Erica Burman was born in Liverpool, as the granddaughter of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She has lived in Manchester since her doctoral studies, and those community and social links have been important resources supporting the activist research she has been able to undertake. When telling her story, Erica Burman says she never planned to become a critical psychologist, nor to take up the field of feminist psychology. As an undergraduate she got involved in cognitive studies, an area dominated at the time by computational models of mind and the beginning of AI. She started to grasp the extent to which science is at times dominated by politics. At the time she was also studying philosophy of the mind, which—via its interrogation of terms, language and logic—led her to take a critical perspective on psychology. Another source of inspiration for skeptical analysis of what she found in psychology was the range of professional practitioners she taught when she started to teach developmental psychology. As she puts it, it was from them that she learned to critically think and look at the practice of psychology. To this day she feels that applied psychology should be continually analyzed in terms of how much it comes to people’s aid, and how much it constitutes an extension of oppressive social practices. In defining herself as a critical and feminist psychologist, she emphasizes at the same time that these are not separate sub-disciplines of our field, and does not think it necessary to create them (since arguably critical psychologists try to dismantle rather than build psychology). It is simply an attitude or posture that makes it possible to look at the theory and practice of psychology differently.
One of her more important and influential works is the 1994 book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, which has now seen three editions published (most recently in 2017, with a second edition of her Developments: Child, Image, Nation now in press). Deconstructing Developmental Psychology is a critical evaluation of mainstream theories of child development and drew upon feminist theory to show how this aspect of psychology serves to regulate family behavior, marginalize working class and minority ethnic women and pathologize their experience as mothers. The book covers the spectrum of dominant approaches in psychology and finds each of them wanting. Erica Burman examines in the book specific cultural assumptions that give rise to different forms of psychology and provides new ways of thinking about the situation of children in contemporary society.
Many later studies by Burman have been devoted to representations of children and to the relations between different kinds of development (hence the second book, Developments: Child, Image, Nation). Continuing critical examination of the role of developmental psychology, she turned to study the way images of children are used in connection with the “developing” world. She has also focused her research on the question of how such images of women and children hold in place models of the “progress” of the development of the nation state and directed several national and transnational projects on service support for minority ethnic women facing state and interpersonal violence (informed by these perspectives). Her current work explores postcolonial and decolonization perspectives as they inform ideas about children and development in the sense of both individual and economic development—that is, as practiced in national and international policies and in pedagogies.
Burman is not only a declared feminist psychologist. She also has questioned cultural assumptions in second wave feminism and has often drawn on anti-racist debates. She has directed attention to the way the position of women is closely connected with the position of cultural minorities. Burman is best known as a developmental psychologist and theorist of women’s studies, but many of her publications have also been concerned with radical developments in methodology. Her study of different ways of carrying out research has been a powerful resource for feminist psychologists, but beyond that the impact has been felt in discourse analysis, critical psychology and critical mental health.
Erica Burman works also as a group analyst, and much of her work has been done in cooperation with a new generation of researchers working in psychology and in similar disciplines, as well as with practitioners. Among the many books co-written and edited by Erica Burman are Challenging Women: Psychology’s Exclusions, Feminist Possibilities and Psychology Discourse Practice: From Regulation to Resistance, practical expressions of this critical feminist work.
In terms of collaborative research projects, she has devoted much energy to such issues as suicide and self-harm, domestic violence, challenging the racism of immigration controls and the ways poor communities are further stigmatized by cuts in welfare support. Burman was a co-founder (with Ian Parker) of the Discourse Unit, and the website of this research unit provides open access to a number of publications.
Probably the first significant critical trend in our field which employed deconstruction as a method on a large scale, although probably not in a very systematic manner, was anti-psychiatry. How do you, as an adherent of critical psychology and a supporter of deconstruction, evaluate the achievements of this movement in retrospect?
