Critical Psychology as Cultural-Historical Psychology: Political Dimensions and Limitations of Psychological Knowledge

Abstract

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 ‘critical psychology’ is always already necessarily social and that as a form of critical cultural-historical psychology, it is always already necessarily political. This political nature of cultural-historical psychology needs to be clarified, however, and to be contrasted with the ways in which ‘politics’ is sometimes understood in ‘community psychology’. In this chapter I address questions of ‘alienation’, the ways critical psychology configures itself as a response to mainstream psychology as an ideological warrant for capitalism. I describe emerging areas of research in critical psychology, taking the particular example of critical psychology in Britain to illustrate the opportunities and dangers to our concern with social justice as intimately linked with anti-capitalist struggle.