Introduction



Madden, S. & Moane, G. (2006) ‘Critical Psychologies in Ireland: Transforming Contexts and Political Possibilities’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 5, pp. 281-304 arcp/5

Siobhán Madden and Geraldine Moane[1]

Critical Psychologies in Ireland: Transforming Contexts and Political Possibilities[2]

1. Introduction

…and when I take down

the map of this island, it is never so

I can say here is

the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor

an ingenious design which persuades a curve

into a plane,

but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger

and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,

and finds no horizon

will not be there.

Lines from ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’ by Eavan Boland (1994)

It is our view that the science of psychology is limited. More than this, as an ‘ingenious design’ which claims mastery in persuading complex curves of subjectivity into the flat and abstract plane of positivist thought, we regard mainstream psychology as a site of power and control. And we are not persuaded.

In this paper, our aim is to re-view psychology in Ireland from a critical perspective. In this re-viewing, we do not wish to reproduce the masterful claims of mainstream psychology by making any claims to comprehensiveness. Our paper is necessarily selective and its possibilities in many ways limited by our own particular locations, engagements and perspectives. By the same token, we hope that the specificities of our own locations and commitments can also open up other possibilities for critical psychology.

In not claiming a neutral perspective, we too wish to engage in our own persuasions. Our own positionings, perspectives and engagements simultaneously converge and creatively diverge in several ways. Our interest is in a critical psychology which struggles for social justice as part of a broader movement of transformation. We therefore wish to centre activism and ourselves as activists. Feminism in particular has been central to both of our practices of critical psychology albeit through somewhat different political and intellectual commitments. We are also differently located within/without/ institutional psychology, although we both experience life here/there on the margins. These similarities and differences are reflected in the writing of the paper itself. Our different voices move in and through it, reflecting these different contexts, locations and angles of vision which infuse and animate each other.

Boland’s poem invites a rethinking of the notion of context itself: from fixed flat planes, to dynamic spheres which circle and move in relation to each other. Our own paper weaves in and between intersecting contexts of critique: of psychology, history, local and global, social movements, and struggles, genres and kinds of practices, women’s groups, class-rooms. Our pluralisation of ‘critical psychologies’ is informed by recognizing multiple sites of resistance and transformation; there is no one way of ‘doing’ critical psychology.

The specificities of an Irish context and particular manifestations of power and oppression have been an important part of our own learning about critique. This has included silencing of questions in regard to abortion, sexuality, racism, Northern Ireland, our colonial history and Ireland’s current embrace of neoliberalism. Such silencing has sometimes been blatant, as in outright censorship, but more often has taken more subtle forms of control. Silencing has never been complete, of course, and voices and movements of dissent have been empowered by histories which include resistance to colonialism and links with international postcolonial and other liberation movements.

Indeed, the instabilities of context and power relationships extend to contestations which challenge any simple notion of ‘Ireland’. ‘Ireland” can refer to the island as a whole or to the 26 counties comprising the Republic of Ireland, which gained political independence from Britain in 1921. Northern Ireland refers to the six counties which are politically part of “The United Kingdom (U.K.)”; our disputes with this political arrangement and its ambiguities are a topic for another paper. Our own particular locations are within the Republic of Ireland (West and East respectively), and this is reflected in much of the content of the paper. We recognise and regret the limitations of this ‘partitionist’ position.

All too cognisant then of the politics of map-making, we nonetheless attempt to articulate a cartography of critical psychologies in Ireland through movement between different contexts. We begin the paper by re-viewing the field of psychology, discussing political struggles and critical practices/perspectives in and on the boundaries of the field. In doing so, we attempt to de-centre mainstream psychology’s claims to masterfulness by centre-ing what we regard as contestations of the disciplinary boundaries of mainstream psychology in Ireland. The inquiry foregrounds and then blurs disciplinary boundaries, thus opening onto dynamic and intersecting contexts of critique in Ireland. We reconstruct ‘critical psychologies in Ireland’ by recognizing a rich range of activist/academic interdisciplinary work informed by Irish cultural, historical and political specificities. We then return to a different ‘base’ for critical psychologies which centres our own activist concerns, and situates our own sometimes contradictory theoretical positionings in more personalized discussions of critical psychology in action. We can position ourselves as ‘critical psychologists’ to the extent that critical psychology offers tools, not only for politicising theoretical understandings of the personal, but also politicising the experience of the personal, reflecting our concern with supporting feminist political agency. Discussion of these questions is framed through our shared political commitments regarding feminism, post-colonialism and neo-liberal critique. The theoretical ground covered includes feminist theory, liberation psychology, post-colonial theory, Foucauldian theory, poststructuralism, and Bakhtinian theory.

In our conclusion we draw our arguments into a hopefully clearer sense of our understanding of critical psychologies which can open onto transformative horizons for their ongoing development nationally and internationally.

2. The Field of Psychology – Limiting Horizons

When the field of psychology was being established in the 1950s in Ireland it built on a long Catholic tradition of voluntary service, with many settings for the practice of psychology involving Catholic institutions. The Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI), formed in 1970, set out with an intention to be a professional society for both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, itself a particular political stance. Yet, it remained a side player in much political discourse, although progressive forces within the field did their best to provide a critical voice. The establishment of professional fields and gaining recognition and status, rather than critical reflexivity, have been and continue to be the main concerns of the field. Thus the programmes which were established in the main universities, although varying in philosophical emphases, drew on the established positivist psychologies of Britain and the USA with little attempt to contextualise theory and research or acknowledge the specificities of the Irish context. The field adopted a strong scientist-practitioner model, with the PSI code of ethics stating that scientific evidence must be the basis for knowledge. Programmes in clinical psychology became established in the 1980s, and moved to professional doctorate level in the 1990s. Social and organisational psychology was also established in the mid 1980s, while educational psychology and other areas followed later.

One exception to the asocial emphasis characteristic of mainstream psychology was in the field of social and organisational psychology, pioneered in the 1980s by Eunice McCarthy. Social issues such as gender and equality were central to the field from the beginning, including an open critique of the failure to attain key objectives on women’s equality in employment (McCarthy, 1988). Over decades, McCarthy was the principle contributor from the field of psychology of briefings and research papers on equality related issues (e.g. McCarthy, 1988; McCarthy and McGinn, 1996). The main arena for any collective politically oriented involvement related to the Northern Ireland conflict. A Special Interest group was set up in the 1970s within PSI (Psychologists for Peace) whose aim was to promote cross-border academic and professional cooperation and to encourage public debate by organizing public lectures and events over many years. While the group became a rallying point for some of the more politicized members, it did not get involved in debates about the nature of the field, or contribute to public debate in other areas.

There was strong pressure in PSI to remain out of public discourse, despite the many political debates about issues of central concern to psychology such as gender, sexuality and the role of women, that occurred in Ireland from the 1970s on. The main argument was that it would be impossible to establish a position on issues like divorce, abortion and sexual orientation on which all members could agree, an argument which obscured the conservative political and professional motives behind such silencing. The main counterargument was that the field had a responsibility to inform the public about relevant scientific research. This debate – itself phrased within PSI’s own terms - was played out particularly in 1986, 1992 and 2002 abortion referenda. At these times proposed amendments to the written constitution of Ireland aimed to prohibit abortion entirely, and in both cases suicide as a threat to life became a central issue. In 1986, after strong pressure from feminist and progressive members PSI published a 12-page scientific review of research on abortion written in a strictly positivist mode, although the weight of the evidence presented supported a pro-choice position. The publication of this provoked much controversy – not about its content but about its publication - and resulted in resignations from the Society.

The 1992 referendum also aimed to ban information about abortion which would have widespread repercussions, including in the areas of counseling and psychotherapy. A number of psychologists founded a group, Psychologists for Freedom of Information (PFI), which could function outside the restrictions of PSI and operate in the political domain, making public statements, and providing resources. For strategic purposes, this group agreed to operate within the positivist and professional frameworks of the field, bringing psychological knowledge and arguments into public discourse. The group had some support in PSI, although most members preferred to keep a separation between political and professional issue, and it played an active role in political debate. Over the decade that followed, PSI consistently failed to make statements in political debates in areas such as sexual orientation, childcare, suicide and abortion, with psychiatrists more likely to provide commentary on issues of relevance to psychology. In the late 1990s, when the government was seeking submissions relating to abortion and suicide, PSI remained silent, with Psychologists for Freedom of Information providing the only formal submission for psychologists. By 2002, when another referendum on abortion focused specifically on suicide, PSI was one of the few professional societies in the health services to remain silent. It released a statement on suicide only days before the vote and only after intense pressure from a reformulated Psychologists for Freedom of Information.

