Discourse Analysis: Dimensions of Critique in Psychology

Abstract

Discourse analysis in psychology provides a range of conceptual and methodological resources for thinking critically about the discipline of psychology. These conceptual and methodological resources also reorient researchers in the discipline away from a search for causes of behaviour inside the head of individuals to social contexts in which human beings construct and challenge what have been presented to them as “facts” about their nature or possibilities for change. It is for this reason that discourse analysis has sometimes even been treated as synonymous with critical psychology or has operated as a code word for politically progressive alternative approaches to subjectivity. This article organises the many different ways of doing discourse analysis into eight approaches at four different levels in which we move from the micro level of analysis to more social macro levels of work. This enables us also to review connections with critical psychological approaches and, more broadly, with dimensions of critique in research.