ABSTRACT
My work in critical psychology over the past three decades reflects shifting theoretical concerns, political projects, and personal experiences, motivated chiefly by an interest in radical social change and a sense that psychology as a discipline helps shape and sustain an unjust and unsatisfying status quo (Fox 2012; Fox et al. 2009). This seemed to me obvious ever since my immersion in 1970s anarchist politics, when I came to understand anarchism as a psychopolitical movement seeking to foster both autonomy and mutuality without sacrificing one for the other (Fox 1985, 2014). This balancing act is complicated by psychology’s reduction of systemic strains to a collection of individual problems and, certainly in its mainstream United States version, its enshrinement of individualism as the primary value. My orientation within critical psychology, thus, as within the Radical Psychology Network that I co-founded in 1993 (https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="https://radpsynet.org">https://radpsynet.org), has been to challenge mainstream assumptions about the interplay between human nature and the larger society and to address psychology’s role as a pacifying agent.