By 2002, interest within PSI in political issues seemed to have almost disappeared, with very little response to the attempts by PFI to organize, and little interest in Psychologists for Peace. Yet at this point, with no consultation or discussion, senior officers in PSI began launching public attacks on complementary medicine of all kinds, publishing a column by the then President of PSI in the Irish Psychologist, the Society’s newsletter/magazine (Hughes, 2004). While this could be regarded as a “professional” issue, clearly the definition of professional related to the interests of the field rather than to a critical analysis. The majority of academic and professional psychologists concurred in defending the field whose conservatism was also apparent in another domain, namely that of sexual orientation, where there has been little discussion of the impact of anti-gay Catholic views in a context where many health services are provided in Catholic dominated institutions. Thus far from challenging the status quo, much of the field, especially in professional areas, has reproduced patriarchal and imperialist agendas of normalization.

While Psychologists for Freedom of Information mobilized in a specific political context, it did operate within the terms of the field by grounding its arguments in positivist research, reflecting the narrow constitution of evidence both in the public domain as well as in the field. And there have been and are numerous examples of researchers who, though not challenging the field itself, move beyond the narrow interests of the field, particularly those who have addressed issues of social concerns using positivist methods. Research on social issues can be and is used for purposes of social control. However, such research can also break silences and inform social policy in progressive ways. Examples include Curtis in the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, one of the first to publish on AIDS (Curtis, 1984), and Taylor’s (University College Cork) contributions to national policy on pornography and child sex abuse through the COPINE project (Taylor et al, 2001). At NUI Maynooth, McGilloway has focused on the relationship between psychological factors and the community context of health and social care provision, touching on gender, class and homelessness among other topics (McGilloway and Donnelly 2001). Several researchers have also disputed the ascendancy of the quantitative paradigm, for example Guerin and Hennessy (2002) in University College Dublin who have used qualitative methods to explore children's understandings of bullying.

3. Critical Psychologies – Disrupting Boundaries

The relatively narrow and positivist view of the field has been reflected in the Irish Journal of Psychology, which publishes almost exclusively positivist research on Irish and international samples. The major exception to this was the publication in 1994 of a special issue of the Journal on the theme of “The Irish Psyche”. Many of the articles adopted perspectives that fall within the domain of Critical Psychology. Although they did not interrogate the phrase “Irish Psyche”, the editors themselves posed questions about specificity and location, encouraged multiple perspectives, and sought considerations of cultural issues that would inform Irish psychology (Coyle & Halliday, 1994). The Special Issue was intentionally interdisciplinary and touched on a broad range of issues thus itself broadening the terms of reference for the field. It was launched at an interdisciplinary event and received much attention, but unfortunately its attempt to begin a more critical discussion did not at the time result in a more sustained emergence of critical psychologies.

In the Special Issue, as well as in their ongoing work, some of the contributors to this issue relate directly to critical psychology. Eunice McCarthy, Sheila Greene, and Geraldine Moane have consistently combined feminism and psychology, including teaching psychology of women and feminist psychology and establishing programmes in women’s studies in Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin (UCD). In the Special Issue, McCarthy (1994), for example, theorised ‘A Celtic Model’ of work systems, arguing for new understandings of social systems underpinned by feminist and culturally specific understandings embodied in language, traditions, norms, folklore and social practices. She drew on Gleick’s Chaos Theory as a framework for conceptualising the dynamics of change, embracing uncertainty, recursiveness, complexity and diversity in order to encounter what is hidden, uncertain, unexpected and disordered thus grounding her analysis is a long historical tradition. Greene (1994) also adopted a systemic view, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, to provide a critical analysis of Irish society as a context for development. She continued with her feminist and ecological analysis in her research – her recent book (Greene 2002) adopted a critical perspective towards developmental psychology. Greene also adopted leadership in the recently funded National Longitudinal Study (NLS), ensuring that a contextualized understanding of development will emerge. Moane’s (1994) contribution focused on the implications of colonialism for psychological and social functioning. Adopting a life-span, ecological and feminist perspective, she disputed the unitary nature of “the Irish Psyche’. She argued that psychological patterns related to colonialism are related to gender, class, age and ethnic grouping, and that decolonization remained to be theorized. She continued to work with the intersections of gender and colonialism to develop a liberation psychology as an alternative to mainstream psychology which she criticized as supporting the status quo through its individualism, acontextualism and racist, sexist and class biases (Moane 1999).

In addition to this Special Issue, three earlier writers on colonialism and oppression were Barry Fitzpatrick, Vincent Kenny, and Sean Ruth, all of whom published their articles in interdisciplinary journals. Fitzpatrick (1983) presented an early challenge to psychology’s alignment with the authority of church and state, ‘as a science of “adjustment” and “socialization”’. Kenny (1985) adopted an explicitly post-colonial perspective and used Kelly’s Construct Theory to describe patterns which derive in part from the complementary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Ruth’s (1988) perspective was grounded in re-evaluation counselling and also focuses particularly on the relational aspects of oppression and liberation. Remaining on the boundaries of the field, more recently he has presented an account of how relations of power and of powerlessness can be acted out through attacks on leaders and how leaders can respond, thus providing leadership for liberation (Ruth 2006).

Ciarán Benson’s contribution to the Special Issue focused on the intersections of art and nationalism (Benson 1994). In his subsequent book, he articulates a ‘cultural psychology of self’, adopting a discursive psychology approach which theorises mind as emerging through joint activity mediated through cultural and historical narratives (Benson 2001). Also in UCD, although not a contributor to the Special Issue, Adrian Brock adopts a social constructionist perspective. His work is concerned with developing a more international history of psychology in order to raise issues currently marginalized in psychology, such as cultural imperialism, the project of modernity, and the relationship between indigenization and universalism in psychology (Brock, Louw, & van Hoorn, 2004; Brock, 2006). Michael O’Connell in UCD has focused on the relationship between inequality in society and psychological well-being and on changing Irish attitudes and values in a neo-liberal context (O’Connell 2001). Along with Malcolm MacLachlann in Trinity College, he has also published on the topics of racism and on healthcare (MacLachlann & O’Connell 2000). MacLachlann has published extensively on critical perspectives to health, and how embodiment is social and cultural (e.g. MacLachlann, 2004).

These publications reflect, to some extent, the range and diversity of critical psychology in Ireland. It is also the case that in the universities much of critical psychology is offered in coursework, or presented in theses and reports. Outside the mainstream universities in Ireland, students who study with the Open University in Ireland are offered theoretical tools of analysis for challenging psychology’s role in social control. Nonetheless, as yet, in the PSI or university departments, there is no concerted interrogation of mainstream psychology’s epistemological assumptions. In particular, there is no shared project to critique mainstream psychology’s role in social control. However, the increasing visibility of critical psychology and related areas nationally and internationally is creating a vital context for the emergence of new voices. For example a Symposium at the annual PSI conference in 2005, on ‘Critical Directions in Clinical Psychology’ convened by Michael Guilfoyle of Trinity College Dublin focused on how clinical psychology conceals the relationship between the personal and the political (Guilfoyle, 2005). The symposium included papers adopting critical discursive approaches to raise questions about the sociopolitical conditions of ADHD (Seery, 2005), deficit models of schizophrenia (Meehan, 2005) and the collusion of psychotherapy in gendered power relations with women presenting with depression (O’Dea, 2005).

On the boundaries of psychology, one might also include social scientists in other disciplines who have drawn on wider theorizations of critical psychology to inform research on subjectivities in an Irish context. For example, Breda Gray (2004) in the University of Limerick has drawn inter alia on the work of Nicholas Rose to analyse the discursive production of Irish emigrant Traveller and settled women’s selves in Irish global modernity; Anne B. Ryan (2001) in NUI, Maynooth, explicitly locates her feminist critique of adult education pedagogical practices within critical psychology; Michael Breen, Eoin Devereux and Amanda Haynes, social scientists in the University of Limerick, have published their research on media representations of asylum seekers in the International Journal of Critical Psychology (Haynes et al, 2006). Moreover, it is important to recognize that there are a range of critical psychologies which exist outside the academy underpinned by analyses of power relations. Full consideration of these forms of critical psychology is not possible here, but of particular note are feminist developments of radical approaches to therapy, and political interventions in the broad area of violence against women.

Indeed, the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the above works suggests that to make sense of critical psychology, it becomes necessary to situate psychology and critical voices in the broader context of critique in Ireland over time.

