Psychology through Critical Auto-Ethnography. Academic Discipline, Professional Practice and Reflexive History

Introduction: Control and confession  PART I: STUDYING PSYCHOLOGY  1. Experiments: Cold method  2. Cognition: Sex and race  3. Biology: Performing animals  4. Science: Breaking up madness  PART II: PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH  5. Paradigms: Performing student  6. Perception: Boxed beetles  7. Analysis: The continental selection  8. Social: What is a dissertation?  PART III: TEACHING PSYCHOLOGY  9. Empirical: Mapping the quadrangle  10. Personality: Behaving badly  11. Conflict: War and peace in the subject  12. Discourse: Tall tales about power  PART IV: GOING CRITICAL  13. Development: Cults and discourse units  14. Psychiatry: On the campus  15. Constructionism: Assessment and appointment  16. Evolutionary: Realistic and critical too  PART V: INSTITUTIONAL CRISES  17. Quantitative: Administrative and personal   18. Qualitative: Watching them watching us  19. Stress: Discipline and publish  20. Management: Big P and little p  Afterword and acknowledgements  Bibliography  Index

This unique book is an insider account about the discipline of psychology and its limits, introducing key debates in the field of psychology around the world today by closely examining the problematic role the discipline plays as a global phenomenon.

Ian Parker traces the development of ‘critical psychology’ through an auto-ethnographic narrative in which the author is implicated in what he describes, laying bare the nature of contemporary psychology. In five parts, each comprising four chapters, the book explores the student experience, the world of psychological research, how psychology is taught, how alternative critical movements have emerged inside the discipline, and the role of psychology in coercive management practices. Providing a detailed account of how psychology actually operates as an academic discipline, it shows what teaching in higher education and immersion in research communities around the world looks like, and it culminates in an analytic description of institutional crises which psychology provokes.

A reflexive history of psychology’s recent past as a discipline and as a cultural force, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone thinking of taking up a career in psychology, and for those reflecting critically on the role the discipline plays in people’s lives.

Ian Parker is Fellow of the British Psychological Society, Emeritus Professor of Management at the University of Leicester, and Co-Director of the Discourse Unit, where he is Managing Editor of Annual Review of Critical Psychology.