ABSTRACT
In which management changes bring psychology into play and into question. We begin on 3 October 2012, and explore how these rapid changes triggered a trade union dispute which led us from regulation to resistance, from obedience to escape. Along the way, we reflect on the nature of bullying, executive stress and feminisation in action, matters where power and psychologisation run through the body. In late 2012 Wilko Johnson, guitarist with Dr Feelgood, cancelled a show and was rushed to hospital, diagnosed two months later with late-stage pancreatic cancer. He decided not to have treatment, knew he was going to die, and threw himself into a farewell tour, but curiously said that he then felt “vividly alive”. After he announced at an awards ceremony in October 2014 that it was a misdiagnosis and that he would live on, he said that he wasn’t really sure what he would do next. In a radio interview in 2016 he said that the only way he could make sense of all this was that he had learned to live all his life with depression – “it’s my constitution”, he said – and that imminent death had given him something to live for. Perhaps only an existential shock like this can wake us from the stories that psychology tells us about how we are condemned to live our lives. That is what I describe in this chapter. The institutional crisis and process by which I left MMU was gruelling but it for sure woke me up to life outside psychology.