To be honest, I wouldn’t have identified anti-psychiatry directly with deconstruction, but it’s an interesting connection. As a critical feminist psychologist, I have some mixed feeling about anti-psychiatry, not least that—since it was always led by psychiatrists—it paradoxically reinforced the role of psychiatric (male) authority. It therefore reconstructed, as much as deconstructed, psychiatry—albeit also helping usher in some other discourses and practices. The democratic psychiatry movement inspired by political developments in Trieste, Italy, while not maintained entirely, certainly showed how coercive institutions produce the phenomena they need to regulate. Hence if the threat of coercive treatment or incarceration is reduced, then the need for those measures is dramatically reduced. This goes for medication practices too.
In your opinion, did the activity of anti-psychiatrists also have any negative effects?
Lots. In dominating the domain of critiques of psychiatric models and practices, it was rather weak and limited, and many key proponents still subscribed to very normative and individualist models of mental health and the organization of social relations (as in labor, etc., individual responsibility).
Just a few weeks before our conversation, the premiere of Susannah Cahalan’s book The Great Pretender (2019) took place, which casts doubt on the veracity of the experiment by David Rosenhan involving sending pseudo-patients to psychiatric hospitals in the USA. This high-profile experiment commonly associated with the anti-psychiatry movement has ushered in revolutionary changes in the treatment of mental illness. What do you think about the discoveries made by Cahalan?
Well the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says “truth has the structure of fiction”… So something made up can still be informative… But of course this speaks to a different kind of truth from the one that positivist empiricists like. Of course it was useful to refer to Rosenhan’s accounts but such anecdotes as the ones he wrote about have wider resonance which is why it was so influential. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter so much. And it could be said that experiments, too, have the pedagogical structure of parables in the style of their narration…
Can we draw any constructive conclusions from the experience of the anti-psychiatry movement as to future activity involving the application of deconstruction?
When we ran day conferences at our university in partnership with the Hearing Voices Movement, inspired by the work of the Dutch social psychiatrist Marius Romme (Romme and Escher 1989), we saw this as a form of practical deconstruction. On the panel, speaking about the experience of hearing voices was a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, but also a shaman and a spiritualist. The accounts of experts by training (all trained in very different expertise) and experts by experience (including psychiatric system survivors) were situated alongside each other, with no single one privileged. Instead each was one relativized, and the dominant accounts (such as the psychiatric one) were correspondingly destabilized from its hegemonic position and shown to be merely one position among various. This shows how deconstruction is a practical activity undertaken collectively by people, including those oppressed by practices of power; and how this practical activity can produce change in models of mental health practice—as indeed the Hearing Voices Movement has done, worldwide.
At this point in our conversation, the question about your attitude to psychiatric categories of mental illness and diagnostic textbooks such as DSM or ICD arises.
I see these as historical documents that testify to the cultural and political preoccupations of their times (think of how “homosexuality” was only removed as a “pathology” in 1973, and by postal vote). Also reflecting prevailing orientations, the early editions of the DSM were psychoanalytically-informed, the later ones behavioral, and now there are alignments neuroscientific accounts. In general, I am suspicious of the tie-up between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and it is regrettable that it dominates psychological thinking. Personally, I do not find the psychiatric labels helpful or convincing (even if some people so labeled find some comfort in those labels, as we discuss elsewhere in this interview), and the medical model can disempower people and be used to deny their human rights, while the so-called treatments can disable people from being able to deal with their difficulties. I would much prefer to talk of distress or suffering than mental illness, though as Frantz Fanon argued even where distress is produced by social conditions (of oppression or marginalization) this will still be experienced in specific ways and need to be engaged with in the light of individual, idiosyncratic associations, perceptions and circumstances. In relation to the status of the DSM, my views are certainly not atypical. The Division of Clinical Psychologists (the group of professional psychologists who work most closely on the terrain of psychiatry) of the British Psychological Society have refused to adopt the DSM V, and in 2018 put forward their own approach of formulation instead. While not official policy of the whole Division, they also published an important document that offers a coherent alternative model of and approach to working with distress (or mental illness/pathology), which they call the Power, Threat, Meaning Framework. This sees distress as a response to threat experienced in unequal or oppressive conditions, and works with the meanings of these experiences via narrative approaches. For the authors of that document, this is a progressive psychological intervention. For me, it indicates a way out of psychology altogether.
