ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses postmodernism and its strong social constructivism within the idealist tradition of philosophy; some of its problems exist as an inevitable legacy of the past. It addresses specific impact of the shortcomings on postmodern psychology and also discusses similarities and differences between postmodernism and critical realism. With the term ‘anarchistic’ in mind, postmodernism has been attributed with a radical political role in intellectual life since the 1980s. Postmodernism has supporters across the political spectrum and so, ideologically, it has become a zero-sum game. A good illustrative example of postmodern psychology, from the period is the edited collection Texts of Identity from John Shotter and Ken Gergen. In the introduction to their text, they lay out their stall for a postmodern version of psychology to displace the inadequacies linked to positivism, which they describe as a wrongheaded ‘optimistic romance’.
