ABSTRACT
There have recently been two major international publications in critical psychology: the encyclopedia edited by Teo and the handbook edited by Parker. In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher characterised many of his students as being prey to what he called "depressive hedonia", a state constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. One of the most recurrent tropes in the critical psychological literature concerns the status of the discipline as a putative science of the individual. Free market economies are ostensibly organised according to the principle of consumer sovereignty, a principle which states that the desires and needs of consumers control the output of producers. The various ramifications of the fundamental transformation in the nature of higher education are still working their way through the institutions affected by it.