I started our conversation asking about these historical events because the critical approach and method of deconstruction are still poorly known, sometimes distorted, and when referring to quite well-known events I am convinced that readers will find it easier to understand what we are talking about. But let’s move on to contemporary issues. When I observe public debates regarding issues involving children, I have the irresistible impression that they are almost always treated as someone’s property. Some parents refuse to vaccinate their children, claiming that nobody can impose decisions as to what they do with them. On the other hand, the state sometimes takes on the role of a policeman who takes “property” away from parents in order to manage their well-being as they see fit. The same applies to education. Decisions are always made for them by someone else. Do you think that children have any chance of any kind of autonomy at all? What does critical psychology offer in this respect?
I cannot speak for critical psychology, as this means different things in different times and places (necessarily so, as it is constructed in relation to other kinds of psychology and social practices operating in a range of socio-political conditions). In relation to this specific question, as someone working on the border of developmental psychology and childhood studies, these are vital and urgent considerations but not ones that are easily answered in simple binary terms (of yes or no). But here goes. Of course children exercise forms of autonomy and need to be recognized as doing so. Quite how they do so, and how they should be enabled to do so, requires some complex thinking about our models of how agency and autonomy—as well as functioning as significant ideological tropes—are actually practiced in relational and interdependent relationships. In this sense, I see this as a general question for us all, not just for children—even though children may function as a key expression of such relational and interdependent dynamics and relations (as proxies, property, or as sentimentalized, nostalgic representations of our lost selves, etc.). This is why I have formulated the approach I call “child as method” to see theories and practices around children and childhood as a way of diagnosing wider sets of issues and relationships at play (Burman 2019a).
Could you say something more about the “child as method” approach? This is a quite new approach and I am afraid that perhaps not all of our readers are familiar with this.
I’m sure your readers won’t be, as it is a new framework that I have generated recently. I draw upon recent postcolonial and anticapitalist analyses, such as Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) Asia as Method, and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s (2013) Border as Method to offer an analytic framework for considering the relationships between models of childhood and other sociocultural and historical axes produced under particular geopolitical conditions. This is an intervention both from and in childhood studies, bringing insights from social theory to interpret the position of children, and the meanings accorded childhood, as not only significant issues worthy of attention in their own terms and for their educational, psychological or legal implications (for example), but also as inflecting and reflecting—in a mutually constitutive way—more general relations of power, privilege and oppression. So I am formulating “child as method” as a way of reading the implication of modes of childhood within those broader socio-political relations. In my book I have explicated how this approach might work through analysis of the writings of the revolutionary anticolonial psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, in particular tracing through the ways discourses of childhood contribute to form racism (and I specifically address this to the current situation of Brexit) (Burman 2018a, 2019a). Elsewhere I have attempted to illustrate its fruitfulness as a resource alongside but also offering a critical commentary on cultural historical and activity theory (Burman 2018b). I have applied to formulate a more democratic open pedagogical approach to the study of childhood using visual methods (Burman 2019b) and—with a colleague—to explore how the domain of nonformal, out of school educational contexts can illuminate the history and current practice of what we understand by schooling, and its limits (Burman and Miles 2018). I am fortunate to be working with some talented doctoral students who are now developing “child as method” to apply to practices of datafication in early childhood education (Pierlejewski 2018, 2019), to inform a cross-national study of early childhood educational practices in China, Hong Kong and Singapore (Zhou et al., in press), and to interpret current debates on educational practices around transgender children as offering a lens on contemporary social and educational understandings. Moreover, the newly emerging research on postsocialist childhoods (Silova et al. 2017, 2018) is developing this perspective further.
