[工程科技]Psychosocial Studies and Psychology Is a Critical Approach Emerging.pdfVIP

Frosh, S. (2003) Psychosocial Studies and Psychology: Is a Critical Approach Emerging? Human Relations, 56 , 1547-1567 Psychosocial Studies and Psychology: Is a Critical Approach Emerging? Introduction 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 does indeed seem to be scientific) and evolutionary psychology (which assuredly is not, if a respect for evidence and scholarly argument is a hallmark of the scientific world view -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. Enough Foucauldian-inspired scholarship has now flowed under the bridge of academic and clinical psychology (e.g. Henriques et al, 1998; Rose, 1999) for it to be well established that psychology emerges out of a set of perceptions of individuality and ‘selfhood’ which in turn are connected with the hegemony of particular constructions of social reality -for example, the belief that there is such a thing as a bounded human subject, the biology and psychology of which (or whom) are closely entwined, and which can be studied as a coherent object of knowledge. The empirical tradition is still dominant within psychology, partly for political reasons (it pays to have a discipline registered as a science) but more because of the continuing dominance of the modernist vision of progress through technological advancement. Knowing