Dialogues At The Edge Of American Psychological Discourse

This book explores the discipline of psychology through in-depth dialogues with scholars who have lived at the turbulent edges of mainstream psychology in the USA, and who have challenged the most cherished theoretical frameworks. It includes researchers whose work has been widely esteemed in recent decades, but has ultimately not been taken up to reconstitute the theoretical direction of the field. This volume chronicles perspectives from select scholars on the current states of their respective areas of the field, their understanding of how their work has been metabolized, and their concerns about the conceptual frames that currently set the theoretical boundaries of the discipline. These authors demand a reinterpretation of thresholds to allow for a less monological emphasis in the adoption of particular frameworks, and to demonstrate historical, social, economic and political consequences of their chosen frameworks. The contents of the volume will assist theoreticians and clinicians in their understanding of how particular kinds of knowledge are determined, accepted, and produced in the field at large.

This volume encompasses deeply critical dialogues that question how the field of psychology exists within and is shaped by the current neoliberal political context. Spanning from psychoanalysis to post-colonial theory, these far-reaching discussions consider how a greater ethical responsiveness to human experience and sociopolitical arrangements may reopen the borders of psychological discourse. With the understanding that psychology grows in the soil of neoliberal terrain and is a chief fertilizer for neoliberal expansion, the interviews in this book explore alternative possibilities for how this field of study might function. By offering their own unique responses regarding the current condition of their respective disciplines, these scholars critically consider the current conceptual frameworks that set the theoretical boundaries of psychology, and contemplate the ethical responsibility currently affecting the field. This book will prove essential for scholars and students across several disciplines including psychology, philosophy, ethics, and post-colonial and socio-cultural studies, as well as practising mental health professionals with an interest in the importance of psychological social theory.

This insightful book offers contemporary psychologists and other social theorists an understanding of the comprehensive system of thought developed by the German scholar William Stern (1871–1938) known as critical personalism. Expanding the author’s ongoing efforts in this area, the book considers, firstly, how critical personalism could ground a needed revival of psychological science, a need created by the field's gradual transformation, through its widespread adoption of aggregate statistical methods of investigation, into a discipline better characterized as 'psycho-demography.' Consistent with Stern's own view of the potential of critical personalism vis-a-vis socio-ethical concerns, the book then explores how the framework could facilitate a transcendence of thinking about racial and other social relationships beyond currently prevailing narratives about personkinds into narratives that are actually about persons. This part of the book includes a chapter discussing Stern's own historical efforts in this direction, serving to highlight the non-individualistic nature of critically personalistic thinking. Throughout, Lamiell constructs a clear case for the merits and applicability of critical personalism in modern psychology and social thought. Primer in Critical Personalism will interest established psychological scientists and advanced students in the field, as well as those who are concerned about our contemporary socio-cultural ethos and the prospects for its improvement, including philosophers, sociologists, educators, journalists, clerics, and thoughtful laypersons alike.

Although qualitative approaches to psychological research have a long history in the discipline, they have also been, and remain, marginalized from the canon of mainstream scientific psychology. At the current moment, however, there is growing recognition of the importance of qualitative methods and a movement toward a more inclusive and eclectic stance on psychological research. This volume reflects upon the historical and contemporary place of qualitative methods in psychology and considers future possibilities for further integration of these methods in the discipline. Scholars representing a wide-range of perspectives in qualitative and theoretical psychology reflect on the historical and contemporary positions of qualitative methods in psychology with an eye to the future of research and theory in the discipline. This book encourages a more critical and inclusive stance on research, recognizing both the limits and contributions that different methodological approaches can make to the project of psychological knowledge.

This volume explores the abiding intellectual inertia in scientific psychology in relation to the discipline’s engagement with problematic beliefs and assumptions underlying mainstream research practices, despite repeated critical analyses which reveal the weaknesses, and in some cases complete inappropriateness, of these methods. Such paradigmatic inertia is especially troublesome for a scholarly discipline claiming status as a science. The book offers penetrating analyses of many (albeit not all) of the most important areas where mainstream practices require either compelling justifications for their continuation or adjustments – possibly including abandonment – toward more apposite alternatives. Specific areas of concern addressed in this book include the systemic misinterpretation of statistical knowledge; the prevalence of a conception of measurement at odds with yet purporting to mimic the natural sciences; the continuing widespread reliance on null hypothesis testing; and the continuing resistance within psychology to the explicit incorporation of qualitative methods into its methodological toolbox. Broader level chapters examine mainstream psychology’s systemic disregard for critical analysis of its tenets, and the epistemic and ethical problems this has created. This is a vital and engaging resource for researchers across psychology, and those in the wider behavioural and social sciences who have an interest in, or who use, psychological research methods.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

This book is a strenuous critique of the misinterpretation of statistical knowledge of populations in mainstream psychology, exploring the implications of assuming that those statistics constitute scientific knowledge of individuals. It investigates the essential nature and historical roots of this interpretive practice, and documents the lack of change in mainstream thinking despite previous critiques of the practice. The author contends that prevailing interpretive traditions result in bad science, in that invalid claims are made to knowledge of individuals. He also discusses the socio-ethical problems resulting from this misinterpretation of statistics, where psychological practitioners unjustifiably endorse interventions in the lives of individuals. Lamiell urges psychologists to abandon the aggregate statistical methods which he argues have transformed the field into ‘psycho-demography,’ and to embrace instead alternative research methods that are logically suited to gaining scientific knowledge about the psychological functioning of individuals. This book concludes by highlighting some of the currently available methodological alternatives, as well as discussing some enduring conceptual impediments to the serious consideration of those alternatives.