Against Postmodernism: Psychology in Cultural Context

Abstract

Postmodern writing has forced psychology to confront a series of problems pertaining to the nature of human consciousness, personal integrity and language. It invites us to re-think notions of undivided and unitary self-hood that have underpinned much orthodox empirical research and theory in the discipline, and it does so in the story-worlds of Progress, Reflection and Opportunity. At the same time as it performs a dispersion of psychological concepts, postmodernism has encouraged a spirit of deconstructive critique and challenge to the modern academic and professional apparatus of the ‘psy-complex’. However, ‘the postmodern’, as a movement of sustained playful theoretical reflection linked to an account of a new cultural context for theoretical research, has now outlived its usefulness. Even the story of ‘the modern’ that postmodernists pitch themselves against misleads psychologists, traditional and critical. The progressive potential of postmodernism has been exhausted, and those who engage in critical theoretical work in psychology need to attend to the ideological assumptions it carries about social relations and structures of power that threaten a radical political agenda in the discipline. The dangers that flow either from an optimistic, naive adoption of postmodern nostrums (relativism, amoralism, collectivism or autonomy) or from a pessimistic, disappointed embrace of the alternative visions it incites (scientism, fundamentalism, individualism or organicism) need to be urgently addressed.