4. Intersecting Contexts of Critique in Ireland[3]

While the psychology which emerged in 1950s Ireland drew on a long tradition of Catholicism, this was not the only tradition. One concern of critical theory in Ireland, for instance, has been to argue that the hegemonic status of ‘traditional Irish Catholicism’ in the 1950s has obscured the contest and resistance of its making (Wills, 2001). The critical voices on the boundaries of psychology in Ireland do not emerge in a cultural vacuum, but have resonances with and are supported by broader critical theory in Ireland and internationally, both historically and in contemporary contexts. This context includes a rich indigenous language and literary culture, as well as social movements such as feminism, the left and nationalist struggles, anti-colonial struggles, Irish language activism, global solidarity struggles, and, more recently, anti-racism movements. Such critical perspectives occupy spaces both within and without academies and assume different cultural forms. All this points to a dynamic, often contradictory, context of contestations of and resistances to normalizing discourses, including those constitutive of mainstream psychology itself.

Some of the contestations and resistances referred to by Wills (2001) are exemplified by The Bell, a literary journal founded in 1940 by Seán O’Faoileán and Peadar O’Donnell, two writers, intellectuals and socialists who had been active in the political struggle for Irish independence. In the first editorial, O’Faoileán calls for the experimental, fresh recreation of all our symbols in order ‘to create a genuinely participatory community of minds’ (Kearney, 1983, p. 167) Ireland is conceived, not as a homogenous cultural unit, but as ‘a complex, teeming synthesis of different views’ (ibid.). But by the last editorial in 1954, O’Faoileán has grown weary and pessimistic. The context in which psychology emerges is one where the possibilities for new creative alternatives seem to have receded, and where critique alone cannot sustain the energy for new visions of Ireland.

But the 1970s marked a period of intense resurgence of radical political mobilization, including the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – followed by British military occupation and armed conflict, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Left and the Gaeltacht[4] Civil Rights Movement. Inevitably, debates and tensions were manifest between and within all strands of resistance. In this context also, ‘revisionist’ versions of Ireland’s colonial history gained hegemonic status, institutionalising repressive and censorious forms of social control for those who challenged partition and/or State abuses of human rights in Northern Ireland.

The Cranebag, another journal for critical thinking, emerges in this context, founded in 1977 by philosophers Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney. The Special Issues characteristic of the journal pick up strands of wider cultural and political debate, including issues, for instance, on Images of the Irish Woman, The North, Minorities, Irish Language and Culture, Latin-America, Socialism, and Media and Popular Culture. The First Editorial explicitly addresses the nature of ‘the critical way’ as historicising and dynamic, not concerned with facts but with ‘examining their roots and their reason for being there in the first place…it is never complete, its borders always shifting, disintegrating, reforming’ (Hederman and Kearney, 1977, n.p). A critical encounter is also a creative one: The Crane Bag aims ‘to promote the excavation of such unactualised spaces within the reader. From such a place a new understanding and a new unity might emerge’ (ibid.).

In ‘The Forum Issue’, The Cranebag extends an explicit invitation to psychology as a discipline to partake in this critical attitude. This issue provided a forum of inquiry for exploring possibilities of cooperation between Religion, Education, Art and Psychology, mirroring somewhat the later interdisciplinary issue in The Irish Psychologist. However, while the later venture sought considerations of cultural issues to inform Irish psychology, the earlier critical project casts psychology as itself a ‘cultural mode of self-representation’, and links a critical review of Ireland’s ‘ideological hegemony’, including psychology, to a political transformation of society (Hederman and Kearney, 1983, n.p.).

The Field Day enterprise was another important critical literary venture which emerged around the same time. It continues mainly in the form of the Field Day Critical Conditions publications series, drawing on a variety of intellectual resources including the Frankfurt School, post-colonialism, critical theory and, albeit less so, on feminist theory. Lloyd (2001) for instance outlines the aim of postcolonial projects as to rethink and re-envision the legacy of occluded Irish anti-colonial struggles in the light contemporary struggles. Cleary (2005) notes that while the series contributors do not share a methodological agenda, they articulate an overall critical skepticism toward liberal teleologies of progress which is at odds with the dominant intellectual, political and popular cultural consensus in Ireland.

However, while critical literary projects such as The Cranebag and Field Day have been important in introducing critical ideas into Irish cultural discourse, their wider public impact has been deemed less impressive (McCormack, 1986; Cleary, 2005). Confinement of critical discussion to an ‘intellectual coterie’ (Cleary, 2005, p.19) contrasts sharply with other kinds of alternative interdisciplinary spaces, forged in resisting the mainstream academy’s refusal to engage with radical perspectives and social movements. These critical spaces articulate a vision of education in and about social change, and a vision of knowledge where political struggles inform academic analysis. Critical to their politics are active connections with communities and social movements through ‘organic intellectuals’. The variegated nature of social movements and the range of concerns have led to specific academic institutional spaces inquiring into the complex power relationships of people’s lives - including those of women, working class people, lesbians, gay men and bisexual people, disabled people, Travellers, refugees and asylum seekers – and broad areas of concern for social movements such as community development, adult education, and global solidarity.

The impact of feminism as a major intellectual and political tradition in Ireland, and as a primary site for radical change in academia, deserves special mention here (e.g. Byrne et al, 1996; Byrne and Leonard, 1997; Connolly, 2003; MacCurtain and O’Corráin, 1978; Smyth, 1993). In the early 1980s, feminists started developing the field of Women’s Studies as a challenge to the patriarchal academic mainstream and with strong links with women in the wider community. Programmes are now established in several universities throughout Ireland. Arguably, these institutional spaces provided one important catalyst for the renewed mobilization of active feminist resistance in the late 1980s and 1990s, as public debate erupted about the legalization of abortion and information on abortion (see Smyth, 1992). Socialist ideas have also long informed Irish progressive movements and, in the 1980s, also became established in academic contexts. The Equality Studies Centre in University College Dublin opened in 1989, drawing on Marxism and critical theory as well as feminism (Baker et al, 2004). In the 1990s, racism began to be theorized by social scientists in Ireland based on the notion of the ‘specificities of Irish racism’, informed by an analysis of Ireland’s contradictory location in racialised discourses (McVeigh, 1992; Lentin and McVeigh, 2002).

These developments have also spearheaded epistemological interrogation of academic knowledge as deeply implicated in the operation of power. The publication of (Re)searching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland (Byrne and Lentin, 2000) marks an important landmark here in tracing a history of epistemological debate in Ireland (e.g. Daly,1987; Lentin,1993; Mahon,1994;O’Dowd, 1988) and in situating feminist debates in the context of wider theoretical developments in the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The volume also showcases examples of feminist emancipatory and interpretative research methodologies in Ireland, based on reflexively questioning dualisms of objectivity/subjectivity, and the ethics and politics of research practices, including the social relations of knowledge production.

While the challenges endemic to operating in an academic environment hostile to radical ideas cannot be overstated, all these institutional strands have intersected with and supported each other in complex ways to create a vibrant intellectual culture of resistance and critique. This has important implications for critical psychologies in Ireland. These interdisciplinary contexts have offered crucial intellectual and political possibilities for individuals in the field of psychology. Although critical psychologists from the discipline of psychology have not yet developed a strong presence in these wider critical debates, the blurring of disciplinary boundaries has itself arguably expanded the range of critical psychologies. Practices of critique in these spaces have laid claim to much of the subject matter of psychology in interrogating questions of self, subjectivity and identity. In the process, psychology’s traditional subject matter has been transformed in ways which necessarily problematise analytical distinctions between individuals and their social contexts.

Yet, with some notable exceptions (e.g. McDonnell, 2003; Ryan, 2001), these challenges to the mainstream have tended to be framed as challenges to mainstream sociology, leaving psychology beyond social critique. Byrne and Lentin (2000), for instance identify a core challenge for feminist research in the social sciences as being that of ‘creating a sociology with women’ (p.31). A critical focus on sociology is somewhat understandable given that these debates have largely been driven by critics from within this discipline. Nonetheless, even these radical approaches in the social sciences have not provided a concerted critique of the taken for grantedness of psychology’s conceptual apparatus of the individual and the implications of this for social control.