In recent times there has been much discussion about what is considered the medicalization and psychologization of childhood. In the last few decades, completely new diagnostic categories have emerged, such as ADHD, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, etc. In your opinion, are these tools based on normative assumptions that aim to “trim down” individuals to the needs of our systems, or by making such diagnoses, are we rather discovering real problems and helping children in their development?
Here you are setting up an opposition that is—for better or worse—untenable. Yes, I think that these new(ish) childhood diagnoses may well work as ways of policing and regulating, constructing even, compliant appropriate childhoods. The rise (and rise) of ADHD under conditions of intensification of schooling and knowledge-based economies seems to support this. On the other hand, there is also no question but that these labels also produce the forms of experience they identify. Ian Hacking (drawing on Foucault) calls this the “looping effect,” and describes this very well in terms of how we (children and adults) become invested in such descriptions (Hacking 1995). Hence the answer to your question is yes and yes, but neither should be seen as a good thing.
This opposition is not something I fabricated. It exists in the minds of my many parents, educators and teachers, people I often talk with. I’m afraid your answer “yes and yes” may not be very practical for them. Is there any practical way to break out of this cycle?
I think it is helpful to see how we come to identify with and invest in available forms of categorization in ways that become personally meaningful; that is, they subjectify us. Attending to this process at least gives the chance of being able to notice what is happening and so allow people to take some critical distance from these, or propose alternatives. The rise of the discourse of neurodiversity, for example, suggests that counterdiscourses to the mainstream medical approaches are flourishing.
Perhaps a not so common but nevertheless very serious problem is that of children in court as witnesses. What are your thoughts on this?
What about it? I don’t see that children as witnesses pose significantly more problematic issues than adults as witnesses. Many of the same phenomena noted about children are just as present in adults (e.g., feeling under pressure to formulate answers to silly questions when they are posed by authority figures; interpreting being asked the same question twice as meaning that your first answer was wrong, both of which were criticisms levelled at Piagetian research long ago, but documented in adults too). But a key problem that this question highlights is the mutual relation of circular legitimation between psychology and the law: Normative conceptions formulated in one domain get taken up as unproblematic in the other, and so each domain—perceived as independent—confirms the authority of the other. This has been called “developmental psycho-legalism” (Cordero Arce 2012, 2015). Not only does this naturalize what is a very contingent body of psychological knowledge and understanding about children’s competences, capacities and susceptibilities to influence (or compliance), but it also confirms the moral-political order as inscribing those developmental norms and trajectories.
Are there any solutions applied somewhere in the world you know of that would prevent or at least limit this psycho-legalism?
In fact it’s the other way round. This is happening at the transnational level and contributes what amounts to the globalization of specific cultural-political norms and practices around children and childhood. It’s there in UNICEF policies, in World Bank documents and so on. Limiting or preventing this is a matter of local resistance and critical and cross-disciplinary transnational solidarity work between academics and activists.
In subsequent editions of Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, you point to a number of issues concerning not only childhood, but also development processes in adults. Which of them do you consider to be the most urgently in need of solutions at the moment?
Poverty, racism, war, inequality, oppression, neocolonialism, displacement, impending climate catastrophe—shall I go on? I guess this is not the order of issue or problem that you meant, but really it is these that we need to attend to, in the sense of addressing how psychology and other disciplines of normalization and pathologization engage supportively with these issues instead of propping up those regimes and systems that contribute to and maintain them.
Here your views coincide with those of some of my other interlocutors, who also stress that psychology should focus more on issues that are central to our field. In your opinion, is it enough to change the subject of the research, or is it necessary to change the methods we currently use?
Clearly both, as well as to change who “we” are. That is, who gets to become psychologists and who comes to represent the discipline… In British universities, students across many disciplines are asking questions about “why are all my professors white?” and “why is my curriculum white?” Psychology has a problematic recent history as being seen as a feminized discipline (although as I note in my book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology it wasn’t always like that!), and I suppose I have benefitted from becoming a teacher and researcher at a particular historical moment and in a particular geographical location which—after significant struggle—managed to be more receptive to feminist arguments. However, the absence of black and minority faces and voices in our departments speaks to the limits of the discipline and reproduces its exclusions. Clearly I am not just saying we need more diverse people to become psychologists—there’s much more than that needed—but it would be a start.
