'First, critical psychology turns the gaze of the psychologist back on the discipline. Psychologists usually study people outside who they treat as the non-psychologists. We now study the psychologists. We ask, for example, how evolutionary psychology confirms differences between

men and women and make them seem biologically unchangeable, how psycho- analytic psychology pathologises lesbians and gay men in the name of normal stages of development, how intelligence testing reinforces essential underlying difference between ethnic groups,

and how study of organizations to make them run more smoothly also makes them better able to crush or smother dissent. These past errors and crimes of psychology often appear to present- day psychologists merely to be historical matters,

but the everyday practice of therapeutic, personnel and organisational psychology is still too often informed by those assumptions. Critiques of those crimes and errors in psychology are thus part of the new critical impulse

we hope to bring alive inside the discipline as part of critical psychology. We can sum this up by saying that ‘critical psychology is the systematic examination of how some varieties of psy- chological action and experience are privileged over others,

how dominant accounts of “psychology” operate ideologically and in the service of power.’

Second, critical psychologists often assume that where there is power there is resistance, and that in every dominant practice there are contra- dictions and spaces

for us to work to challenge and change the existing state of affairs. Mainstream psychology is incoherent, and competing domains of study aim to supplant their rivals, and advocates of different methodological paradigms bitterly dispute the procedures

adopted by colleagues who may well be working in the same department. That inco- herence is one of the sources of our strength. For example, a psycholog- ical test that is used to stigmatise failing children may also be used to rescue a child from a ‘special’ school.

An attention to the structure of the nuclear family and an emphasis on systemic forces in the appearance of distress in the ‘identified patient’ may also be a lever against biological psychiatric diagnosis.

Humanist images of the person that may often individualise explanations may also be used to contradict experimental studies. But while we look for resistance in these ideas, we do not really deep down believe any of them.

What is most important in this dialectical activity for us is to look for political tactics, not underlying truth. Hence, ‘critical psychology is the study of the ways in which all varieties of psychology are culturally historically constructed, and how alternative varieties of

psychology may confirm or resist ideological assumptions in mainstream models.’

Third, psychology is not only at work in the universities and the clinics. It is not only the body of men and women armed with instruments for testing and enforcement in

the training institutions and the hospitals. We need to go beyond that academic and professional psychology to study the way in which psychology has recruited thousands upon thousands of academics and professionals who use its ideas and appeal to its theories to back up their own

programmes of normalisation and pathologisation. The problem here not only concerns the particular images of the human being that are purveyed in the media (in which maladaptive behaviours are explained with reference to neurological factors, for example),

but also the invitation for people to believe that the sources of the problem are hidden inside themselves and must be released as they are spoken about to others

(as in radio and television shows that demand the individuals own up to their emotional shortcomings and aim to change themselves for the better). And, hence, we need to study the way in which psychology recruits all of the people who read and believe its theories of

individual personality differences and happy healthy behaviour. This critical research would focus on the way it recruits all of us in psychological culture. In summary, ‘critical psychology is the study of forms of surveillance and self-regulation

in everyday life and in the ways in which psychological culture operates beyond the boundaries of academic and professional practice.’

Fourth, the discipline of psychology pretends that it is a science, but it draws its images of the human being

from culture and from everyday life to construct its object. And part of the de-construction of psychology is the study of the way ideology in society is the ‘condition of possibility’ for psychology to exist.

Psychological theories do not come out of nowhere. They do not fall from the sky.

And we can draw upon the variety of different theories about our own different psychologies to interrupt & subvert the dominant stories that are told by the academics & the professional psychologists, whether those are clinical, educational, forensic or organisational personnel.

This means that ‘critical psychology is the explora- tion of the way everyday “ordinary psychology” structures academic and professional work in psychology and how everyday activities might provide the basis for resistance to contemporary disciplinary practices.’ [. . .]

These 4 elements of critical psychology are often rebutted by psychologists who've been trained in the old reductionist + positivist programmes, & the old-style psychologists react to critical psychology in a number of ways that we need to tackle."

http://www2.psych.utoronto.ca/users/tafarodi/psy420/articles/Parker%20(2007).pdf