A Critical Psychology

If the reader will excuse a brief anecdote from my own intellectual history, I would like to use it as an introduction to this book. In 1957, I was a sophomore at an undergraduate liberal arts college major­ ing in medieval history. This was the year that we were receiving our first introduction to courses in philosophy, and I took to this study with a passion. In pursuing philosophy, I discovered the area called "philosophical psychology," which was a Thomistic category of inquiry. For me, "philosophical psychology" meant a more intimate study of the soul (psyche), and I immediately concluded that psychology as a discipline must be about this pursuit. This philosophical interest led me to enroll in my first introductory psychology course. Our text for this course was the first edition of Ernest Hilgaard's Introduction to Psychology. My reasons for entering this course were anticipated in the introductory chapter of Hilgaard's book, where the discipline and its boundaries were discussed, and this introduction was to disabuse me of my original intention for enrolling in the course. I was to learn that, in the 20th century, people who called themselves psychologists were no longer interested in perennial philosophical questions about the human psyche or person. In fact, these philosophical questions were considered to be obscurantist and passe. Psychology was now the "scientific" study of human behavior. This definition of psychology by Hilgaard was by no means idiosyncratic to this introductory textbook.

Contenu

1 Metaphors of Understanding: A Critical Introduction.- Metaphors of Understanding.- The Mechanical Metaphor.- The Organic Metaphor.- The Personal Metaphor.- Prospectus.- 2 Human Expression: A Relational Act.- Prologue.- Expression.- Loose Ends: Habits and the Unconscious.- Summary.- 3 The Personal World: A Relational Event, a Cultural Reality.- Individualism: An Impediment.- The Personal World as a Relational Totality.- The Personal World as a Metaphor of Communication.- Integrative Components of a Personal World.- Summary.- 4 Personal World, Cultural Forms, and the Structures of Class, Gender, Ethnicity, and Age.- Power, Agency, and Domination.- Class as a Structure of Domination.- Class, Cultural Form, and Ethnicity.- Gender and Domination.- Age and Class Dynamics.- Conclusion.- 5 Interpretation.- The Personal World as a Text.- The Problem of Mediation and the Paradoxes of Psychological Interpretation.- The Hermeneutic or Interpretive Spiral.- 6 Critical Interpretation.- Emancipatory Psychology and Its Relation to a Critical Theory of Society.- Psychology in the Social Order.- Cause and Intention.- 7 Adequacy of Interpretation.- The Problem of Multiple Horizons.- Study 1: The Rules of Disorder.- Study 2: Learning to Labour.- Adequacy of the Accounts: A Comparison.- Method Revisited.