Criticism and Psychology: the Understanding with a Postmodern Psychology

Abstract

Frequently, “critical psychologies” question the ideological and political framework that develops and legitimizes certain mainstream psychology. Nevertheless, it is still a field of knowledge which has not been fully differentiated from its crisis—mainly—because an exhaustive ontological categorical demand has not been made. From the analysis of Ian Parker’s critical discourse psychology (CDP) and critical psychology, we observed the causes and consequences of the introduction of scientific realism as an intermediate stage in the elaboration of what has been called radical metapsychological project or a general critic of psychology. We reviewed, from the quantitative method multi-RPYS references, an approximate of 51 papers and 10 books of Ian Parker’s work analyzed by the web program RPYS i/o. From the start, CDP and PCL avoided the short form of the critic, which is barely a differentiation from the totality of dominant psychology. Instead, they announced, implicitly, some methodological and theoretical tools which could be useful to prevent its definite adhesion to postmodernism, where “anything goes” is its most manifest condition.