At stake here is more than the need to contest received definitions of psychology’s appropriate subject matter and ‘who’ is entitled to engage in critical interrogation of psychology. While links with social movements and grass-roots activism provide a vital context for purposeful development of emancipatory knowledge paradigms, emerging debates suggest that the political agency and, indeed, the very constitution of, grass-roots social movements cannot be taken for granted. The assertion, for instance, that the ‘mushrooming’ of grassroots women’s groups over the past two decades marks a new phase in the women’s movement (Connolly,1996, 2003; Coulter, 1993; Mahon, 1995) is disputed, in part, through questioning the emphasis on personal development courses on their agendas (e.g. Mulvey, 1994; Clancy, 1995). Mulvey, for instance, has argued for the need to ‘move beyond’ the personal in order to focus on systems and structures. These debates open onto key questions about the personal as a critical focus of inquiry in facilitating women’s groups as agents for social change. Broader questions also trouble political agency in Ireland given the assumed transcendent status of neo-liberalism. Critics challenge the policy-making paradigm of ‘Social Partnership’, a corporatist approach to policy that draws community development into partnership with government and capital, and which is the main institutional framework for community development organizations to interact with the state (Powell and Geoghegan, 2004). Meade (2005) argues that community development projects are positioned as social rehabilitators but not critics, given the government’s role in mobilizing, surveillance, and controlling a ‘top-down model of active citizenship’ (p. 360). While energy is sublimated into the partnership process, it does not allow for more critical voices or a radical restructuring of agendas. These various discontentments invite work for critical psychological scrutiny, and, in particular, highlight the importance of conceptual and theoretical tools to address questions of agency as they relate to political transformation in specific contexts.

In conclusion, relocating critical possibilities from the field of psychology to the wider context of social critique in Ireland provides a wider frame of political and cultural references for understanding critical voices within psychology. Challenging disciplinary boundaries expands the range of critical psychologies in Ireland, and makes available rich strands of critique linked to activism to inform critical psychologies of transformation in Ireland. However, it is suggested that these critiques also prise open urgent questions relevant to critical psychology regarding the search for meaningful political agency in Ireland today.

5. Negotiating Personal and Political: Critical Psychologies for Transformation

This section takes another shift in context by exploring the particularities of our own attempts as feminist activists to negotiate the personal and political in order to illustrate some possibilities for understanding political agency. We each present a more personal account of some of the political and theoretical trajectories and engagements which we find interesting and useful in informing our own engagements as activists, and as critical psychologists negotiating political agency for radical change. Our accounts are framed through our shared political commitments regarding feminism, community education, post-colonialism and neo-liberal critique, with emphases on structuralist (Geraldine) and post-structuralist (Siobhán) analyses respectively.

Geraldine’s Journey: Liberation Psychology, Gender and Colonialism

These multiple strands of critical thinking obviously provided a rich and challenging context for theory and activism in Ireland, yet with the exception of the work of McCarthy outlined above (McCarthy 1988; 1994), the Psychology programme in which I participated in the 1970s made no connections with Irish cultural and political contexts. Joining a feminist group while an undergraduate provided experience of direct action which has continued since. Central themes in these political contexts were the importance of inclusion, equality and accessibility. The phrase ‘the personal is political’ at that time encompassed the view that structural power inequalities had an impact on all areas of functioning, that internalized oppression acted as a block to solidarity and to activism, and that personal change could be linked with political change. (All of these, of course, have since been problematized). On the academic front, the often atheoretical positivism of psychology contrasted with the uncertainties and challenges of feminist theory and critical theory, yet the field of psychology remained stubbornly committed to quantitative positivist methodology and the defense of professional issues, and impervious to the theorizing outside the field reviewed above. This reflected the international context which disciplined the field in Ireland.

When Women’s Studies started to emerge in Ireland in the 1980s, it offered the opportunity to engage in an interdisciplinary context which seemed to encompass activist as well as academic ideals of transformation. In UCD we adopted a feminist perspective, and defined Women’s Studies as ‘Feminism in action criticizing accepted knowledge and advancing new women centred knowledge’. This definition encompassed the critical and deconstructive agenda of Women’s Studies, its critical grounding in women’s experiences, its aim to construct new knowledge and its radical approach to teaching and learning. Thus, in the face of the intransigence of Psychology, I chose to operate in Women’s Studies and the women’s movement rather than try to mobilize a Critical Psychology.

In Women’s Studies (and elsewhere) in the 1980s and 1990s, post-structuralist perspectives challenged many assumptions about power, the unitary nature of psyches and of identities, and understandings of social change and of activism (Burman et al. 1996; Nicholson, 1990). The difficulties of poststructuralist approaches for clear political analysis have been outlined by Brodrib (1992) among others. Brodribs’ title, ‘Nothing Matters’, identified the tendency in post-structuralist analyses to reduce political issues to such a degree of specificity that they seemed irrelevant. Other difficulties frequently identified in post-structuralist theorizing include that of identifying clear political targets (where power is dispersed rather than institutionalized) and a tendency to minimize the role of structural and material forces and indeed sometimes of power itself (Delphy and Leonard, 1992). There was a danger of undermining solidarity among groups as the focus shifted to specificity and subjectivity. Furthermore post-structuralist perspectives – including postmodernist feminist writings, post-colonial theory and queer theory – all employ a mode of discourse which is difficult if not impossible for those without university education. I engaged with these critiques in the context of co-teaching Feminist Theory to postgraduates in Women’s Studies (Smyth, 1993) and Equality Studies (the latter committed to a structuralist perspective, Baker et al. 2004), while also involved in direct action groups concerned with reproductive rights and lesbian and gay rights.

The difficulties of post-structuralist perspectives became particularly apparent through teaching Women’s Studies to undergraduates and in community contexts as the Women’s Studies programme extended to involve women with little formal education. As personal development and psychology courses proliferated, critics focused on the acontextual and individualizing nature of such courses (Kitzinger and Perkins, 1993; Mulvey, 1994). Yet, my experience in teaching and workshops was that the draw of Psychology in a Women’s Studies context lay precisely in the opportunity it offered to link the personal and the political in a way which Sociological and other perspectives did not. How to offer a clearly political yet also constructed view of the personal and of agency and transformation became my central interest. The validity of the above critiques of social constructionist approaches also became more apparent through the experiences of the annual Lesbian Lives conference and the emergence of Queer theory in UCD. Both of these aimed to provide a context which bridged the academic and the community, yet as post-structuralist perspectives gained prominence, those without university education became alienated, complaining of inaccessible language and irrelevant theorizing. Post-structuralist analyses clearly provided a very important and necessary challenge to the simplifying and universalizing tendencies of much structuralist theorizing, tendencies which had also been criticized by post-colonial, black and global feminism(s) (Basu, 1995; Mama 1995; Rajan 1993), and offered emancipatory analyses, but could also be alienating and disempowering.

In my work I have attempted to combine structuralist and poststructural perspectives by presenting a structuralist view of society while at the same time acknowledging the negotiation of subjectivities by class, race, gender and other social categories. I argue, along with others in critical psychology and liberation psychology (Fox and Prilleltensky 1997; Martin-Baro, 1994; Prilleltensky and Nelson 2002), that a politicized psychology can facilitate political activism and that an understanding of internalized oppression is crucial for agency and solidarity. In my contribution to the Special Issue of the Irish Journal of Psychology, I identified six patterns labelled ‘mechanisms of control’, clearly locating these patterns as interconnected and as forming a system of oppression (Moane, 1994). The six mechanisms have been used throughout my work, and are: violence; economic exploitation, political exclusion, control of culture, sexual exploitation, and fragmentation. The works of feminist psychologists (e.g. Miller 1986) and writers on colonialism (Fanon, 1967; Memmi, 1967) and postcolonial theory (Kiberd, 1995; Lloyd, 1993; Said, 1993) provided a basis for identifying cultural and psychosocial patterns which could vary across different social groups, across historical time and across the life-span. The article also considered strategies for liberation, an analysis which was developed further in a chapter on lesbian and gay liberation (Moane 1995) which argued for the necessity for change at the personal level of internalized oppression, the interpersonal level of community and the political level of the socio-political system.

These themes were fully developed in the book Gender and Colonialism (1999), a work which rejected positivist psychology and drew on feminist and critical psychology as well as postcolonial theory to develop an analysis of internalized oppression, agency, resistance, solidarity and activism. The book elaborated three elements which became the basis for classes and workshops in Liberation Psychology. The courses used the phrase ‘Liberation Psychology’ but outrightly rejected institutionalized psychology as individualistic and as involved in social control. These were delivered by tutors in settings that included community women’s education groups (The UCD certificate in Women’s Studies), religious life, lesbian groups, prison groups and trainee psychotherapists. The overall aim is to challenge the separation of the personal and the political, and to present them as constituting each other. The approach begins with a structuralist analysis of oppression by elaborating on the specificities of the six mechanisms of control in the particular context being examined. This provides participants with a clear political analysis which provides the basis for solidarity and support as well as for an analysis of internalized oppression. The second step is to explore the impact of these structural patterns on the individuals who experience these patterns (internalized oppression). An important theme here is that oppression is associated with both strengths and weaknesses, a theme emphasized particularly in feminist writings (Miller 1986) and in writings on liberation psychology (Martin Baro 1994). Areas identified include anger and despair, for example, but also courage, humour and generosity. This allows a personalized as well as a collective exploration of the construction of psyches. The third element is an analysis of transformation by identifying strategies for change at the personal, the interpersonal and the political levels (the ‘cycle of liberation’). Change at the personal level linked to areas of personal development, while the interpersonal level involved groups and communities, and the political level involved taking action to bring about change at the system level. These levels are presented and explored as intrinsically interconnected in a ‘cycle of liberation’ (Moane, 2003). In essays and evaluations of these classes and workshops, participants repeatedly confirmed that participation had enhanced their political analysis, their understanding of the link between the personal and the political, their sense of solidarity and their interest in activism. Rather than seeing themselves and the political as separate, they saw them as mutually constructed and mediated through the interpersonal realm of relationships and community. This approach, like that of others in liberation psychology (Nelson and Prilleltensky, 2002), thus breaks down the dichotomy between individuals and society and also facilitates agency, resistance and solidarity through clear structural/systems levels of analysis.

