ABSTRACT

In which we move further out to the edge, further north west, and here we discover how smaller teaching institutions, through a peculiar effect of their own construction of the social world as psychological, set limits for themselves. We look at Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory along the way, at connections between psychology and Marxism, and at attempts to construct the world differently. There have been plenty of attempts to develop a radical critique of psychology and a radical alternative to the assumptions that the discipline makes about people. We connect with some of those attempts in this chapter, and I want to show what the limits of those forebears of contemporary critical psychology were. I have to admit that I was tempted out of MMU, my academic home, by ambition, and I persuaded myself that it was more an ambition to do something different in the discipline, to change the subject, than a concern with academic status. I hope that becomes clear in what follows, and as I tell you about what it is like to move from one place to another I describe how and why I imagined that the dead weight of a fairly traditional teaching institution could be lifted. We live in hope.