Let’s discuss some more general topics for a moment. For a few years now, there has been heated discussion about a crisis in psychology, and the term “replication” is eagerly used to describe it. I am convinced that this crisis is much more serious and goes far beyond the problem of the replicability of research results. But when reading the work of psychologists like yourself, who take a critical approach, one’s eyes are opened to additional issues that don’t even occur to someone educated in traditional academic psychology. In your opinion, what are the main problems facing modern psychology?
The “crisis” in psychology ushered in many fruitful critical debates and resources. I don’t see “replication” as big problem, but as an impossible project indicating the omnipotent desires of psychologists. As social theorists (from Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler onwards) have been saying for some time, even repetition does not reproduce similarity. There is always difference, of time, of space. Re-iteration is not simply iteration. The quest for prediction and control engages with a pitifully reduced model of the world and phenomena that the criticism of lack of “ecological validity” scarcely names. Even seeking generalizability cannot stand as a criterion without much further elaboration, explicating what is being generalized, why and how—and once you do that all the complexity and indeterminacy of everyday material social life lived in specific historical geopolitical conditions flood in. As a reflexive discipline, subjectivity—or what positivists try to screen out or characterize as “bias” or “volunteer effects”—always insinuates inside the traditional measures. In my opinion, the more “objective” psychology tries to go—into neuroscience, for example—the more we see subjective experimenter and interpreter effects creeping back in unacknowledged. (But fortunately some commentators—both critical theorists and neuroscientists themselves—are on to this.) As feminist scientists, including philosophers and historians of science, have said for many years: There is no view from nowhere; all knowledge is situated and partial—partial in the double sense of being perspectival (and so necessarily aligned) but also thereby incomplete. Psychologists need to give up the project of grand universal claims to knowledge that not only prop up oppressive institutions (that require such models relying on normative developmental models, such as early intervention programs, etc.) but also on closer scrutiny fall flat on their faces because of logical incoherence.
What ways of solving these problems do critical psychology propose?
There isn’t a unified critical psychology, so I guess there would be lots of proposals of ways to answer this question. Some critical psychologists would rework or apply existing psychological concepts and methods differently, to come up with different practices. Others would start from a different place, building new psychological concepts and tools from other—less oppressive or tainted (if that’s possible)—cultural backgrounds to formulate different modes of partnership and activity. This is where some varieties of critical psychology share a background with critical social psychology and community psychology. Others would want to refuse the use of any psychological concepts or practices, while still others would focus on exploring the complex history of how psychology came to take the forms that it has. There has been valuable conceptual, methodological and practical work on all these fronts.
The way in which we psychologists present certain issues has an impact on social practices. For example, the hydraulic model of emotion, taken from psychoanalysis, which says that suppressed emotions must someday escape and somehow be resolved, is still present in our culture and constitutes a kind of explanation, or sometimes even an excuse, for many violent acts. There are many more similar thought constructs that have migrated from science to everyday language and thinking. Some of them are very harmful and dangerous. Which of them would you consider the most salient and why?
Sorry, I don’t accept or recognize that model of emotion as psychoanalytic at all. But yes all kinds of bowdlerized ideas get taken up in everyday and policy discourse. Much of my work has been focused on trying to problematize the apparently banal incontestable “truths” of development that inscribe not only textbooks of child development but also policies on national and international development. So much of this is seen as “commonsense,” and that commonsense not only comes from the popularization of psychology into everyday life (although this also does happen, within increasingly psychologized cultures) but these commonsense assumptions (about gender, heterosexuality, culture, etc.) enter psychological models too.
Do you think that we should focus on the difficulty caused in psychological research by the presence of colloquial psychological concepts?
