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Increasingly there have been more and more challenges to received notions of psychological thought and practice. No longer satisfied with old-fashioned positivist approaches, psychologists are following other social sciences in their critiques and methods. Psychology, society and Subjectivity traces the history and development of German critical psychology. Its author, Charles Tolman, charts the initial dissent from mainstream psychology in the late 1960s, to the reconstruction of a psychology that is truly for people, not simply one about people. Drawing on the work of leading figures such as Klaus Holzkamp, Psychology, Society and Subjectivity will need to be read by anyone keen to make psychology relevant without sacrificing its rigour.
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Psychology, Society, and Subjectivity
One result of the European student movements of the late 1960s was a critique of the mainstream, bourgeois social sciences. They were seen as irrelevant to the real needs of ordinary people and as practically and ideologically supporting oppression. The discussions around psychology in Berlin at the time became increasingly focused on whether the discipline could in fact be reformed. Some insisted that any form of institutionalized social science was necessarily oppressive, while others remained optimistic about the possibilities for an emancipatory science. Among the latter was a group under the leadership of Klaus Holzkamp at the Free University who undertook an intensive critique of psychology with a view to identifying and correcting its theoretical and methodological problems and thus laying the groundwork for a genuine ‘critical’ psychology. Psychology, Society, and Subjectivity relates the history of this development, the nature of the group’s critique, its reconstruction of psychology, and its implications for psychological thought and practice. It will be of interest to anyone keen on making psychology more relevant to our lives. Charles Tolman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the editor of Positivism in Psychology (1991) and (with Wolfgang Maiers) Critical Psychology (1991).
Critical Psychology Series editors John Broughton Columbia University, New York David Ingleby Vakgroep KPG, Utrecht Valerie Walkerdine Goldsmiths’ College, London
Since the 1960s there has been widespread disaffection with traditional approaches in psychology, and talk of a ‘crisis’ has been endemic. At the same time, psychology has encountered influential contemporary movements such as feminism, neomarxism, post-structuralism and post-modernism. In this climate, various forms of ‘critical psychology’ have developed vigorously. Unfortunately, such work—drawing as it does on unfamiliar intellectual traditions—is often difficult to assimilate. The aim of the Critical Psychology series is to make this exciting new body of work readily accessible to students and teachers of psychology, as well as presenting the more psychological aspects of this work to a wider social scientific audience. Specially commissioned works from leading critical writers will demonstrate the relevance of their new approaches to a wide range of current social issues. Titles in the series include: The crisis in modern social psychology And how to end it Ian Parker
Rewriting the self History, memory, narrative Mark Freeman
The psychology of the female body Jane M.Ussher
Lev Vygotsky Revolutionary scientist Fred Newman and Lois Holzman
Significant differences Feminism in psychology Corinne Squire
Deconstructing developmental psychology Erica Burman
The mastery of reason Cognitive development and the production of rationality Valerie Walkerdine
The crisis of the self in the age of information Raymond Barglow
Child-care and the psychology of development Elly Sin