ABSTRACT
In which complaints about what the discipline gets wrong are crystallised as critical psychology, an approach which pretends to provide something completely different. Critical psychologists insist that what has been constructed can be taken apart again, and so they quite rightly shift focus from a concern with knowledge to a concern with what psychological knowledge does to people. It is tempting to tell a story about the emergence of critical psychology as being the end point of a necessary evolutionary process in which the discipline of psychology develops a reflexive conscience about its shortcomings and allows practitioners to step back, take stock and chart a better path forwards. Some of the self-representations of critical psychology as a separate sub-discipline spin a narrative of that sort. Unfortunately, this is not the case. What I will show you in this chapter is that this latest version of attempts to voice qualms about what the discipline does to people is just as susceptible to being turned into part of the discipline again, with critical psychologists engaging in often futile debates, debates which serve as spectator sport for the rest of their colleagues. The new identity we assumed in this spectacle was a trap.