Yes! Because what it shows is that psychological research is necessarily, inevitably implicated in and structured by those everyday ideas and practices. They can’t just be stripped away. Plus acknowledging this exposes the sham of peddling back to people, in the name of psychological expertise, what are in fact just dressed up versions of commonsense ideas they already know. David Ingleby said it so well, long ago: an originator of the notion of the “psy complex,” pointed out in an early critique “Psychologists claim to be social engineers, but turn out to really maintenance men” (1972, p. 57).
Both critical and feminist psychology are often met with criticism, sometimes quite harsh. Looking at what you do from the other side of the barricade, is there any particular type of criticism aimed at you that you feel is particularly serious and justified?
Again, I don’t see there as being a barricade; or if so then there must be many as there are so many debates and discussions. But, yes, there are of course criticisms that need to be taken seriously. A first one that I have long encountered is that such criticisms are all about being negative, and do not offer anything positive. Actually this is one that I can empathize with but don’t really rate as a major problem as in my view critique has to stand irrespective of solving the problems identified. Indeed Foucault offered a key response here, highlighting how moving too quickly to solutions threatens to reproduce the same problem (Foucault 1977). (This is also the problem with utopian thinking in general.) It also arises from a fundamental misunderstanding that sees being critical as being negative. Closely following this criticism is the claim that critical psychologists work only at the level of theory and don’t change practice. Actually, this is far from the case. Indeed it’s largely the other way round. It is already existing practices that have inspired the critical theorizing, often as an act of solidarity or partnership work in which the critical psychologists learn from the practitioners. So, for example, the various projects that I have been involved with—whether on transnational dynamics of violence against women and children, or local projects on impacts of welfare benefit cuts—have inspired my conceptual and theoretical work rather than the other way round. I take very seriously claims of indirectly maintaining or legitimating oppressive knowledge structures. But this is a condition of life as critical academic working in a University in a global metropolitan center. One is always compromised and complicit. Claims of irrelevance don’t bother me much—I’d rather be understood to do nothing much, than do loads of damage.
If psychologists finally cease to take the reproduction of mental terms in everyday life as evidence for their existence as causal entities, will psychology then turn into textual analysis?
As a materialist, I don’t see problematizing models of causality as turning all psychology into textual analysis. We are way off being able to say anything about causes in psychology, I think. On the other hand, it depends on the model of textual analysis. I subscribe to a model of discourse that sees these as systems of meaning grounded in history, economics and geography; while the material world can only be apprehended through representational systems structured by those features. The question of what the proper domain of psychology is or could be outside the colonial, liberal bourgeois, heterosexist conditions that gave rise to it remains open.
In your opinion, is it possible to combine the post-structuralist and realistic approaches in psychology? What would such a post-deconstructive psychology look like?
I don’t accept that opposition between post-structuralist and realist approaches. Your question seems to suffer from the presumption that reconstruction would be a good thing, which—as I indicated above—I cannot accept. Instead, I guess there will be new forms of critical psychology that will emerge in relation to, and hopefully to counter, the non-critical varieties. If past experience is anything to go by, much of these will come from other disciplines and practices.
In 2018, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian exposed their large-scale hoax in an attempt to ridicule what they called “grievance studies” (News at a glance 2018). In their opinion, areas dealing with discriminated social groups have been consumed by intellectual “corruption” for some time now. It is sufficient to dress up absurd or even immoral hypotheses or data into political and ideological jargon fashionable in certain milieus in order for them to be printed in prestigious magazines, and consequently to influence public opinion and politicians. Pranksters? Whistle blowers warning us against the invasion of science by ideology? Or maybe hooligans who tried to tear down important ideas? What are your feelings about this incident and its consequences?
