘critical’ at one moment can easily be recuperated at the next. These critical reflections on the issues raised in the course of this book concern not only what the promise of ‘critical discursive psychology’ was, and still i...

Jost and Hardin’s defence of Wittgenstein fails to address the ways in which that writer’s texts function in different discursive contexts to warrant essentialist and relativist positions. The strategy of assembling bits of text from Wittgenstein and Marx to illustrate similarities of perspective is unconvincing, for it neglects the mobilization of...

Relativism in psychology unravels the truth claims and oppressive practices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge has not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline as part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution and problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so th...

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...

Potter et al.’s response to my ‘Against Relativism in Psychology, on Balance’ neatly summarizes what they take a ‘critical realist’ position to be and how ‘relativists’ should defend themselves. Their response also illustrates why the version of critical realism I elaborated is more thoroughly critically relativist than Potter et al. assume and how...

Approaches to language and subjectivity from post-structuralist theory outside psychology and from deconstructive perspectives within counselling and psychotherapy have questioned the way therapeutic relationships are formed in Western culture. Discourse analysis has been developed as a methodological framework to take this questioning further, and...

This chapter is concerned with reflexivity in research and the way research is grounded in the operations of the psy-complex in psychology. A central argument is that qualitative research in general, and a focus on reflexivity in particular, requires theoretical grounding. Distinctions are drawn between ‘uncomplicated subjectivity’, ‘blank subjecti...

This chapter explores recent developments in discursive psychology which have drawn on psychoanalytic theory to produce a new subfield of research known as ‘psychosocial’ studies. I show how the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalysis offers a fruitful way forward for this emerging tradition, addressing questions of ‘indeterminacy’ of discourse, refle...

This chapter outlines some aspects of contemporary ‘critical psychology’ which attempt to locate the discipline of psychology in the ‘psy complex’ and in the context of present-day capitalism and the state. Conceptual resources that critical psychologists draw upon - most notably Marxism and feminism - alert us to the way in which the threat of sta...

This article is concerned with the place of psychotherapy under capitalism. This is addressed using elements of the critique of political economy undertaken by Marx. I also argue that a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy is also necessarily feminist. I include analyses of the “feminisation” of work in order to grasp how value is produ...

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, features a newly written introduction and presents a focused overview of a key topic...

This article explores work that anticipates current interest in the development of ‘psychosocial studies’. Marie Jahoda’s Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology raises important questions about the historical and extant relationships between psychoanalysis and the discipline of psychology. This article traces those questions within two contextual fra...