ABSTRACT
In which we encounter groups more tightly organised than the Discourse Unit, and discover a radical take on the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. We explore the way that ‘cult’ phenomena draw people in and the way outsiders spawn a psychological discourse which misleads everyone about what is going on, including about the relationship between sex and power inside institutions. In this part of the book I take you into the world of critical psychological research, and that necessarily means reflecting on how we position ourselves in relation to institutions that operate, sometimes competitively, on the same terrain. I will describe how the institutional constraints on research take on a peculiar form when they are infused with psychological discourse, when they are populated by and resisted by those who wield psychology as a weapon. In different ways the following four chapters also tackle the boundaries that divide academic psychologists from those they want to speak to and work with, and you will notice a tension between how we ‘critical’ people define ourselves inside the academic world and how people in the world outside try to define themselves. We begin in this chapter with the Discourse Unit and work through some surprising connections with group psychology and psychotherapy.