Actually I do have some small bit of sympathy for the descriptor “grievance studies,” even though it can work appallingly to delegitimize experiences of oppression and marginalization. But how does this come to operate in a zero-sum world that presumes either that all grievances are legitimate, or they aren’t? Isn’t “grievance” too reduced and psychologized a description that already denies objective, material conditions of oppression? Do we not all carry with us effects of injury that demand attention, to be grieved over if not to be a source of grievance? Even though (as in the discussion of Hacking above) I might be concerned about what the investment in “victim” or “aggrieved” identities might do, it’s important not to blame the victims further. Rather, the issue is the cultural conditions that produce such invested identities, alongside a misconceived model of identity politics that threatens to delegitimize group mobilizations on the basis of oppression. But, you know, even if this was a hoax at the level of international journals, such phenomena smack to me of being very USA, and like the US domination of Anglophone psychology, and globalized further, its influence has spread. It may be that arenas dealing with discriminated groups have been corrupted by the bowdlerized discourse they have mobilized, but whose responsibility is this? As you would guess from my earlier responses, I don’t see science and ideology as separable, and indeed would challenge the ideology of scientificity that underlies traditional psychology. So rather than eliding the issue and the arena, I’d see this particular prank as a commentary on the gullibility and market pressures on the ever accelerating publishing industry, rather than about this specific topic (albeit it is the latter which has gained it its publicity). It is deeply troubling and indicative of the right wing alliances at play if this is interpreted as a warrant to disregard work attending to experiences of oppression and efforts to challenge and redress these.
I have asked all my interviewees about the most significant achievements of our field. I am very curious about your response. Do you perceive them in the achievements of traditional academic psychology, or rather in what critical psychology has developed?
I can’t say I identify with any one field. I’m as much at home (or homeless) in history, development studies, feminist studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, education, childhood studies, critical psychoanalysis—including psychosocial studies, as in psychology. On the other hand, I absolutely defend my claim to be a psychologist, and speak as a psychologist. It is, after all my intellectual history and biographical disciplinary trajectory (which also, by the way, includes cognitive science). As a critical psychologist, I see psychology as having been very successful in getting itself allied with practices of power of all kinds. The project of critical psychology must be to expose and oppose this.
What achievements of critical psychology do we enjoy on a daily basis without even being aware of it?
Mainly critical (and uncritical) psychologists are beneficiaries of all kinds of other critical, transformative work undertaken by countless others that we are often unaware of. Since we started off talking about anti-psychiatry, I’d say one obvious example would be the way approaches to working with people who are sometimes described as psychotic, schizophrenic or having visual or auditory hallucinations are now transformed by the hearing voices movement. However, it is the fate—under existing conditions of power relations—that such interventions become amenable to recuperation. Hence, having won the argument that people can “recover” from such experiences, we now have paradigms of recovery that are normalized that demand that people return to work and be compliant, economically active neoliberal citizens. We should therefore expect that an intervention that, in one time or place, has been transformative, might in another become reconstructed as oppressive or unhelpful. As you can see, I don’t subscribe to a linear narrative of (social as well as individual) progress.
What are the greatest challenges facing psychology in the twenty-first century?
Making itself redundant. It has been too successful as worming its way into practices of power. Whether and how it could be part of emancipatory practices (rather than simply appropriating and depoliticizing its language and approaches) is a different, big question.
And what challenges and questions have you set yourself?
Most recently, I have been revisiting the work of the revolutionary psychiatrist and social theorist Frantz Fanon, reading this as a corpus in which to explore how claims about children and childhood work in normative and counter normative ways. This is part of my project to formulate “child as method,” an approach to thinking children and childhoods as a means to understand wider sociohistorical and geopolitical conditions. Rather than simply fitting children and childhood into wider social theory, then, the idea is to see how models of children and childhood have worked and continue to work to produce those conditions in constitutive ways. Overall, it’s part of a project to foreground postcolonial and feminist theories within critical psychologies and educational studies. It’s exciting to see colleagues and students run with these ideas and find applications and formulations that I wouldn’t have dreamt of to do really interesting and valuable work. So right now, this seems fruitful.
At the beginning of your career you yourself chose to defy the crowd following the dominant tendencies of the time. Would you encourage young people to adopt a similar attitude?