This work on liberation psychology provided the basis for returning to an analysis of the legacies of colonialism for Irish society in 2002, in an article that placed the analysis of liberation and of decolonization in the context of Ireland’s historical legacies and also of contemporary economic and social changes. Again linking the personal and the political, albeit in a different context, this article argued that specific psychosocial weaknesses which could be seen as legacies of colonialism placed Irish society at greater risk for domination by a hegemonic discourse such as neo-liberalism which would in turn enhance these weaknesses. It also suggested that there were cultural strengths gained from history that, if acknowledged and supported, could increase the capacity to resist such domination. It still remains the case, however, that the bulk of writing on postcolonial themes in an Irish context, even in the social sciences, comes from outside the field of psychology (Connolly, 2004), and, as noted in the previous section, even critical psychologists have not developed a presence in numerous critical debates in contemporary Ireland.

Siobhán’s Story: Rooting and Shifting: Feminism and Poststructuralist Dilemmas in Negotiating Solidarity

If it were possible to easily trace a point in time of becoming a self-consciously political agent, then the late 1980s, post psychology degree, mark the moment when I entered the wider swarm of critique and resistance. Through involvement in the radical politics of (a male-dominated) left republican group, I first encountered the notion of ‘structures’ as a core explanatory concept allowing for the development of clear political strategies. Yet, these structures seemed to evade and silence the realities and intensities of mental life, for which psychology had earlier seduced me with unrequited promises of understanding. And if it were possible to easily trace a day of political and conceptual shifts, then I trace the day the words THE POLITICS OF REALITY screamed at me urgently from a book-spine (Frye, 1983) on a book-shop browse, propelling me resolutely into a feminist politics of linking the personal and political. The taken-for-granted surface of social relations was disturbed anew by the discovery of Henriques et al’s (1984) Changing the Subject, which also opened possibilities for a more active critical engagement with psychology. Feminist post-structuralism has since addressed for me some core dilemmas, but also created new ones, in understanding personal-political links, embracing diversity and contradictions, and in opposing and subverting power relationships (e.g. Henwood et al, 1998; Roulston, 1999).

I have constructed this narrative in order to encapsulate a sense of ongoing dilemmas for me in negotiating a sense of myself as a political agent and feminist activist, and the intertwining of politics and ideas. These dilemmas set the terms for my engagement with critical psychology in this section, where I try to think through some issues of political agency which arise for me given the specificities of my own political concerns. In doing so, I draw on some wider contributions to critical thinking in Ireland.

I work for a community-based women’s centre in a small town in a rural part of Ireland where the main focus of my work is supporting women’s groups in becoming agents for social change. Social partnership sets the primary context within which we are funded and negotiate for social justice and gender equality. This context often presents challenges for me in linking theory and practice to support my own political agency.

The work of Anne B. Ryan (2001) offers an important contribution in this regard. Her concern is to theorise forms of subjectivity to support social movements such as feminism and she does this from a feminist post-structuralist perspective drawing inter alia on the work of Hollway, Mama and Henriques et al. She reframes debates which question personal development practices of women’s groups in Ireland by challenging the implicit individual-society dualism in arguments to ‘move beyond the personal’. Critiquing mainstream psychology’s role in conceptualizing and regulating these practices, she argues that the issue is not to deny the personal but to negotiate the ‘tricky ideological ground’ involved in attending to it. She adopts a Foucauldian approach to agency, discursive practices often making it not thinkable/doable for women to assume positions as agents, especially in heterosexual relationships. Her own research suggests that women who can deal with uncertainty are likely to be agentic in pursuing feminist goals in a multiple and complex world. She therefore makes selective use of psychoanalysis to engage with emotional experiences, such as ambivalence and guilt, associated with change. This analysis informs her creation of pedagogical conditions for self-reflection as ‘a politically radical act for women’ (p.3), using the content of standard personal development courses. The facilitator’s role is crucial in providing terms outside of individualistic discourses in which women can interpret their experiences. As a facilitator, she openly questions dominant discourses about women and men, naming power and the social nature of feelings and contradictions. Her practice includes careful listening to women’s stories to discern current understandings of control in their lives. Introducing questions of why and how, she encourages women to read themselves as multiple, feminist subjects through multiple interpretations of the same event. One pedagogical tool she employs to explore relational elements of subjectivity and resistance is Lerner’s (1985) idea of relationships as a dance.

This post-structuralist critique of psychology also permits for me a range of alternative questions for critical inquiry, based on interrogating wider functions served by psychological discourses in Ireland. It enables inquiry, for instance, about the funding arrangements of the State, and the discursive practices involved in framing and regulating personal development. For instance, the (then) Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs (1998) locates obstacles to participation within the individual as ‘low self esteem and social skills’ (p. 16), while personal development courses are constructed as providing a ‘first step’ to ‘escape from poverty and disadvantage’ (p. 16). In this account, individuals, such as women with whom I work, are positioned as passive and denied their personal histories of survival and resistance. In addition, a reified poverty entails ‘escape’ but not critique, with personal development processes constructed as paving the way for community involvement in the pre-constituted world of social relations which is social partnership. Psychological discourses of personal development can in this sense be interpreted as part of the moorings of dominant discourses of social partnership, based on ideologically saturated and multi-layered notions of ‘development’.

Feminist research and analyses also suggest identity processes going on here linked to neo-liberalism. Breda Gray (2003) draws on feminism, poststructuralism and development theory to address the discursive production of women’s ways of describing their conduct as subjects and selves in Irish global modernity, analysing the shifting conditions of possibility for the categories ‘Irish’, ‘women’, ‘migrant’ ‘national’ and ‘diaspora’ in the 1980s and 1990s. She argues that Irish global modernity is marked by new modes of gendered, classed racial and national classifications, hierarchised by a privileging of ‘white’ Euro-American mobility. However, social partnership processes tend to preclude and undercut the possibility of politically challenging these hierarchical relationships. In particular, such depoliticizing effects include the construction of discrete identity categories around demands for ‘inclusion’ which flatten power relationships. Categories of identity such as women, Travellers, lone parents, disabled, lesbians etc. no longer signify power relationships but have become ‘new axes of identity along which social consensus can be broadened’ (Meade and O’Donovan, 2002, p. 3).

Psychological discourses then are reworked through neoliberal discourses and practices to contain and regulate social movements by subverting possibilities of critique at a number of points. These challenges point to the urgent need to expand the range of thinking about political subjects to address solidarity as a theoretical and political concern. But while feminist post-structuralism offers critique, the possibilities for reclaiming political agency appear correspondingly insurmountable given the difficulties assumptions of multiple subjectivities raise for collective identities. Indeed, collective identities are themselves appropriated and emptied of power through the terms of engagement offered by social partnership. While the notion of discursive positions offers some agentic possibilities, it does not necessarily tap into questions of solidarity. In this clash between epistemology and politics, between critique and the search for alternatives, it is necessary to chart new strategies and understandings.

I am also on the voluntary management executive of a small feminist organization called Banúlacht. Banúlacht works with grass-roots women’s groups in Ireland linking local and global issues in solidarity with women in the global South. Our Economic Literacy programmes facilitate women to critically explore their experiences in regard to gendered representations of ‘the economy’, offering possibilities for political agency through international women’s human rights frameworks (Madden, 2000; Maeve Taylor, 2004).

Wetherell’s (1995) discussion of post-structuralist understandings of feminist politics provides a starting point for me in making sense of Banúlacht’s collective identity (Madden, 2005). She describes a ‘politics of articulation’ which combines contradictory movements of closing and opening. Banúlacht’s negotiation of an identity from which to act through its ‘Feminist Principles’ creates closure by articulating commitments such as women-only spaces, anti-racism and challenging global inequalities. But an openness of identity is sustained through recognizing these principles as holding multiple meaning possibilities, and building in the possibility of their own questioning through ongoing critical reflection. The idea of moments of opening and closing is of itself however limited theoretically in not explicitly engaging with questions of solidarity at stake for an organisation such as Banúlacht.

