Psychology and critique – forms of psychologization after 1945: An introduction

Psychologization in and through the women's movement: A transnational history of the psychologization of consciousness‐raising in the German‐speaking countries and the United States

“…Jan de Vos has defined meta‐psychologization as a “psychology of psychologization” (De Vos, 2013, p. 3) and has warned that a critique of psychologization might itself turn into a psychology, which itself may need to be criticized for its psychologizing tendencies, if it fails to address the socio‐structural and political dynamics of the dispersion of psychological knowledge and practices into different social fields. Somewhat in contrast to de Vos' proposal, we employ meta‐psychologization as an analytical term that tries to understand the interrelations between psychologization and its critique (see Balz & Malich, 2020; Malich & Balz, 2020, for a similar endeavor). It is the notion of meta‐psychologization that allows us to finally tie our analyses together with the historiographic distinction between “little p” psychology and “big P” Psychology (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010, p. xix; Richards, 2010) and to better understand the interrelation between feminist psychologies produced in the social field of feminist activism and the Psy‐disciplines.…”

“…We identify this spreading of Psychological or other Psy‐discipline concepts or practices beyond the borders of the disciplines (see Parker, 2015) and into ever new spheres, for example, social movements (see Malich & Balz, 2020), as the first key aspect of psychologization that becomes relevant for our purposes. However, we emphasize that feminist activists actively appropriated Psy‐concepts in their knowledge production, that is, in the process of using these notions they also produced new feminist P/psychological knowledge.…”

“…Research on psychologization analyzes how the discourse of the Psy‐disciplines penetrates other social fields and/or shapes everyday feeling, experience, and action. Some scholars have argued that social movements play a particularly important role in this process (e.g., Castel et al, 1982; Malich & Balz, 2020; Tändler, 2016). Following these leads, this study analyzes psychologization processes in feminist activism in the US and the German‐speaking countries, particularly Austria, by focusing on the feminist practice of consciousness‐raising.…”

“…To analyze the history of the relations between feminism and P/psychology in the German‐speaking countries, with a particular focus on Austria, we rely on a strand of research that has studied the influence P/psychology has had on feminism since the late 1960s and the 1970s (e.g., Herman, 1995; Illouz, 2008; Schmidt, 2020). We here focus on the concept of “psychologization” that has been developed—not least from the margins of the discipline of Psychology itself—to critically assess the effects of Psychological expert discourse on society and on subjectivity (see De Vos, 2013, 2014; Malich & Balz, 2020; Mulvae & Teo, 2020; Parker, 2015). In contrast to much research on the history of feminist Psychologies, which has analyzed the effect feminism has had on Psychology, scholars interested in psychologization have focused on the other side of the equation, that is, on the impact P/psychology has had on other social fields or domains.…”

“…We first explore the uses of P/psychological notions in the earliest conceptions of consciousness‐raising developed by the radical feminist collective Redstockings in the late 1960s. In doing so, we not only attend to the swapping back and forth of concepts between feminist activists and the Psy‐disciplines (see Schmidt, 2020) but also to the interplay between psychologization and the feminist critique of the Psy‐disciplines (see Malich & Balz, 2020). Next, we analyze ways in which consciousness‐raising was psychologized already in the early by mid‐1970s, as protagonists of the Psy‐disciplines started to employ consciousness‐raising as a mental health resource for women and feminist activists, too, started to propagate more psychologized versions of the practice.…”