Charles W. Tolman - Böcker

Positivism needs further scrutiny. In recent years, there has been little consensus about the nature of positivism or about the precise forms its influence has taken on psychological theory. One symptom of this lack of clarity has been that ostensibly anti-positivist psychological theorizing is frequently found reproducing one or more distinctively positivist assumptions. The contributors to this volume believe that, while virtually every theoretically engaged psychologist today openly rejects positivism in both its 19th century and 20th century forms, it is indispensable to look at positivism from all sides and to appraise its role and importance in order to make possible the further development of psychological theory.

One result of the European student movements of the late 1960s was a critique of the mainstream, bourgeois social sciences. They were seen as irrelevant to the real needs of ordinary people and as practically and ideologically supporting oppression. The discussions around psychology in Berlin at the time became increasingly focused on whether the discipline could in fact be reformed. Among the latter was a group under the leadership of Klaus Holzkamp at the Free University who undertook an intensive critique of psychology with a view to identifying and correcting its theoretical and methodological problems and thus laying the groundwork for a genuine ‘critical’ psychology. Psychology, Society, and Subjectivity relates the history of this development, the nature of the group’s critique, its reconstruction of psychology, and its implications for psychological thought and practice. It will be of interest to anyone keen on making psychology more relevant to our lives.

Critical psychology constitutes a radical critique and reconstruction of scientific psychology from a dialectical and historical-materialistic point of view. Its aim is to provide a firmer foundation than presently exists for a psychology that is methodologically sound, practically relevant and theoretically determinate. This book was first published in 1991.