Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book gives a brief account of key ideas emerging in the course of the paradigm crisis in psychology and examines the two caveats. The first caveat is that though approaching the issues from specific political, conceptual and methodological vantage points, there is an impact of other arguments in qualitative research, critical psychology and in the Discourse Unit. The second caveat discusses the role of 'deconstruction' as a strategy for questioning taken-for-granted assumptions in psychology and 'discourse analysis' as one useful but limited methodological alternative. At the same time the 'participatory action research' approaches linked to 'liberation psychology' in Latin America showed the limits of discourse analysis, and that is why the authors brought into their work ideas from 'deconstruction' in literary theory, from psychoanalysis and from Marxist and feminist interventions.