Psychology After Psychoanalysis: Psychosocial studies and beyond

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area.

Psychology After Psychoanalysis, the fourth volume in the series, is about the impact of psychoanalysis on critical debates in psychology. It addresses three central questions:

Why is psychoanalysis re-emerging within psychology?

How can psychoanalytic ideas inform psychosocial research?

How does psychoanalysis explain the relation between the individual and society?

International in scope, the book includes a clear account of psychoanalysis, and the different varieties of the approach that are at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. It explores the status of psychoanalysis as a series of concepts and as a methodology, and shows how its clinical practice is crucial to the way that it operates now in an academic context. In doing so, the book sheds light on the arguments currently occurring inside psychoanalysis, with discussion of its relation to critical psychology, psychosocial research, the health professions, culture and social theory.

Parker shows how psychoanalysis rests on a notion of ‘method’ that is very different from mainstream psychology, and unravels the implications of this difference. Early chapters examine the lines of debate between various psychoanalytical traditions, and show how critical psychology challenges the assumptions about human nature and subjectivity made in conventional psychoanalysis. Later chapters introduce the methodological device of ‘transference’ and explore how psychoanalysis may be utilized as a resource to review key questions of human culture.

Psychology After Psychoanalysis is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research.