Notions of ‘closing’ and ‘opening’ resonate with another set of ideas integral to the concept of ‘transversal politics’. Transversal politics is a concept developed by Italian peace activists for understanding alternative forms of solidarity (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Eilish Dillon, another Banúlacht activist, and I stumbled across the concept in an attempt to analyse the tensions involved in Banúlacht’s work (Dillon and Madden, 2004). Transversal politics challenges universalism and homogenisation but also relativistic understandings which assume that shared political goals are not possible. It moves beyond uncritical notions of solidarity which conceptualise differences as a fixed ‘otherness’, and which deny historical and political aspects of their construction (Yuval-Davis, 1997). The concepts of ‘rooting’ and ‘shifting’, underpin the idea of non-closure of identity so that ‘each participant in the dialogue brings with her the rooting in her own membership and identity, but at the same time tries to shift in order to put herself in a situation of exchange with women who have different membership and identity’ (ibid, p. 131) (see also Cockburn and Mulholland, 2000).

In applying these concepts to Banúlacht’s work, we argued for the need to situate transversal politics of solidarity in the wider context of other relationships to be negotiated. In order to understand multiple sites of negotiation and alliances embraced at local, national, regional and international levels, we suggested pluralizing and expanding the concept of transversal politics to a ‘web of transversalisms’. However, these positions and relations are not fixed or simply determined, but complexly infused with power issues/dynamics in terms of actors, structures and discourses. Since not all relationships are best understood as ‘transversalism’, it seemed to us also necessary to include an analysis of how constraining relationships, such as funding relationships, intersect with transversal politics at all levels. We conceptualised this in terms of the intersection of ‘shrinking tensions’ and ‘stretching tensions’: Banúlacht is constrained to some extent by its own identity, position and funding and other relationships which try to diminish/control its feminist agency’; it is also ‘stretched’ through transversal relationships with women’s groups and organisations in Ireland, Europe and the South, as well as other non-governmental development organisations, which have created spaces of mutually expanding feminist agencies. The ongoing struggle then in negotiating tensions is considered as always complex, contingently resolved, yet dynamic.

These understandings of transversal politics facilitate me in making sense of my own political agency, and support a politics of identity based on solidarity which goes against the grain of the prevailing model of social consensus. I am also interested in theoretical connections offered by Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogical understandings of self-other relationships, and his theorization of social life which also centres ideological struggle. Indeed, the notion of intersecting ‘shrinking’ and ‘stretching’ tensions resonates with Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of struggle through intersecting authoritative discourses which fix meaning, and open provisional discourses which unfix meaning.

Bakhtin’s historicized understanding of this openness, whereby any utterance must ‘brush up against thousands of living dialogical threads’ (ibid. p. 276), also offers leverage for further theorising political possibilities of rooting and shifting to encompass an expanded temporal horizon linking past, present and future. The constitution of the present through multiple dialogical threads of the past, casts it as a site potent and alive with an unstable ‘heteroglossia’ of contradictory voices. Where histories of the present are up for grabs, then so too is the future: permitted is a refusal to accept as ‘destiny’ the univocality of authoritative discourses of liberal progress; by the same token, a radical political activism is empowered to sustain open and hopeful dialogues with alternative futures, such as in the announcement by the World Social Forum that ‘Another World Is Possible’.

These concerns also find support from other recent strands of critical thinking in Ireland. Cleary (2005) notes emerging understandings of history in contemporary Irish scholarship which assume that ‘all our “nows” …represent a continuous process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts lived in traumatic relay with each other’(p. 19). Kirby et al (2002) also argue for the linking of past and present transformative energies in Irish culture, foregrounding ‘diasporic and dissident energies’ in order to contest the present neo-liberal orthodoxy in Ireland (p. 206). In setting out these possibilities for the emergence of a critical culture and community of liberation in Ireland, they delineate ‘a cultural politics of dynamic rooted-ness’ (p. 206). This kind of historical rootedness is conceptualized by post-colonial projects in terms of ‘the reconstitution of alternative narratives which emerge in the history of our present’ (David Lloyd, 1999, p.41).

One concept which usefully links the individual and social in the reconstitution of such narratives is that of ‘radical memory’. Whelan (2005) introduces the concept as a framework for understanding inventions of tradition by the post-Famine generation of activists (circa 1880s)[5] who deployed the past for radical political purposes to challenge the present and reshape the future. According to Whelan, the most engaged of these cultural thinkers differentiated between two modes of memory: an individualistic form internalising damage as melancholia, and a culturally induced form seeking wider explanations and political strategies. Radical memory, in recognising that individual memory and social memory are inextricably linked, restores agency and allows for translation from the personal to the public sphere.

One contemporary example of the practice of radical memory is the organization Afri which draws on Ireland’s historical experience of Famine[6] in order to inform a critical social consciousness relevant to strategies of global solidarity in the present. A range of scholarship also explores the possibilities for solidarity through practices of historical remembering in Ireland, with new implications for global feminist solidarity. Examples include Margaret Kelleher’s (1997) work on contemporary and twentieth century literary representations of the Great Famine, and how a sense of unspeakability coexists with the emergence of the ‘feminization of famine’ as a representational strategy enabling narration. Her purpose is to inform an ongoing critique of representations of famine, their concomitant occlusions and political consequences. Breda Gray (2004) also explores discursive and structural factors in the collective memory of emigration, where ‘our’ homogenized history of emigration is invoked as a basis for solidarity with new immigrants, thereby assimilating the other into the self. She discusses how to use memory for an ethical political project to ‘keep contestation and negotiation at the heart of how memory operates in the present’ (p. 13). Arguing for an openness to radical difference, she suggests bringing experiences to memory in different ways by locating them in different contexts to open new interpretive frameworks. Examples include responses to new immigrants which make connections between settled people and Travellers, or in relation to how ‘whiteness’ was/is inhabited in the Irish diaspora.

The notion of radical memory, constituted in part through contrast with its melancholic, individualistic opposite (Whelan, 2005), also suggests that keeping contestation at the heart of memory explicitly requires critical attunement to insinuations of ahistorical, individualistic discourses of psychology in practices of collective remembering. In the case of commemorations of the Great Famine, for instance, Lloyd (2000) critically interrogates the therapeutic discourse of psychoanalysis which emphasized ‘the function of that mourning as socially healing for the present’ (p. 221) in popular discourses. A core question for Lloyd is how to theorise the transition from the individual to the social, recognizing that any relation between the psychological and the social is always already ideological. Here he spots a developmental narrative: famine commemorations on these terms are about shaking off ‘the burden of the past’ in order to ‘enter modernity as fully formed subjects’ (p. 221). For Lloyd, the commemorations, and the psychological/therapeutic discourses constitutive of them, align with Ireland’s uncritical embrace of transnational capitalist modernity, so reproducing the same colonial attitudes toward other post-colonial peoples in the global present. In this sense, the problematics of ‘personal development’ and psychology’s individualism discussed above (Ryan, 2001) reverberate through wider socio-political-cultural-historical spheres of action. This underlines that the search for alternative notions of political agency cannot attempt to transcend critique. Rather, the activity of critique is itself an ongoing process of rooting and shifting in dialogue with new (and old) alternatives.

In this section, I have drawn on feminist post-structuralism, critical theory and post-colonial theory to argue that psychology works with neoliberalism to diminish spaces for articulating oppositional discourses. But accounts of political subjectivities as open, multiple and contingent conjoin with notions of rooting and shifting to connect the self, the other and the social in dynamic, ongoingly critical, historicized ways, suggesting transformed radical political possibilities for solidarity.

Through our two presentations, we can see that practices of critical psychology are emerging in debates where questions of the personal and of identity have become a site of conceptual and political contestation in the context of ongoing political struggles in Ireland. Engagements such as these, we suggest, can also contribute to further development of critical psychologies in Ireland as part of a wider politics of transformation.

6. Conclusion

The consideration of critical psychologies in Ireland prompted by this Special Issue confronted us with a host of contradictions and challenges, including the very questions of what constitutes ‘Ireland’ and the meaning of critical psychology. Our re-view of psychology in an Irish context highlights both a range of critical psychologies in an Irish context, but also points to the limitations of attempts to achieve change by organizing from within mainstream psychology. While such an option may sometimes be strategically necessary, experience in Ireland suggests that possibilities for radical critique are blunted by the terms of the mainstream.

