ABSTRACT
In which we encounter alternative methods that break completely from old-paradigm laboratory-experimental research in order to surf through the crisis to a supposedly more scientific ‘new paradigm’ focused on language as a defining characteristic of human psychology. By way of distress, we encounter other, more traumatic ways of making and breaking the rules, by Scientologists and by Michel Foucault. What a reasoned well-balanced account I have given so far of my time as an undergraduate student, telling you how I was subjected to psychology but saying little about the anguish I felt surrounded by people who turned everyone else into objects or animals. Every pathological label cut, for it spoke of distress while marking it off as something ‘other’, as if anxiety and unhappiness were signs that one was not fully human, still less that I was not really, could never really be a psychologist. I was behaving like an insider, that is what this ethnography speaks of, but I was profoundly alienated from the discipline. Sometimes I felt quite mad, and every attempt to bring science to bear on madness compounded the problem. The language psychologists use to speak about people in distress is quite appalling. I felt that, knew that, as I tried to take my distance from it.
