ABSTRACT
This chapter ‘applies’ the analytic frameworks outlined in the previous chapters, but with quite specific tasks in mind. There is a deepening of the arguments in relation to one particular area of psychology which is often off the radar for critical work after the crisis. Because the ‘paradigm’ shift was advanced first in social psychology, the realm of ‘individual’ psychology in which we find cognitive research was simply treated as a sub-set of social psychology. So, this chapter tackles cognitive psychology on its own terms, and does that by applying some Marxist concepts.
The key concept here is ‘dialectics’, the idea that the world, whether material or social, is in constant change and that contradictions in reality are the place where new forms arise. A classic paper by Steinar Kvale, ‘Memory and dialectics: Some reflections on Ebbinghaus and Mao Tse-tung’, is the perfect opportunity to explore this idea. Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the founding figures of cognitive psychology, and Kvale showed that a dialectical perspective is useful as a critical tool for showing the limitations of underlying assumptions made in that area of the discipline.
The chapter was written for a book to honour Kvale's work, and he was able to see the chapters before he died. He also produced some influential methodological texts which drew on psychoanalytic ideas to reconfigure qualitative research interviewing, which I discuss in the course of this chapter. He was a pioneer. He was reluctant to call himself a ‘critical psychologist’ because he felt 56that the term had been banalized and institutionally recuperated – stripped of its radical meaning and made part of mainstream academic debate. You will have seen from the previous chapters that I agreed with him about recuperation, but I think it is still worth fighting to reclaim the term ‘critical’ for ourselves.
