ABSTRACT
This chapter engages interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives to offer critical perspectives on psychological assumptions underlying child development. It plays on multiple readings of notions of ‘placement’ and ‘displacement’ (connecting geography and psychoanalysis) to resituate a range of claims that underlie and justify the project of developmental psychology. I argue that psychological narratives of development have tended to presume a spurious universality and generality that is increasingly recognised as untenable. Recent critical work in psychology highlights the particular culturalhistorical resources that inform contemporary psychological models. Hence this chapter explores what it means to ‘place’ development in terms of: (a) situating the emergence of ‘development’ as equivalent to ‘progress’; and (b) identifying the positions elaborated for the subjects and objects of such ‘development’. Examples are given from development policy and therapeutic practice, both of which draw upon idealised models of childhood and claims to empirical developmental psychological research to justify their models. The chapter moves on to motivate for a ‘displacing’ of ‘development’, drawing on postdevelopment critiques that highlight how multiple agencies and interests mobilised within any development intervention inevitably disrupt and transform its original aims. Finally, the question of whether ‘development’ can be replaced (or re-placed) is posed: both in terms of what such arguments mean for our understandings of development, and what remains for us to see as ‘developing’, or to help ‘develop’ (with the problem of ‘helping’ subjected to critical scrutiny in later chapters, especially Chapter 6).
