Its [this book's] main purpose is 'to show how psychology can be done differently.' From a standpoint which views knowledge as produced and reproduced within specific historical conditions and power relations, Wendy Hollway criticizes the 'almost intentional blindness of psychology to its own conditions of production.'
She describes her own method in her research on subjectivity and gender difference as well as the subjective, cultural and theoretical conditions within which it was developed. She outlines a theory of how meaning is achieved within discourses and discusses how the theory can be used to understand and analyse accounts and their production.
She explains how her theory helped her to understand the production and reproduction of gender difference in adult relations. Then, using a framework which connects psychodynamic processes, power relations and gender-differentiated positions, she analyses the production of a range of mainstream psychologies.
Central to the book is a radical reappraisal of the concept of subjectivity and its use as a tool for psychological understanding. The author concludes with an analysis of the way in which gender difference and subjectivity are involved in dominant concepts of psychology as a science. She explores the implications of this analysis for feminist psychology and other psychologies with emancipatory goals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)