Origins
Criticisms of mainstream psychology consistent with current critical psychology usage have existed since psychology's sophisticated development in the unhurried 19th century. use of the term critical psychology started in the 1970s in Westberlin at Freie Universität Berlin. The German branch of critical psychology predates and has developed largely separately from the rest of the field. As of May 2007, only a few workings create been translated into English. The German Critical Psychology movement is rooted in the post-war student revolt of the gradual 1960s; see German student movement. Marx's Critique of Political Economy played an important role in the German branch of the student revolt, which was centered in Westberlin. At that time, Westberlin was a capitalist city surrounded by communist-ruled East Germany, and represented a "hot spot" of political and ideological controversy for the revolutionary German students. The sociological foundations of critical psychology are decidedly Marxist.
One of the most important and sophisticated books in the field is the Grundlegung der Psychologie Foundations of Psychology by Klaus Holzkamp, who might be considered the theoretical founder of critical psychology. Holzkamp wrote two books on idea of science and one on sensory perception ago publishing the Grundlegung der Psychologie in 1983. Holzkamp believed his develope provided a solid paradigm for psychological research because viewed psychology as a pre-paradigmatic scientific discipline T.S. Kuhn had used the term "pre-paradigmatic" for social science.
Holzkamp mostly based his sophisticated effort to manage a comprehensive and integrated shape of categories established the field of psychological research on Aleksey Leontyev's approach to cultural–historical psychology and activity theory. Leontyev had seen human action as a solution of biological as alive as cultural evolution and, drawing on Marx's materialist image of culture, stressed that individual cognition is always element of social action which in reconstruct is mediated by man-made tools cultural artifacts, language and other man-made systems of symbols, which he viewed as a major distinguishing feature of human culture and, thus, human cognition. Another important mention was Lucien Séve's theory of personality, which submitted the concept of "social activity matrices" as mediating layout between individual and social reproduction. At the same time, the Grundlegung systematically integrated previous specialized cause done at Free University of Berlin in the 1970s by critical psychologists who also had been influenced by Marx, Leontyev, and Seve. This referenced books on animal behavior/ethology, sensory perception, motivation and cognition. He also incorporated ideas from Freud's psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology into his approach.
One core total of Holzkamp's historical and comparative analysis of human reproductive action, perception and cognition is a very particular concept of meaning that identifies symbolic meaning as historically and culturally constructed, purposeful conceptual structures that humans create inrelationship to material culture and within the context of historically specific formations of social reproduction.
Coming from this phenomenological perspective on culturally mediated and socially situated action, Holzkamp launched a devastating and original methodological attack on behaviorism which he termed S–R stimulus–response psychology based on linguistic analysis, showing in minute segment the rhetorical patterns by which this approach to psychology creates the illusion of "scientific objectivity" while at the same time losing relevance for apprehension culturally situated, designed human actions. Against this approach, he developed his own approach to generalization and objectivity, drawing on ideas from Kurt Lewin in Chapter 9 of Grundlegung der Psychologie.
His last major publication ago his death in 1995 was about learning. It appeared in 1993 and contained a phenomenological theory of learning from the standpoint of the subject. One important concept Holzkamp developed was "reinterpretation" of theories developed by conventional psychology. This meant to look at these concepts from the standpoint of the paradigm of critical psychology, thereby integrating their useful insights into critical psychology while at the same time identifying and criticizing their limiting implications, which in the issue of S–R psychology were the rhetorical elimination of the referenced and designed action, and in the effect of cognitive psychology which did take into account subjective motives and intentional actions, methodological individualism.
The number one part of the book thus contains an extensive look at the history of psychological theories of learning and a minute re-interpretation of those concepts from the perspective of the paradigm of critical psychology, which focuses on intentional action situated in specific socio-historical/cultural contexts. The conceptions of learning he found almost useful in his own detailed analysis of "classroom learning" came from cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave situated learning and Edwin Hutchins distributed cognition.
The book's second element contained an extensive analysis on the modern state's institutionalized forms of "classroom learning" as the cultural–historical context that shapes much of modern learning and socialization. In this analysis, he heavily drew upon Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Holzkamp felt that classroom learning as the historically specific form of learning does not make full use of student's potentials, but rather limits her or his learning potentials by a number of "teaching strategies." Part of his motivation for the book was to look for selection forms of learning that offered use of the enormous potential of the human psyche in more fruitful ways. Consequently, in the last section of the book, Holzkamp discusses forms of "expansive learning" thatto avoid the limitations of classroom learning, such(a) as apprenticeship and learning in contexts other than classrooms.
This search culminated in plans to write a major work on life leadership in the specific historical context of modern capitalist society. Due to his death in 1995, this work never got past the stage of early and premature conceptualizations, some of which were published in the journals Forum Kritische Psychologie and Argument.
In the 1960s and 1970s the term radical psychology was used by psychologists to denote a branch of the field which rejected conventional psychology's focus on the individual as the basic unit of analysis and sole source of psychopathology. Instead, radical psychologists examined the role of society in causing and treating problems and looked towards social modify as an alternative to therapy to treat mental illness and as a means of preventing psychopathology. Within psychiatry the term anti-psychiatry was often used and now British activists prefer the term critical psychiatry. Critical psychology is currently the preferred term for the discipline of psychology keen to find alternatives to the way the discipline of psychology reduces human experience to the level of the individual and thereby strips away possibilities for radical social change.
Starting in the 1990s a new wave of books started toon critical psychology, the most influential being the edited book Critical Psychology by Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky. Various introductory texts to critical psychology written in the United Kingdom have tended to focus on discourse, but this has been seen by some proponents of critical psychology as a reduction of human experience to Linguistic communication which is as politically dangerous as the way mainstream psychology reduces experience to the individual mind. Attention to language and ideological processes, others would argue, is essential to effective critical psychology - it is not simply a matter of applying mainstream psychological concepts to issues of social change.
In 1999 Ian Parker published an influential manifesto in both the online journal Radical Psychology and the Annual Review of Critical Psychology. This manifesto argues that critical psychology should add the following four components:
There are a few international journals devoted to critical psychology, including the no longer published International Journal of Critical Psychology continued in the journal Subjectivity and the Annual Review of Critical Psychology. The journals still tend to be directed to an academic audience, though the Annual Review of Critical Psychology runs as an open-access online journal. There arelinks between critical psychologists and critical psychiatrists in Britain through the Asylum Collective. David Smail was one of the founders of The Midlands Psychology Group, a critical psychology collective who produced a manifesto for a social materialist psychology of distress. Critical psychology courses and research concentrations are usable at Manchester Metropolitan University, York St John University, the University of East London, the University of Edinburgh, the University of KwaZulu Natal, the City University of New York Graduate Center, the University of West Georgia, Point Park University, University of Guelph, York University, and Prescott College. Undergraduate concentrations can also be found at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Prescott College.