ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter of Conversational Realities, John Shotter wrote that ‘each new approach in psychology has to struggle in from the margins to a place in the centre’ (1993a, 5). Those in the centre of the discipline, he continued, can draw upon ‘an order of meanings’ in order to exclude all those who do not fit their ‘orderly, tranquil world with everything in its expected place’ (p. 5). He was, of course, speaking from personal experience. Throughout his time as an academic, Shotter has criticised orthodox, experimental psychology, not because he objected to a specific theory or to a particular study, but because he was deeply dissatisfied with the underlying assumptions and the routine practices of experimental psychology as a whole. Shotter has wanted to uproot the basis of mainstream psychological thinking and to replace it with new, more humane ways of thinking about psychological issues. Unsurprisingly the psychological establishment did not look kindly upon John Shotter’s project, especially in the early days.
