Derek Hook

A critical psychology of the postcolonial

Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal form of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which not only is the psychological placed within the register of the political, but—perhaps more challengingly—the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. What the writings of Fanon and Biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on the one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the other.

Genealogy, discourse, ‘effective history’: Foucault and the work of critique

The companion piece to an article on the shortcomings of much discourse analysis in psychology, this paper offers an exposition of Foucaults genealogical method as a mode of critique better able to accommodate those dimensions of discourse (history, materiality, the conditions of possibility underwriting ‘knowledge’) less facilitated by more textually focused or less historically sensitive models. Opening with a discussion of Foucaults ‘epistemology of critique’ and moving to a close reading of his Nietzsche, genealogy history (1977a) this paper both extends Foucaults analytical principles for the analysis of discourse (reversal, discontinuity, specificity, exteriority) and develops, through a series of methodological injunctions (the category of the ‘event’, the dissipation of the object, the effacement of the self-constituting subject, the prioritization of the procedures of ‘emergence’ and ‘descent’), an account of genealogy as a mode of effective critique.

Analogues of Power Reading Psychotherapy through the Sovereignty –Discipline–Government Complex

This paper draws on Foucault’s multifaceted understanding of modern power, the sovereignty–discipline–government complex, as a means of re-conceptualizing, and finding critical analogues for, what is perhaps psychology’s most characteristic formof applied practice: psychotherapy. One of the chief assets of this model is that it enables one to think the dynamic interchange between capillary and modern state forms of power. An explication of this particular interchange is one of the primary focuses of this paper. A brief characterization of technologized disciplinarity is offered as a first tentative model for psychotherapeutic practice. Whereas the idea of a disciplinary technology provides a means of thinking the instrumentation of psychotherapeutic power, Foucault’s notion of the pastorate is seen as a means of thinking its rationality. The notion of technologies of subjectivity enables a way of conceiving of psychotherapy’s functionality as an interchange between a structural apparatus of influence and a micro-politics of self. The confluence of these notions allows one to speak meaningfully of a ‘governmental psychotherapy’, a complex mode of power that operates perhaps both more widely and more privately than one may at first have suspected.

The Fallible Phallus: A Discourse Analysis of Male Sexuality in a South African Men's Interest Magazine:

This article presents a discourse analysis of the constructions of male sexuality in the South African publication Mens Health. The focus of the analysis was a series of monthly featured articles on best sexual practices and behaviour. Since the magazines content appears to confront men with, on the one hand, the construction of the ideal, potent phallus, and, on the other hand, the fallibility inherent in attempting to live up to this ideal, the overarching discourse in the texts was termed the ‘Fallible Phallus’. By stipulating ideal sexual experiences and then juxtaposing these descriptions with the threat of those moments not occurring, a paradox is created in the texts between the phallic dominance of masculinity and the anxieties and insecurities that may result from sexual failure. The Fallible Phallus discourse is a synthesis of four subsidiary themes derived from the texts, namely the male sexual drive theme, the inadequacies of male sexuality, the rule book of sexual practices, and the problematic nature of female sexuality. In the discussion of these themes, it is suggested that the texts use male sexual performance as a yardstick for assessing level of masculinity.

Retrieving Biko: a Black Consciousness critique of whiteness

There is an important history often neglected by genealogies of ‘critical whiteness studies’: Steve Bikos Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism. What would it mean to retrieve this criticism in the context of white anti-racism in the post-apartheid era? Saids (2003) contrapuntal method proves useful here as a juxtaposing device whereby the writings of a past figure can be critically harnessed, travelling across temporal and ideological boundaries to interrogate the present. Four interlinked modes of disingenuous white anti-racism can thus be identified: (1) a fetishistic preoccupation with disproving ones racism; (2) ostentatious forms of anti-racism that function as means of self-promotion, as paradoxical means of white self-love; (3) the consolidation and extension of agency through redemptive gestures of ‘heroic white anti-racism’; (4) ‘charitable anti-racism’ which fixes tolerance within a model of charity, as an act of generosity and that reiterates the status and role of an anti-racist benefactor.

Psychoanalytic contributions to the political analysis of affect and identification

The focus of my comments in what follows – a response to Baldacchino’s ‘The eidetic of belonging’ – will be on qualifying and sharpening a prospective analytics of affect, such that we may attempt a meaningful political analysis of affect grounded within a given socio-symbolic domain, and linked to a series of subjective (psychical) operations.

