ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book pursues a political and methodological agenda broadly similar to that prefaced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Situated at the nexus at once unlikely and over determined of cognitive psychology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and feminism, it takes recent developments in connectionist theory as the means by which a number of questions can be asked not only about cognition, the brain, and psychology, but also about the politics of feminist-critical interventions in contemporary scientific psychology. Connectionism is the name given to a group of relatively new theories and models of cognitive function. Neurological plausibility has been a major component in the marketing of connectionism. Deconstruction is the methodological apparatus that will release psychology from these restrictions: The metaphysical assumptions that persist within the cognitivist approach can be revealed and overcome by application of concepts of "deconstruction".
