Critical Psychology

Critical psychology has emerged as a vibrant site of research and reflection on the assumptions and practices of its host discipline. As serious scholarship flourishes in the area as never before, this new collection from the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to map the terrain. In four volumes, Critical Psychology is an accessible database which brings together foundational and the best and most influential cutting-edge materials, including key works produced before the term ‘critical psychology’ gained wide currency but which anticipate approaches now included under that rubric.

The collection is organized thematically. Volume I assembles vital research to examine and explore how critical psychology turns the gaze of the psychologist back upon the discipline. The volume includes influential critiques of the limits of dominant models, concepts, and methodological approaches. Volume II, meanwhile, focuses on the contradictions and spaces for resistance to such dominant assumptions in the discipline. The materials gathered here address the way mainstream psychology is structured, and show how it is possible to turn the incoherence of psychological research into a strength for critical work, bringing out contradictions in order to highlight new readings of phenomena described in different sub-fields of the discipline. Volume III goes beyond academic and professional psychology to study how psychology has recruited academics and professionals who use its ideas and appeal to its theories to back up their own programmes of normalization and pathologization. The work brought together in final volume interrogates the everyday, commonsensical psychology that people use around the world and demonstrates how this provides the basis for the deconstruction of psychology. The research collected here illustrates how individuals can draw upon the variety of different theories about our own different psychologies to interrupt and subvert the dominant stories that are told by many academic and professional psychologists.

With a detailed and comprehensive introduction and commentary to each volume, Critical Psychology is destined to be welcomed as an essential work of reference and a crucial research tool.