This underlines for us the importance of constituting critical psychology through being: explicitly critical of the field of psychology itself and of its role in social control; interdisciplinary; contextualized; engaged with radical social transformation. We do not confine critical psychology to those within or on the socially constructed boundary of mainstream psychology. Indeed, we would see forms of critical psychology as most effectively practiced by those who traverse the boundaries. Nonetheless, we do not see critical psychology as a pre-constituted domain of inquiry; its constitution is an open-ended question and a deeper deconstruction of ‘critical psychology’ in terms of its multiple forms merits further attention in the Irish context.

We have centred here the role of political activists, of alliances between academics and activists, and of those who stride the academic/activist interstices. In sustaining the insistence of critical psychology to challenge personal/political individual/social dichotomies, we situate these insistencies in the context of ongoing political struggles. These we suggest are vital and urgent sites of conceptual and political contestation. In these contexts, particular questions and dilemmas can provide an impetus for theoretical developments and for debate about alternative political interventions. Challenges here include the ongoing development of emancipatory concepts for theorizing agency and solidarity. In this paper, we have discussed concepts such as ‘internalised oppression’, ‘cycles of liberation’, ‘transversal politics’ and ‘radical memory’. In this regard also, we argue that feminism has a central role to play in critical psychology in the ongoing development of strategies of political transformation through the personal/political nexus.

The specificities of an Irish context also point to particular challenges and possibilities. The institutional weakness of, and mainstream resistance to, critical psychology perspectives in Ireland underscores the vital role being played by international critical psychology spaces for supporting the local legitimization of critical perspectives. The possibility of our contributing to the current journal is a case in point. By the same token, however, Ireland’s contradictory location between a colonial history and current ‘Celtic Tiger’ embrace of neo-liberalism underscores for us the importance of not uncritically adopting forms of critical psychology developed elsewhere. Ireland offers particular possibilities for the ongoing development of critical psychologies in dialogue with international developments, including rich traditions of critical thinking and resistance, existing institutional spaces of critique and a strong community education movement.

We suggest that transformative developments can only come about through moving beyond the boundaries of the field of psychology, collectively organizing and theorizing across disciplinary boundaries, and across institutional and community spaces in a pluralist dialogue. In this expansion and complication of critique, we see political possibilities for critical psychologies as part of a wider national and international movement of transformation.

Finally, Eavan Boland’s opening poetic of critique serves as a reminder that the work of critique is to tell ourselves again and again of those lines which find no horizon in cartographic persuasions of form and design. But our hope is that forms of critical psychology, in signposting new re-mind-ings, can also help to liberate alternative horizons for alternative futures.

References

Baker, J, Lynch K, Cantillon S, and Walsh J (2004), Equality: From Theory to Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Basu, A. (ed.) 1995. The challenge of local feminisms.: Women's movements in global perspective. Boulder: Westview Press.

Benson, C. (1994). ‘A Psychological Perspective on Art and Irish National Identity’ The Irish Journal of Psychology: 'The Irish Psyche' Special Issue, 15, 2 &3, 1994, pp. 316-330.

Benson, C. (2001). The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds. London: Routledge

Boland, E. (1994) In a Time of Violence. Manchester: Carcenet Press.

Brock, A. C. (Ed.) (2006). Internationalizing the history of psychology. New York: New York University Press.

Brock, A. C., Louw, J. & van Hoorn, W. (Eds.) (2004). Rediscovering the history of psychology: Essays inspired by the work of Kurt Danziger. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum

Brodribb, S. 1992. Nothing mat(t)ers: A feminist critique of post-modernism. N.Y.: New York University Press

Burman, E., Alldred, P., Bewley, C., Goldberg, B., Heenan, C., Marks, D., Marshall, J., Taylor, K, Ullah, R and Warnder, S. 1996. Challenging women: Psychology's exclusion, feminist possibilities. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Byrne, A and Lentin, R (eds) (2000) Researching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland, Institute for Public Administration: Dublin.

Byrne, A. and Leonard, M. (1997) Women and Irish Society: A Sociological Reader. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications.

Byrne, A., Byrne, P. and Lyons, A. (1996) ‘Inventing and Teaching Women's Studies’. Irish Journal of Feminist Studies. 1:1 Spring. p. 78-99

Clancy, N. (1995) ‘Personal Development as a Tool for Empowering Women’, Unpublished MRD Thesis, University College Galway.

Cleary, J. (2005) ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’ in Cleary, J and Connolly, C. (Eds) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cockburn, C. and Mulholland, M. M (2000) ‘Analytical action, committed research: What does a feminist action research partnership mean in practice?’ In Byrne, A and Lentin, R (eds) Researching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland, Institute for Public Administration: Dublin.

Connolly, L. (1996) ‘The Women's Movement in Ireland, 1990-1995: A Social Movements Analysis’ Irish Journal of Feminist Studies. 1:1 Spring. p. 43-77

Connolly, L. (2003) The Irish Women's Movement: From Revolution to Devolution. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.

Connolly, L. (2004). ‘The Limits of “Irish Studies”: Culturalism, Historicism, Paternalism’. Irish Studies Review, 12: 2: 139-162.

Coulter, C. (1993) The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women and Nationalism in Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press.

Coyle and Halliday (1994) ‘Introduction: The Irish Psyche considered’ The Irish Journal of Psychology: 'The Irish Psyche' Special Issue, 15, 2 &3, 1994,

Curtis, R. (1988) ‘Perception of Risk of AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Third Level Students.’ Irish Journal of Psychology, 9, 31-42.

Daly, M. (1987) ‘Feminist Research Methodology: The Case of Ireland’, paper presented at

the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, July 6-10 1987, Trinity College Dublin.

Delphy, C. and Leonard, D. 1992. Familiar exploitation. London: Polity Press.

Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs (1998) Review of Expenditure Programmes: Schemes of Grants for Locallly-Based Women’s Groups and for Locally-based Men’s Groups. Dublin: DSCFA.

Dillon, E. and Madden, S. (2004) ‘Positioning between tensions and connections: A critical exploration of Banúlacht’s work in contesting globalisation through linking local and global issues’. Paper presented at Women’s Education Research and Resource Centre Conference, ‘Feminism Contesting Globalisation’, University College Dublin, April, 2004.

Fanon, F. (1967) The wretched of the earth. London: Penguin books. (Original French edition, 1961)

Fitzpatrick, B. (1983) ‘Freud and Ireland’ Cranebag,7(2), 177-182.

Fox, D.R. and Prilliltensky, I. (eds.) (1997) Critical psychology: an introduction. London Sage.

Frye, M. (1983) The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. New York: The Crossing Press.

Gray, B. (2004) ‘Remembering a ‘multicultural’ future through a history of emigration: Towards a feminist politics of solidarity’, University of Limerick, Department of Sociology Working Paper Series, Working Paper WP2003-02.

Gray, B. (2004) Women and the Irish Diaspora. London: Routledge.

Greene, S. (1994). ‘Growing up Irish – Development in context’ The Irish Journal of Psychology: 'The Irish Psyche' Special Issue, 15, 2 &3, 354-371.

Greene, S. (2003). The psychological development of girls and women: rethinking change in time. London, New York, Routledge.

Guerin, S. and Hennessy, E. (2002). ‘Pupils' definitions of bullying.’ European Journal of Psychology of Education, 17 (3), 249-262.

Guilfoyle, M. (2005) ‘Critique and clinical psychology’ Paper presented at The Psychological Society of Ireland 36th Annual Conference 17th-20th November 2005 Abstracts November 2005.

Haynes, A. Devereux, E. and Breen, M. (2006) 'Fear, Framing and Foreigners' International Journal of Critical Psychology, Spring, Special Edition on 'White Fear'.

Hederman, M.P. and Kearney, R. (1977) ‘Editorial’ The Crane Bag, 1(1) n.p.

Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984) Changing the

Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London: Methuen.

Henwood, K., Griffin, C. and Phoenix, A. (eds) (1998) Standpoints and Differences: Essays

in the Practice of Feminist Psychology. London: Sage.

Hughes, B. M. (2004). ‘The mythical provenance of “holistic” therapies.’ Irish Psychologist, 30 (6), 125-126.

Kearney, R. (1983) ‘Between Politics and Literature: The Irish Cultural Journal’, The Cranebag, 7(2) 160-171.

Kelleher, M. (1997) The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Durham: Duke University Press.

Kenny, V. (1985) ‘The post-colonial personality’ The Crane Bag, 9, 70-78.

Kiberd, D. (1995). Inventing Ireland. London : Jonathan Cape.

Kitzinger, C. and Perkins, R. 1993. Changing our minds: A radical lesbian critique of psychology and its dangers. London: Onlywomen Press.

Lentin, R. (1993) ‘Feminist research methodologies – a separate paradigm? Notes for a

debate’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3: 119-138.

