Territories of Critique in Psychology: Lübeck Colloquium on Psychological Humanities

Abstract

„Territories of Critique in Psychology“ – the image of politicized spaces with rigid boundaries in which different parties follow their own agendas arises when reflecting upon the notion of „territory“ in the title of the Lübeck Colloquium. The organizers, LISA MALICH (Lübeck) and VIOLA BALZ (Dresden), attempted to draw these boundaries in their opening speech in order to establish three territories of critique. They distinguished between critical voices from within and those from outside mainstream psychology. The latter were either psychologists developing alternative psychologies, some of which even explicitly called themselves ‘critical’, such as the Marxist-oriented „Critical Psychology“ (Holzkamp, 1983)1, or they were raised outside academia by those concerned with psychological applications. To illustrate the boundary between the scientific discipline of mainstream psychology and critical thinkers on the fringes, photographs by Mamie Phipps Clark and Michel Foucault were juxtaposed on the colloquium website. The American psychologist Clark criticized racial segregation in schools from within the field of psychology by drawing the conclusion from her famous doll study that discrimination and segregation caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.2 Foucault, in contrast, was presented as criticizing psychology from the outside by looking through the glasses of a historian. Narrating a „History of Madness“3, Foucault shed a critical light on how the language of psychiatry at the end of the 18th century constructed madness as a mental illness solely to be cured in confined and controlled medical institutions. As a critical historian outside the field of psychology, Foucault does not belong to any of the three territories of critique outlined by the organizers of the colloquium. He seems to be part of a fourth territory that is outside mainstream psychology but within academia or, more specifically, within the humanities. However, Foucault did not only approach psychology from the perspective of a humanities scholar. His „History of Madness“ stems from his experiences working in a mental hospital after obtaining a degree in psychology and briefly considering a career in psychiatry.4 As a boundary figure5 that appeared in the guise of the historian and of the psychologist, Foucault’s persona demonstrates the flexibility of boundaries separating psychology from other disciplines in the humanities. Drawing on contributions from scholars working at the interface of psychology and any discipline of the humanities as well as from experts in the humanities who critically reflect upon psychology, it was this interor transdisciplinary territory of critique that the organizers of the colloquium intended to establish. To lay the foundation of the so-called „Psychological Humanities“, speakers from different fields in the humanities and psychology, most of them might be considered as boundary figures, were invited to either criticize psychology or to historicize and systematize critiques of the field. Critique took the shape of a mode of inquiry to understand the field of psychology in all its complexity by highlighting its embedding in political, eco-