critical psychology - is it just jumping on 'critical' bandwagon?

JuliusCaesar

From: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/critpsy/whatis.htm

>For the most part psychology has been uncritically built on ideas that happened to carry weight in the particular cultures in which it developed. Perhaps the two most influential, and disastrous, have been science (as the path to true knowledge) and the individual (as the way of conceptualizing people), but these ideas or are so much part our everyday commonsense that is hard to imagine thinking differently. To do this we need to examine the origins and effects of these ideas, and to try and produce alternatives.

Critical Psychology is precisely this moment of interrupting business as usual and examining psychology from the outside. The critical method entails a suspicion of accepted ideas. To do this Critical Psychology draws on many other disciplines - including history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, politics, economics and everything that can be called cultural studies, including feminism, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, science studies, and all manner of post-structuralisms. Thus Critical Psychology is transdisciplinary: it is both inside and outside of psychology, it borrows and steals useful concepts from wherever they may be found, and it deliberately attempts to make conceptual connections with critical approaches outside the field.<

What's so disasterous about 'science as a path to true knowledge'? What else do we have? I can't help wondering if they're just jumping on the bandwagon of critical psychiatry, which really does have real and urgent issues to address.

Neuro

JuliusCaesar wrote:

What's so disasterous about 'science as a path to true knowledge'? What else do we have? I can't help wondering if they're just jumping on the bandwagon of critical psychiatry, which really does have real and urgent issues to address.

There's nothing worse than this postmodern nonsense. This sort of work is usually undertaken by second rate academics of university arts faculties with far too much time on their hands...

Valmont

"it lacks a sense of the specific social and historical conditions in which it emerged, and how those conditions shaped its concepts, methods, institutions and practices. It believes its own stories about itself because it does not know where they came from."

Having just completed a module in the history of psychology, I would have to completely disagree with this. Of course psychology knows where the "stories" came from, what does he think the history books are full of?

"We refuse to let this rest, because what is wrong is not simply a mistake, a conceptual error, a lack of data, or the failure to implement the necessary programme, but something far deeper and more serious"

Sounds like all this guy has is a hunch and some muddled ideas.

Good thread, thanks.:cool:

Playboy

JuliusCaesar wrote:

What's so disasterous about 'science as a path to true knowledge'? What else do we have? I can't help wondering if they're just jumping on the bandwagon of critical psychiatry, which really does have real and urgent issues to address.

Every scientific enterprise from physics to psychology has assumptions upon which it is based. Try checking out some philosophy of science , philosophy of psychology or the philosophy of mind. Science doesnt necessarly equal truth. A discipline such as critical psychology should be welcomed as it can only help to improve psychology in the long run by challenging the underlying assumptions of psychology

Valmont

Playboy wrote:

Every scientific enterprise from physics to psychology has assumptions upon which it is based. Try checking out some philosophy of science , philosophy of psychology or the philosophy of mind. Science doesnt necessarly equal truth. A discipline such as critical psychology should be welcomed as it can only help to improve psychology in the long run by challenging the underlying assumptions of psychology

I agree but the home page of 'critical psychology' seems to be lacking any real scope or depth and the argument is not presented well.

It seems he has developed some sort of psuedo - sociology idea which seems half baked at that. Also I think the roots of psychology are clear for all to see, as I said before I just did a module on the history of psychology (doesn't make me an expert though) and I really enjoyed finding out how modern psychology developed throughout the ages with the help of many keen scientists.

Obviously my opinion on the subject is somewhat limited but I'm yet to be convinced that this method is the way forward.

Gibs

Valmont wrote:

Of course psychology knows where the "stories" came from, what does he think the history books are full of?

On the contrary, Psychology often does not know where the stories come from. How many people writing theses and doing research are actually going back to original sources for their information? How many times have you seen at the end of an article, a thesis, or a book, references to work by 'founding fathers' of psychology published in the early part of the 20th century or before? Are we expected to believe that the person writing the article/thesis/book actually went back to the original source material in the original language to verify what was in it? What about more recent sources? Are people reading them are is it a case of reporting on what someone else reported on? This might seem like a pedantic or mundane point, but if everyone is using secondary or tertiary sources, then you are inevitably going to get some kind of chinese whispers effect. Context is lost, translations are garbled (most famously with the translation of Id, Ego and Superego) and so-called fundamental, basic tenets become so established that to question them seems foolish, no matter what evidence comes to light.

