Heather MacDonald – författare

This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society’s modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures. Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism’s impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology.This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.

This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society’s modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures. Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism’s impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology.This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.

This book presents psychological assessment and intervention in a cultural and relational context. A diverse range of contributors representing six continents and eleven countries write about their therapeutic interventions, all of which break the traditional assessor-as-expert-oriented framework and offer a creative adaptation in service delivery. A Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment model, including work with immigrant communities, and Indigenous modalities underscore individual and collective case illustrations highlighting equality in the roles of the provider and the receiver of services. The universality and uniqueness of culture are explored as a construct and through case material. Some chapters describe a partnership with a Eurocentric scientific model, while others adopt a purely community method, preserved with Indigenous language and subjective methodology. This volume brings together diverse therapeutic collaborative ideas, and recognizes relational, community, and cultural psychologies as integral to mainstream assessment and intervention literature. This book is essential for psychologists and clinicians internationally and graduate students.

This book presents psychological assessment and intervention in a cultural and relational context. A diverse range of contributors representing six continents and eleven countries write about their therapeutic interventions, all of which break the traditional assessor-as-expert-oriented framework and offer a creative adaptation in service delivery. A Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment model, including work with immigrant communities, and Indigenous modalities underscore individual and collective case illustrations highlighting equality in the roles of the provider and the receiver of services. The universality and uniqueness of culture are explored as a construct and through case material. Some chapters describe a partnership with a Eurocentric scientific model, while others adopt a purely community method, preserved with Indigenous language and subjective methodology. This volume brings together diverse therapeutic collaborative ideas, and recognizes relational, community, and cultural psychologies as integral to mainstream assessment and intervention literature. This book is essential for psychologists and clinicians internationally and graduate students.

This volume encompasses deeply critical dialogues that question how the field of psychology exists within and is shaped by the current neoliberal political context. Spanning from psychoanalysis to post-colonial theory, these far-reaching discussions consider how a greater ethical responsiveness to human experience and sociopolitical arrangements may reopen the borders of psychological discourse. With the understanding that psychology grows in the soil of neoliberal terrain and is a chief fertilizer for neoliberal expansion, the interviews in this book explore alternative possibilities for how this field of study might function. By offering their own unique responses regarding the current condition of their respective disciplines, these scholars critically consider the current conceptual frameworks that set the theoretical boundaries of psychology, and contemplate the ethical responsibility currently affecting the field. This book will prove essential for scholars and students across several disciplines including psychology, philosophy, ethics, and post-colonial and socio-cultural studies, as well as practising mental health professionals with an interest in the importance of psychological social theory.

This volume encompasses deeply critical dialogues that question how the field of psychology exists within and is shaped by the current neoliberal political context. Spanning from psychoanalysis to post-colonial theory, these far-reaching discussions consider how a greater ethical responsiveness to human experience and sociopolitical arrangements may reopen the borders of psychological discourse. With the understanding that psychology grows in the soil of neoliberal terrain and is a chief fertilizer for neoliberal expansion, the interviews in this book explore alternative possibilities for how this field of study might function. By offering their own unique responses regarding the current condition of their respective disciplines, these scholars critically consider the current conceptual frameworks that set the theoretical boundaries of psychology, and contemplate the ethical responsibility currently affecting the field. This book will prove essential for scholars and students across several disciplines including psychology, philosophy, ethics, and post-colonial and socio-cultural studies, as well as practising mental health professionals with an interest in the importance of psychological social theory.

This book explores the discipline of psychology through in-depth dialogues with scholars who have lived at the turbulent edges of mainstream psychology in the USA, and who have challenged the most cherished theoretical frameworks.

This book engages the practice of community-based psychology through a critical lens in order in order to demonstrate that clinical practice and psychological assessment in particular, require more affirmative psychopolitical agency in the face of racial injustice within the urban environment.

This book explores the discipline of psychology through in-depth dialogues with scholars who have lived at the turbulent edges of mainstream psychology in the USA, and who have challenged the most cherished theoretical frameworks.

This book engages the practice of community-based psychology through a critical lens in order in order to demonstrate that clinical practice and psychological assessment in particular, require more affirmative psychopolitical agency in the face of racial injustice within the urban environment.

One of the best of our urban journalists considers the upside-down world of public policy and the entrenchment of foolish ideas in closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power. Insightful and articulate...entertaining and provocative. —Richard Lamm, Wall Street Journal. Spirited, stimulating, eloquent essays...vivid and devastating....The Burden of Bad Ideas is social, cultural, and political criticism of the first order. —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Critics have attacked the foolishness of some of today's elite thought from many angles, but few have examined the real-world consequences of those ideas. In The Burden of Bad Ideas, Heather Mac Donald reports on their disastrous effects throughout our society. At a Brooklyn high school, students perfect their graffiti skills for academic credit. An Ivy League law professor urges blacks to steal from their employers. Washington bureaucrats regard theft by drug addicts as evidence of disability, thereby justifying benefits. Public health officials argue that racism and sexism cause women to get AIDS. America's premier monument to knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution, portrays science as white man's religion. Such absurdities, Ms. Mac Donald argues, grow out of a powerful set of ideas that have governed our public policy for decades, the product of university faculties and a professional elite who are convinced that America is a deeply unjust society. And while these beliefs have damaged the nation as a whole, she observes, they have hit the poor especially hard. Her reports trace the transformation of influential opinion-makers (such as the New York Times) and large philanthropic foundations from confident advocates of individual responsibility, opportunity, and learning into apologists for the welfare state. In a series of closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power, The Burden of Bad Ideas reveals an upside-down world and how it got that way.