ABSTRACT
In which we begin teaching psychology, and learn to find our way around the inside of another academic department. We discover how psychology relates in practice to other subjects taught in the university; with professional courses that often call upon psychology as a resource, and with sociology, in which it is tangled in a fraught relationship of jealousy and rivalry. The four chapters in this part of the book are concerned with how those who teach psychology must navigate a complicated network of contradictions, and how that complicated network comprises conceptual debates, practical academic tasks and interpersonal disputes which slowly but surely draw us deeper into the discipline. Psychologists who teach psychology need at some level to believe what they say about it to their students, and so we are faced, time and again, with ethical questions about how we challenge what is wrong about psychology and how we collude with it. In this chapter I describe how I began teaching and, in the process, how I had to persuade my new colleagues that I was at one with them, enough at least to maintain the illusion that we were talking and listening to each other.