An old History of Psychology lecturer of mine when I was an undergrad told a story about how he actually went back to view an original source written by Wundt. The lecturer happened to speak German and was able to view the material in its original form, in handwritten manuscript. He realised that there had been an error made in the original translation, which had misrepresented one of Wundt's ideas very badly. He was obviously very excited by this and wrote, and presented a paper to the APA at a conference in the States. He was expecting people to come up to him afterwards and congratulate him on making a very significant discovery that might change the way we understood what Wundt achieved, and might mean that our understanding of what he said would have to be sunstantially revised. However, he was a bit startled to find that there was an uneasy silence after his talk and people did not want to address the substantive issue, which was that a wrong version of events had been peddled and repeated ad nauseum for decades and decades and that noone had actually checked to see if it was correct. He gave lots of other examples that I can't recall now, of original material being altered, edited and misreported and subsequently gaining a life of its own.

I know this is only one small aspect of what critical psychology addresses, but surely, if for no other reason, we could acknowledge its usefulness as an "internal affairs", checks and balances type of thing? Perhaps critical psychiatry has more obvious targets and fundamental philosophical concerns (i.e. to medicate or not? to medicalize or not? to individualise or not?), but no body of knowledge is independent of the social context in which it is created. There should also be concerns about the desk drawer phenomenon, whereby only a tiny fraction of all research conducted ever gets published and you are more likely to get published if you find a difference or a 'something' rather than no news.

I am also a little surprised by the original poster of this thread, who has suggested above that there is perhaps no real need for critical psychology, and yet here, has refered us to two websites that challenge the underlying assumptions made by those who propose that there is some degree of equivalence among some psychotherapies. If we are to maintain a rigorous, scientific integrity about what we accept as viable therapeutic approaches and avoid accepting assumed truths about different therapeutic approaches without subjecting them to the scrutiny of reproducible, evidence-based research, surely we should not shy away from the idea of subjecting the underlying knowledge base and methodologies of Psychology and Science in general, and its assumptions to the same level of scrutiny and analysis? I'm not advocating a rush to relativism and a discarding of science and the scientific method and I am not an apologist for anti-psychiatry or undifferentiated dodo-bird equivalence, but all of science is currently going through a re-appraisal of its methods, assumptions and social-constructions, so why should Psychology be any different? Baby and bathwater notwithstanding, I think it is reasonable for science to be reflexive, even if that means questioning things that seem self-evident. The original post here expressed the concern in terms of "what else do we have?", which almost sounds like an appeal to faith! Change doesn't have to be extreme, but if we ignore the various contexts within which knowledge is generated and don't try to account for, or at least acknowledge that, these contexts have a very significant impact on the nature and quality of the knowledge and understanding we have, then we at least run the risk of being taken in by our implicit, perhaps untested assumptions.

Valmont

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"For the most part psychology has been uncritically built on ideas that happened to carry weight in the particular cultures in which it developed."

I agree on this point, Freudian theories being the perfect example of social context having a strong influence on the resulting ideas and methods. This is also applicable to many other psychological theories, some I encountered during my history module like Maslow and humanistic psychology.

Conversly I don't think that the social and historical context of the time held much influence in corrupting the work of Fechner or Ebbinghaus among others. Fechner had an idea, he performed the experiments, he calculated the data and formulated his theory. Somehow I don't think that trawling through his original texts would yield any ground breaking new evidence that shows us we actually got it all wrong.

I think critical psychology is necessary, like Gibs said:

Gibs wrote:

If we are to maintain a rigorous, scientific integrity about what we accept as viable therapeutic approaches and avoid accepting assumed truths about different therapeutic approaches without subjecting them to the scrutiny of reproducible, evidence-based research, surely we should not shy away from the idea of subjecting the underlying knowledge base and methodologies of Psychology and Science in general...

Wundt was unfortunate in the representation his work received, partly owing to his student Titchener, who doctored some of Wundts work during translation to fit some of his own ideas. And obviously there more mistakes like the one mentioned above.

I am sure there are far more misinterpretations of various works that are taken for granted and used today and questioning these assumptions can only help psychology. In fact I learned during the year in my experimental design class to beware of knowledge acquired by "tenacity" that is, something that is accepted as true solely because it has been repeated over and over for a long time.

The critical psychology home page just seemed a bit too subversive for my liking, "psychology has responded with an erratic combination of ineffectual concern, wilful ignorance and willing collaboration". I think we should always be questioning and reassessing the methods and underlying assumptions of psychology but one or two enlightening discoveries that may disprove certain modern theories shouldn't lead us to adopt a mistrusting attitude to modern psychology.