ABSTRACT
In which we discover a new way of noticing how psychology tells stories about individuals that are structured and can then be unravelled. The discipline can itself be treated as a series of discourses suffused with power, and these discourses are woven into institutional practices and patterns of dominance and submission that maintain and sustain psychology in the institutions that house it. This chapter is about how we can teach psychology differently, but also about how we can carry out research in a way that is more compatible with an approach to the discipline that is a little more sceptical about the truth claims psychologists make about their objects of study. This way of ‘changing the subject’ shifts attention from the individual human subject of experimental investigation to the discourses about thinking and behaving that frame all psychological research questions. We turn the gaze of the researcher onto what psychologists are saying and writing about people, and so we can then teach about psychology as if it was a collection of stories rather than deep immutable truths. This approach to teaching is also a convenient bridge to research for it is then possible to formulate what you are doing as respectable empirical study. This, as you will see, brings us up against the limits of the discipline.
