Auto-ethnography and psy-critique in Covid times. A book review essay of Ian Parker’s Psychology through Critical Auto-ethnography

ABSTRACT

This book review essay of Ian Parker’s Psychology through Critical Auto-ethnography has three objectives. The first is to provide an assessment of Parker’s unique contribution to the field of Critical Psychology. Parker’s critique of the psy-sciences is shown to offer a key challenge not only to mainstream psychology but also to those who envision themselves working in the field of Critical Psychology: how not to relapse in the traps of mainstream psychology and psychologisation? The second objective is to scrutinize Parker’s idiosyncratic use of the methodology of auto-ethnography. Here it is argued, again, that Parker’s appropriation of this method not only is ideally positioned to question the problematic field of mainstream psychology, but also opens up a different perspective on subjectivity and sociality that should challenge Critical Psychology. The third objective is to apply these insights to the Covid crisis: if Parker enjoins us to step outside the psy-complex and “find many other ways to live together without it,” the entry of mainstream psychology into the Covid-debate, claiming expert knowledge on how we should live apart/together, should be confronted head-on. To achieve these three objectives, the author also uses a moderate dose of auto-ethnography.

KEYWORDS:

• Auto-ethnography
• psy-critique
• Covid
• psi-complex

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In this section I am both leaning on and attempting to supersede Louis Althusser’s (1971) conceptualisation of interpellation.

² https://medium.com/@SteveGlaveski/groundhog-day-why-our-lives-are-feeling-emptier-by-the-day-3703295a0e7b

³ The reference here is Jacques Lacan’s formulation that the analysand must go on to ‘traverse the fundamental fantasy’, which is a reworking of the Freudian idea of an analysand having to ‘work through’ (Durcharbeitung) . As Lacan writes: ‘There is in effect no other way of accounting for the term durcharbeiten, of the necessity of elaboration, except to conceive how the loop must be run through more than once.’ (Lacan 1978, 274).

⁴ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2020/04/26/psycholoog-koen-lowet-waarschuwt-voor-gebrek-aan-perspectief-me/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan De Vos

Jan De Vos currently is Lecturer in Critical Social Psychology at Cardiff University, UK. He holds an MA in psychology and a PhD degree in philosophy. His main interests are the critique of (neuro)psychology, (neuro)psychologisation, and, related to this, the subject of the digital turn. His inspiration is continental philosophy, Freudo‐Lacanian theory and ideology critique. His books include The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity. A Psy‐critique of the Digital Death Drive (2020), The Metamorphoses of the Brain. Neurologisation and its Discontents (2016) and Psychologisation in Times of Globalisation (2012). http://janrdevos.weebly.com/books.html