ABSTRACT
The ongoing crisis in the humanities and social sciences takes on a particular significance in the field of psychology. Psychology richly exemplifies this predicament, yet a fully critical psychology could contribute to a way out of crisis. Leading scholars have characterized this situation as a challenging search for a credible alternative to modern-era objectivism and postmodern relativism. This paper suggest that an openness to cultural diversity and interdisciplinary approach to theory and research, undertaken through a robust critical hermeneutics, points to such an alternative. A crucial, often underappreciated element of this approach, I argue, is critical cultural history.
Sources for the work of critical cultural history are Heidegger’s overall project of challenging Cartesian understandings of the relationship between human being and moral understandings; Gadamer’s development of the concepts of dialogue and relationality; Foucault’s early applications of Heidegger’s emphasis on historicity; and the turn to a socially-oriented, “from the bottom up” approach to history (begun by the Annales school in the 1930s in France and a modified Marxist approach from the 1950s in the U.S.).
The unusual cultural/political position of psychology is complex, implicated as it is in the political status quo in ways as dangerous as they are disguised. I illustrate the value of a cultural history approach in illuminating this predicament through a brief analysis of neoliberal influences in psychotherapy theory and practice, the hegemony of proceduralism and the new panopticism in psychology doctoral programs, and APA’s recent collusion with the U.S. Department of Defense in the use of torture.