I didn’t see this as a choice. It was what I did. I suppose, following this line of thinking, I’d say that it’s important not to do work you don’t want to do, or don’t believe in. (In that sense I remain a liberal humanist.) I remember seeing other colleagues, postgraduate researchers in my generational cohort, becoming dispirited and dropping out after being pressured to undertake work on topics or using methods that they were uninterested in or opposed to. In that sense, I was lucky to find myself in an environment where I was able to find my own reference points, formulate my own intellectual and practical projects, and define and forge relevant research communities, even if (or perhaps precisely because) that context was not particularly prestigious.
Who would you name as a model to follow for them just getting their careers off the ground?
I don’t like naming individual people as this buys into an individualist model that underestimates the role of social conditions and relationships and overstates individual influence. In fact this was a key point for us on the editorial board of the journal Feminism & Psychology, when it was suggested we reprinted and celebrated the contribution of key figures or stars, and we realized that it would be more accurate to acknowledge the historical contribution of key articles of books, some of which were written jointly. I’ll just add one more thing. Every professional should read Fanon’s resignation letter as medical director of a psychiatric hospital to consider the conditions for, and limits to, ethical-political practice. He wrote: “The function of a social structure is to set up institutions that are traversed by a concern for humankind. A society that forces its members into desperate solutions is a non-viable society that needs replacing. The citizen’s duty is to say so. No professional morality, no class solidarity no desire to refrain from washing the dirty laundry in public, can have a prior claim. No pseudo-national mystification finds grace when up against the demand to think” (Fanon 1956/2018, p. 345).
What are other issues we have not talked about yet but you would like to mention to our readers? Such as a message about contemporary psychology, a big issue or important question about psychology?
Yes. There is a big movement afoot in universities concerned with decolonizing knowledge and practices. Psychology is sorely in need of decolonization. At all levels. There is the question of personnel, or what we—in psychology—call role models. Students are now asking “why are all my professors white?”, “why is my curriculum white?” Psychology has a lot to answer for in this regard, and the lineup in this book, perhaps unsurprisingly, is no exception. All Anglophone, all bar one from the Global North, we are part of the problem. White, mainly men, creating knowledge and practices that—implicitly if not explicitly—reflect white, middle class, androcentric and heteronormative perspectives. Psychology, together with psychiatry, has long played a role as apologist for class and colonial domination, and gender plays a key role in the articulation of this too. There are, of course, many indigenous psychologists and psychologies, many critiques of the skewed and limited perspectives currently on offer as hegemonic, supposedly general and universal psychological models. Where are the minority voices, the perspectives from the Global South, from the non-Anglophone world (whose traditions you might know much better than me perhaps)? Some key names, such as Sylvia Wynter, are now being remembered (see, e.g., Wynter 2003), but it is not only a question of adding in the missing voices and perspectives but rather really thinking through and working through what their exclusion or devaluation means for the kinds of psychology we are familiar with and should be practicing.
A final question. While working on this book, I asked my readers to submit one question they would like to ask the most eminent leading psychologist, and I received thirty-one questions. Would you agree to answer one or two of them?
Yes.
Please choose one or two numbers from 1 to 30.
Ok 7 and 27…
7. How can we reduce potential harm in psychotherapy?
Good question! Not trying to be like psychiatrists for one thing. And not losing sight of the person in the consulting room, or in the complexity of our various models. On the other hand, the theory is a tool to think with, to offer material to think with and through so it’s important to be consistent in one’s approach (I do worry about so-called eclectic approaches). Personally, I was drawn to train as a group analyst because this way of working unavoidably brings questions of authority and democracy into the room as matters that have to work with, rather than assumed or swept under the carpet. Social inequalities are neither reducible to therapeutic ones, nor can they be relegated outside the therapeutic context. We all participate in oppressive practices by living in an unequal world; as therapists at the very least we cannot further pathologize people for (if I may use such terms) not being sane in an insane world.
27. The most ridiculous idea in the history of psychology which was taken seriously?
So many to choose from. The concept of “race,” which psychologists played a big part in developing and legitimating. And the most dangerous.