Racism as abjection : a psychoanalytic conceptualisation for a post-apartheid South Africa

Treating the analysis of racism as a key critical imperative of South African psychology, this article questions the adequacy of many of the social constructionist or discursive approaches to racism that have proved influential in critical South African social psychology of late (Dixon, 1996; 1997; Dixon Dixon, Foster, Durrheim, & Wilbraham, 1994; Duncan, 1993; 1996; Duncan, van Niekerk, de la Rey, & Seedat, 2001; Durrheim & Dixon, 2000; 2001; Foster, 1993; 1999; Terre Blanche & Seedat, 2001). While such approaches have much to recommend them as means of apprehending institutional, historical, representational and textual forms of racism, and while they offer a vital critique of de-politicising, individualising treatments of racism which reduce it to an internal psychology of sorts (a function of personality variables, perceptions, attributions, attitudes, cognitions, traits, authoritarianism, prejudice, etc.) (see for example Bhana, 1977; Bhana & Bhana, 1975; Duckitt, 1991; Heaven, 1977; MacCrone, 1930; 1932; 1949; Mynhardt, Plug, Tyson & Viljoen, 1979; Orpen, 1973; Simon & Barling, 1983), they nevertheless appear somewhat limited in their ability to grasp those less palpable and more insidious forms of racism, those structures of oppression, that, in Youngs (1990a, p. 11) terms, ‘lie beneath the level of discursive awareness’. By focusing on racism’ overt structural or discursive forms we risk losing sight of the ‘psychic density’ of this phenomenon, that is, racisms extraordinarily affective and often eruptive quality, its visceral or embodied nature, its apparent stubbornness to social, historical, discursive change, the intensity, in other words of the individual racists investment in their own racist subjectivity. Julias Kristevas notion of abjection has much to recommend it as the basis for a tentative analytics of racism to be able to understand racisms extremities of affect, its visceral, ‘pre-discursive’ and bodily forms, and its symptomatic aspects of avoidance and aversion. This model is useful in helping us to appreciate that racism is a phenomenon which is as psychical as it is political, affective as it is discursive, subjective as it is ideological.

Weakening Habermas: the undoing of communicative rationality

Abstract Habermass elaboration of a procedural, discursive deliberative democracy extends from his faith in communicative action, in symmetrical communicative interactions played out in an arena of communicative rationality. Yet Habermas expects too much of his agents. His theory of communicative action, built upon the necessary possession of communicative rationality, requires individuals to have clear, unfettered access to their own reasoning, possessing clear preference rankings and defendable rationales for their goals and values. Without such understandings, agents would have no reasons to extend or defend their positions in a discursive interchange; no validity claims are redeemable between communicative participants if the agent cannot access, substantiate or understand their own rationality. The psychological and discursive preconditions that agents must manifest to meet Habermass conditions as participants in communicative rationality are exceptionally demanding. This paper brings empirical research from psychology and political science, and conceptual critiques from political philosophy, to bear on Habermass agent.

Deconstruction, Psychopathology and Dialectics

This paper endeavours to ask how one might rethink essentialized and reified concepts of psychology and psychopathology as they are represented and experienced in the domain of ‘psychological culture’. Deconstruction, a critical mode of reading systems of meaning, and of unravelling the ways these systems work as texts, is the theoretical and methodological tool of choice for this task. The objective here is to critically engage with privileged notions of psychology on the reciprocal levels of both the personal and the political, the subjective and the social. An additional tool that becomes important here, in linking the internal and external deconstructions of psychology, is dialectics. Dialectics is a means of comprehending the relation between different forms of critique and the relation between different domains in which the psychological is worked through. Connecting the spheres of social relationships with individual activity, and the realms of political and personal in this way, enables a critical linking of the individual and the social without reducing one to the other. Engaged, albeit schematically, in this way, psychopathology may be approached as a construct that has been storied into being in psychiatric texts, that has been sedimented in practices which make it look and feel substantial and real. Essentialized in these ways, the abstract notion of psychopathology operates as if it were concrete, whilst the concrete practices surrounding it operate as if they were abstract. To sufficiently critically engage with constructs of psychopathology then, it is necessary to simultaneously grapple with the objective and subjective aspects of the problem, to engage with how ‘normality’ and ‘pathology’ function both in reality and within the subjective grasp they have on us as we read our own experience at each moment as normal or pathological.

White Privilege, Psychoanalytic Ethics, and the Limitations of Political Silence

Abstract The moral and philosophical interrogation of white privilege remains an imperative in post-apartheid South Africa. Whereas the critique of whiteness involves both philosophical and psychological scrutiny, subsequent calls for white political silence and withdrawal have yet to be subjected to adequate psychological analysis. This paper offers such an analysis by questioning, firstly, the idea of appropriate emotions for white South Africans (shame, guilt, regret), posing instead the problems of mimed affect and neurotic goodness. White approaches to guilt-alleviation and political passivity are queried, secondly, via the claim that such agendas lead all too easily to types of white exceptionalism and condescension, respectively. The ethical problems of political silence and withdrawal – implied superiority, non-participation and an unequal ‘rights of silence’ – provide a third area of questioning. The paper ends by introducing the Lacanian ideas of subjective destitution and identification with the symptom. These concepts throw a critical light on disavowals of white privilege and provide a novel means of thinking how white narcissism might be relinquished.