ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interview with the author conducted by Dimitris Papadopoulos and Ernst Schraube in December 2002. The interview ranges over the social role, epistemological presuppositions, and methodological questions of critical psychology and discourse analysis. The first part of the interview touches on the social and epistemic conditions, the current status and functions of critical psychology, and methodological principles of the empirical research practice of critical discourse analysis. The second part focuses on the methodological and epistemological background of discourse analysis, and the problem of a realist versus a constructionist approach to psychological inquiry. The last part illuminates the relation of critical psychology with various major social theories and movements, specifically Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis in the context of contemporary postmodern conditions. Dominant forms of cultural identity are kept in place precisely by the banal ways the categories are repeated in everyday discourse.