Lentin, R. and McVeigh, R. (Eds) (2002) Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland, Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications.

Lerner, M.G. (1985) The Dance of Anger: A woman’s guide to changing the pattern of intimate relationships. New York: Harper and Row.

Lloyd, D. (1999) Ireland After History Critical Conditions: Field Day Series. Cork: Cork University Press.

Lloyd, D. (2000) ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’ in Interventions Vol 2(2), 212-228.

MacCurtain, M. and O’Corráin, D eds (1978) Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension; Dublin: Arlen House.

MacLachlan, M. and O'Connell, M. (eds.) (2000), Cultivating Pluralism: Psychological, Social & Cultural Perspectives on a changing Ireland. Dublin: Oak Tree Press.

MacLachlan, M. (2004) Embodiment: Clinical, Critical & Cultural Perspectives on Health & Illness. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Madden, S. (2000) Putting the Action into Beijing: Institutional Mechanisms and the Beijing Platform for Action. Dublin: Banúlacht.

Madden, S. (2005) ‘Negotiating Identities: The Case of a Feminist Organisation in Ireland Linking Local and Global Issues’ Paper presented at International Critical Psychology Conference, “Beyond the Pale”, 28 June -1 July, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, 2005.

Mahon, E. (1995) ‘From Democracy to Femocracy: The Women’s Movement in the Republic of Ireland’, in Clancy, P., Drudy, S., Lynch, K. and O’Dowd, L. (eds) Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.

Mama, A. 1995 Beyond the Masks. Race, Gender and Subjectivity. London: Routledge.

Martin-Baro, I. 1994. Writings for a liberation psychology. Essays, 1985-1989, edited by A. Aron and S. Corne. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

McCarthy, E. (1988) Transitions to Equal opportunity at Work in Ireland: Problems and Possibilities. Dublin: Employment Equality Agency.

McCarthy, E. (1994) ‘Work and mind: Searching for our Celtic legacy’ in The Irish Journal of Psychology, 15, 2&3, pp. 372-389.

McCarthy, E. and McGinn, A. (1996) Women in Management in Ireland. Commissioned by the Women’s Rights Committee of Dáil Eireann. Dublin: Stationery Office.

McCormack, W.J. (1986) The Battle of the Books: Two Decades of Irish Cultural Debate Dublin: Lilliput Press.

McDonnell, P. (2003) ‘Developments in special education in Ireland: Deep structures and policy making’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, Vol. 7, No. 3, 259–269.

McGilloway, S, and Donnelly, M. (Eds) (2001) ‘Homelessness and Mental Illness - studies from Western Europe’. International Journal of Mental Health, Special issue, Vol 30.

McVeigh, R. (1992) ‘The Specificity of Irish Racism’ Race and Class, 33 (4), 31-45.

Meade, R. (2005) ‘We hate it here, please let us stay! Irish social partnership and the community/voluntary sector’s conflicted experiences of recognition’ Critical Social Policy Ltd Vol. 25(3): 349–373.

Meade, R. and O’Donovan, O. (2002) ‘Editorial Introduction: Corporatism and the ongoing debate about the relationship between the state and community development’ in Community Development Journal, January, 1-9.

Meehan, T. (2005) ‘Self-disruption in schizophrenia: A critique’ Paper presented at The Psychological Society of Ireland 36th Annual Conference 17th-20th November 2005.

Memmi, A. (1967) The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. (Original French edition, 1957)

Miller, J.B. (1986) Toward a new psychology of women. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin.

Moane, G. (1995) ‘Living visions’. In I. O'Carroll and E. Collins, (eds.), Lesbian and gay visions of Ireland: Towards the twenty-first century. London: Cassells.

Moane, G. (1994) ‘A psychological analysis of colonialism in an Irish context’ The Irish Journal of Psychology: 'The Irish Psyche' Special Issue, 15, 2 &3, 1994, pp 250-265

Moane, G. (1999) Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation. London: Macmillan/Palgrave.

Moane, G. (2002) ‘Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of history and the quest for vision.’ In Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (eds.), Reinventing Ireland: Culture, society and the global economy. London: Pluto Press.

Moane, G. (2003) ‘Bridging the personal and the political: Practices for a liberation psychology.’ American Journal of Community Psychology, 31, 91-101.

Mulvey, C. (1994) Evaluation report on the Allen Lane Foundations's funding programme in Ireland, 1989-1991. Dublin: Allen Lane Foundation.

Nicholson, L.J. (ed.) (1990) Feminism/Postmodernism London: Routledge.

O'Connell, M. (2001), Changed Utterly: Ireland and the New Irish Psyche. Dublin: Liffey Press

O’Dea, A. (2005) ‘Discursive and material factors in women’s depression’. Paper presented at The Psychological Society of Ireland 36th Annual Conference 17th-20th November 2005 Abstracts November 2005

O’Dowd, L. (ed) (1988) The State of Social Science Research in Ireland. Dublin: Royal Irish

Academy.

Powell, F. and Geoghegan, M. (2004) The Politics of Community Development. Dublin: A&A Farmar.

Prilleltensky, I., & Nelson, G. (2002). Doing Psychology Critically: Making a Difference in Diverse Settings. Macmillan Press.

Rajan, R.S. (1993) Real and imagined women: Gender, culture and postcolonialism.

Roulston, C. (1999) ‘Feminism, Politics and Postmodernism’ in Galligan, Y., Ward, E.

and Wilford, R. (eds) Contesting Politics: Women in Ireland, North and South.

Oxford/Colorado: Westview Press.

Ruth, S. (1988). ‘Overcoming Oppression and Liberation’. Studies, 21, 252-259.

Ruth, S. (2006). Leadership and Liberation: A Psychological Approach. London:Routledge

Ryan, A. B. (2001) Feminist ways of knowing: Towards theorising the person for radical adult education. Leicester: NIACE

Said, E.W. (1993) Culture and imperialism. London: Vintage.

Seery, L. (2005) ‘Teachers’ constructions of ADHD’ Paper presented at The Psychological Society of Ireland 36th Annual Conference 17th-20th November 2005 Abstracts November 2005

Smyth, A (ed) (1992) The Abortion Papers, Ireland, Dublin: Attic Press.

Smyth, A. (ed) (1996) Feminism, Politics, Community. WERRC Annual Conference, 1996. Dublin: WERRC, University College, Dublin. 24-27.

Smyth, A. (ed.) (1993) Irish Women's Studies Reader. Dublin: Attic Press.

Taylor, M. (2004) Looking at the Economy through Women’s Eyes: a Facilitator’s Guide for Economic Literacy. Dublin: Banúlacht.

Taylor, M., Quayle, E and Holland G. (2001) ’Child Pornography, the Internet and Offending.’ ISUMA, The Canadian Journal of Policy Research, 2 (2), 94-100.

Wetherell, M. (1995) ‘Romantic discourse and feminist analysis: interrogating investment, power and desire’ in Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (Eds) Feminism and Discourse London: Sage.

Whelan, K. (2005) ‘The cultural effects of the Famine’ in Cleary,J. and Connolly, C. (Eds) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wills, C. (2001) ‘Women, Domesticity and the Family: Recent Feminist Work in Irish Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies, 15 (1), 33-57.

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation. London: Sage.

-----------------------

[1] Contact: siobhanmadden@ & ger.moane@ucd.ie

[2] We would like to thank Eilish Dillon and Eunice McCarthy for their support in this project and for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Responsibility for the final version, with all its imperfections, is of course our own. Our thanks also to Ian Parker for the invitation to contribute to this Special Issue, and to the editors, Manolis Dafermos, Athanasios Marvakis and Sofia Triliva, for their kind patience and flexibility.

[3] The section on ‘Intersecting Contexts of Critique in Ireland’ was written by Siobhán Madden, although the content very much reflects both authors’ shared understandings and positionings.

[4] ‘Gaeltacht’ refers to regions where the Irish language is predominantly spoken. The Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement (Gluiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta) was ‘Composed of a small cadre of well-educated and politically inspired young people, [who were] committed to collectivised forms of self-help’ (Powell and Geoghegan, 2004, p. 67).

[5] The ‘Great Famine’ of 1845 to 1852, the immediate cause of which was the failure of the potato crop, is considered to be the single most calamitous event which occurred in Ireland in the modern period. Over one million people died and two million people emigrated within a decade (Whelan, 2005). Eavan Boland’s poem, quoted in the introduction of this paper, is an invocation of the British government’s famine relief works which employed starving people in building roads, often leading to nowhere. These famine roads can still be seen all over Ireland. In Boland’s poem, they are the ‘lines which cry hunger’ and which ‘find no horizon’

[6] See note 5.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download