ABSTRACT
Psychology as a discipline is diverse and dynamic and social psychology is well able to engage with feminism and sociology (Walsh and Nicolson 1997). Discursive, or social constructionist, psychology has shifted the emphasis of the discipline from consideration only of `observable' behaviours such as those posited by Walker in her exposition of the battered woman syndrome, towards examination of the meanings and practices surrounding human interaction (S.D. Brown 2001). Social constructionist psychology has therefore confronted taken-for-granted, common-sense assumptions as to what counts as `real' (I. Parker 2003). The concern in discursive psychology with how relationships between people and institutions are described and understood via language used to give them meaning provides a means of experiencing social relations that are not static or set phenomena but dynamic constructions (I. Parker 2002). This has been employed in feminist psychology for example to take apart (or deconstruct) the relationship between `de®cit' accounts of women's embodied reproductive status and mental health in for example the medicalisation of the premenstrual syndrome (P. Choi 1995; Ussher 1989, 2006), the menopause (Hunter 1990; Gannon 1999), postnatal depression (Nicolson 1998) and depression and mental health overall (Ussher 1989; Stoppard 2000). However, this enterprise becomes particularly sensitive, and important, when used to challenge takenfor-granted assumptions by feminists themselves.
