ABSTRACT
In which we return home, now part of the apparatus, to discover that there is more to psychology than teaching and research, a bruising context in which we try to find out how people think and what they will do next. We assess students and each other, and try to resist getting recruited into some bureaucratic manoeuvres that will change the balance of power in an academic department and university. This looks like a new beginning, but it was the beginning of the end. This book has tried to show how the discipline of psychology is a problem in and of itself, but also how the discipline is curiously intertwined with institutional processes which corrupt it further, which exacerbate what is already, at root, psychology’s alienating and destructive nature. This part of the book illustrates how psychology is like and unlike other academic disciplines which are subject to similar institutional processes. It is worse, for it promotes precisely the very forms of discipline and subjectivity that power in contemporary capitalist society routinely mobilises against us. We begin to see in this chapter how the chain of command in a psychology department is infused with psychological conceptions of leadership, personal responsibility and power.
