What is ‘deconstruction’ in theory and research in psychology? How does deconstruction radicalise ‘social constructionist’ approaches in psychology? Where does radical conceptual and empirical research go now? The book includes a clear account of deconstruction, and the different varieties of the approach that are at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. It explores its status as a series of concepts and as a methodology, and shows how its research practice is crucial to the way that it operates now inside the discipline. It thus provides the reader with access to lines of debate currently occurring inside deconstruction, with discussion of its relation to mainstream assumptions such as ‘psychopathology’, ‘diagnosis’ and ‘psychotherapy’ and alternative approaches such as ‘qualitative research’, ‘humanistic psychology’ and ‘discourse analysis’. A brief commentary introducing each chapter draws out key themes that are outlined in the introduction and returned to in the course of the book. Each specific intervention is thus able to function as a separate argument and as part of an introduction and overview of deconstruction for psychologists. The title 'Psychology after Deconstruction’ emphasizes the impact of these arguments on the discipline, and the changing ways some of us now approach ‘language’, ‘culture’ and the collective action. It is thus ‘after’ deconstruction, but also after ‘social constructionism’ in psychology. Contents: Qualitative Data and the Subjectivity of ‘Objective’ Facts. Critical Reflexive Humanism and Critical Constructionist Psychology. Constructions, Reconstructions and Deconstructions of Mental Health. Deconstructing Accounts. Deconstruction and Psychotherapy. Deconstructing Diagnosis. Deconstruction, Psychopathology and Dialectics. Lacanian Social Theory and Clinical Practice. About the Author: Ian Parker was co-founder and is co-director (with Erica Burman) of the Discourse Unit. He is a member of the Asylum: Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry collective, and a practising psychoanalyst in Manchester. His research and writing intersects with psychoanalysis and critical theory. He is currently editing a book series ‘Lines of the Symbolic’ (on Lacanian psychoanalysis in different cultural contexts) for Karnac Books. He edited the 2011 4-Volume Routledge Major Work Critical Psychology, and is editing the series ‘Concepts for Critical Psychology: Disciplinary Boundaries Re-Thought’. His books on critical perspectives in psychology began with The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology, and how to end it (Routledge, 1989), and continued with Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology. His recent books include Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research (Open University Press, 2005) and Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation (Pluto Press, 2007). | 
