Introduction — Psychosocial Studies and Critical Narrative Analysis

Abstract

There once was little doubt that psychology should be thought of as the ‘science of behaviour’ and hence that it would aspire to the seeming rigour of the natural sciences and, especially, be able to distance itself from the arts. This lofty ambition has turned to air, despite repeated attempts by psychologists to establish fully fledged scientific credentials — notably, these days, through neuroscience (which might indeed be scientific) and evolutionary psychology (which assuredly is not, if a respect for evidence and scholarly argument is a hallmark of the scientific worldview — Rose and Rose, 2001). What has become increasingly apparent is that psychology is a broad discipline, largely but not solely empirical, very fuzzy at the edges where it merges with sociology, biology, brain science and the humanities, and just as much a discursive construction as any other area of knowledge.