Psychological Theorising in Transdisciplinary Perspective

Summary

The call for interdisciplinarity within psychology appears to be an ambivalent one. The integration of investigative practices and knowledge from other academic realms into psychology has recurrently been tantamount to sacrificing an independent understanding of the psychological. It is not only with respect to the (wishful) emulation of physics or to the advance of computer-scientific metaphors, with the cognitive turn, that psychology’s history can be written as the history of an “imitative science”. The same holds true for alternative designs of psychology as an interpretative investigation in strict analogy to the hermeneutics of textual material. Interdisciplinarity raises issues of the possible unity of the sciences and of how this relates to reality. The scientific program of materialist dialectics, while facing up to the philosophical problem of realism, opens a new perspective for an explanatory understanding of the totality of nature and society that does not concern itself with disciplinary entrenchments. In this vein, Critical Psychology builds its own specifically psychological conceptual and methodological system within a truly “transdisciplinary” framework.