ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the way critical psychology has emerged in Britain as a new, more academically respectable, version of the 1960s and 1970s radical psychology and anti-psychiatry movements. Critical psychology in Britain has been closely associated with social psychology, and introductions to critical psychology produced here tend to run psychology and social psychology together. In particular, the social psychology they have in mind is qualitative, specifically discourse-analytic social psychology. Critical psychologists in Britain have also drawn on alternative theoretical frameworks which challenge the way the people think about the subject of psychological research. Although critical psychology is as critical of humanistic paradigms in the discipline as it is of any of the others, its emphasis on contradiction and change does makes it an optimistic progressive movement. Also important is the growth of organizations like Asylum, but most important is support for the groups of people speaking out against the abuse of power by psychologists.
