Introduction

This chapter focuses on the way deconstruction was put to work in relation to qualitative research, mental health politics and psychotherapy, and describes what attracted people to deconstruction, how it radicalized social constructionist critiques and where it might be leading now. Deconstruction is used in social psychology as a codeword for critique, a way of turning around the attempts to 'reconstruct' the sub-discipline of social psychology and to ask deeper questions about the assumptions researchers still seemed to be making about the nature of theory and research. The leverage for critique in a deconstruction of the oppositional constructions comes from the way one term is conventionally privileged over the other. The chapter explores a series of debates between the characters who are not in search of a psychology, and who, instead, remind that deconstruction aims at the erasure of psychology as conventionally understood so that a social reconstruction of a world that does not need psychology might be possible.