ABSTRACT
In which we settle into a new academic home, watch colleagues carry out empirical investigations, and also find out, now from the inside, how a psychology department works. Here structural family therapy provides a description of relationships and a lesson in what qualitative research might entail, and we also notice better the ways in which psychology really functions as a discipline. Now it is possible to look around this strange social world of a psychology department as an insider. A psychology textbook and an undergraduate course stitches together a variety of different contradictory approaches, and is barely held together by its experimental method. A psychology department is more diverse still. This department comprised some psychologists who were very sceptical about that method and others committed to it. The conceptual tensions were matched by the interpersonal tensions between colleagues often working at cross-purposes. Nevertheless, you can also begin to see in this chapter how the institution of a psychology department is structured, structured in such a way as to enable each approach to be slotted into place, and for an illusion of coherence to then operate for everyone as if, and only as if, they were all working together on some kind of common project.
