[Part 1/3] Critical reflections on psychology: cultural distance and encounters with the 'other'

All three of you are connected through your past work and your links with the Discourse Unit. How do you feel your work fostered or reflected critical perspectives in research? Maybe do you maybe want to start, Erica? Do you want me to say a little bit about the Discourse Unit? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And its relation to kind of critical research. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's, yes, just in relation to the Discourse Unit, which, you know, it's started off as a sort of a safe place for people doing critical work in and around psychology. And the around has always been important as a space to support people to do that work. And I mean, initially, geographically, and then it became sort of trans-institutional as it is now. And I think we have a long subtitle, something about the Centre for the Study of the Reproduction and Transformation of Subjectivity, etc. And initially, Ian Parker and myself kind of convened it. And I think Ian has written, wrote a document about the critical resources informing the Discourse Unit that he used to identify as being, I mean, at a theoretical level, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian perspectives. And then as the years went on and more people, more people kind of participated and did really interesting work, you know, then it became all kinds of other sort of resources that people drew upon. And I would say now very much post-colonial and queer theory perspectives. So the fostering and the critical perspectives have always been in movement according to, you know, wider debates. But, you know, I think that there's a lot we could—oh, well, now there's new materialism, now there's all kinds of other things going on that people are participating in. The question around—I mean, I think it's interesting that kind of all of us in this virtual room kind of have a complex relationship with the discipline of psychology. I, myself, now I'm not in the psychology department either. I'm in an institute of education, which has many psychologists working there. But, I mean, I think it's also worth saying that, I mean, in terms of Ilana and Ingrid, they, you know, both of you came, and Rose as well, came and, you know, it sort of ended up working with us, you know, in the discourse unit in a way, whatever it is. But it's, I mean, maybe it's this very gendered thing about sort of, you know, locus of control or whatever, but it feels like it was very much an accident in many ways. You can both tell your own stories, but, you know, how that all happened. And, you know, well, so you can tell your own stories, but, you know, it wasn't a big plan, was it? Well, I mean, I think, Ingrid, you're—I mean, there was a plan for you to come when we first met. Didn't we meet in Pietermaritzburg in about 1996? Yeah, seven, I was going to say, probably. When you were just finishing your master's, is that right? Had finished your master's. Yes, no, no, I would have been just starting. Yes, but the plan was to come because I was familiar with your work. It wasn't, you know, and I think the discourse unit was a place where then I could also get exposed to other kinds of ideas and find other people that I wouldn't have connected with otherwise. So, yeah, I mean, I think you're right, a happy accident in some ways. That meant there were connections that could be made outside of the discipline and in different topics that otherwise wouldn't have been ones I engaged with. And I've met Erika in the discourse unit during my master's that I was doing at MMU in healthcare studies, actually, looking at issues on drug use. And then I got to know the discourse unit in 1998. And then, since then, we started our work together. Erika Berman was my supervisor. And then it was a great source, really, of critical perspectives, theoretical perspectives, research and practice. So, you all work in different geographical contexts and psychology has been accused of being very Anglo-Eurocentric. How have you experienced this in your own work and how do you feel this impacted more widely on the field of psychology? I can't say much about how it's impacted on the field of psychology, really. Well, I can say that initially, personally, my work evoked a lot of hostility at times, and sometimes still does. So, it's not always been a positive reception, although I think now, since the British Psychological Society, probably with some nudging and help from the psychology of women and equality section, has honoured me with an honorary fellowship. That is certainly recognition, isn't it? So, I suppose there has been some acknowledgement of impact. But in terms of being Anglo-Eurocentric, I mean, I think I would say the issue is that we've challenged from our different positions and perspectives. I mean, as I was reflecting, I remember the first time I went to India to join Vasudevi Reddy and we were thinking about developing who's a developmental psychologist, British-based, but from India originally. And we went to her old university, Osmania University in Hyderabad. This is a long time ago in the, I think, 1994. And in that room, it was very old, there were all these sort of fading pictures of the key figures in psychology, Wundt, William James, Ebbinghaus, these fading photographs. There were literally bunts and burners on the table in their lab. But, you know, it did strike us. And it was Ian Parker and myself, we went and we gave a little talk there to the students who were much more interested in hearing about Charles and Diane's divorce at the time than anything to do with psychology. So that was an interesting lesson. But also, there was a real sense that, you know, these students had a much better, were in a much better place in some ways to formulate a critical perspective on psychology, because they could, you know, they could think about that funny white knowledge from over there in a way that the sort of the students I was teaching, you know, didn't have that geographical and cultural distance so easily. And, you know, at that time, perhaps even more than now, the dominant psychology in the text was very, very sort of US American dominated, even though sort of British critical social psychology was making some headway. So that's kind of one example that came to mind. And, I mean, I've got two other anecdotes that I'd like to sort of throw in before. Well, I don't know if Ingrid and Ilana, well, one of them actually concerns you, Ilana. I was remembering, in terms of the Anglo Eurocentrism, if you like, of not just psychology, but, you know, also the sort of feminist sort of debates that, you know, is very much part of what I would draw upon. And how, when I think it was either at the end of your master's or during your doctorate, we were, it looked like we were talking at cross purposes for a long time. And then I realised that when you were using Heidegger, that you'd learned about from your sort of studies in psychology in Brazil, you were using Heidegger and phenomenology to do the kind of critical interpretive work that I was using feminist, you know, debates and feminist epistemology to use. And that was a really important lesson for me about how people, you know, there are cultural and, you know, different geopolitical resources that are drawn up intellectually, cultural resources that are drawn upon by people doing critical work in different contexts, that might be getting to similar places. And I was also thinking about how more recently Saba Siddiqui came from India from a critical psychology and psychoanalytic tradition also to work with us. And I mean, I remember her saying, I mean, she's been so involved in so many interesting, critical, sort of decolonial discussions, etc, about psychology, but she said that she'd never heard the word intersectionality until she came to Britain. And, you know, and of course, she's been working, you know, with what I would see doing highly intersectional work in her critical analyses, etc. But when I, you know, when I went and met the study group and did a sort of retreat with them a couple of years ago, a few years ago, you know, I could see that, you know, they were using Derrida and notions of difference to do that kind of work, interpretive work, that, you know, we were using kind of ideas from intersectionality and so on. So, you know, it does, I know there are debates about the cultural remit and, you know, and some kind of critical reflections on the way in which talking about intersectionality has become a kind of orthodoxy. But, you know, we were all getting at it from different places. And I guess, you know, there'll be equivalent kind of discussions from South African context about the sort of drift of even critical currents from the global north and how to engage and reflect on those critically and in other contexts. I was thinking about this question, you know, so I think it's a fundamental question to think on how psychology and other studies, or anyway, work in different geographical contexts. And I will talk a bit about this, but also I'm very interested on how specific groups come to be seen as the other in our local context as well. So, we look at cross countries, but we can look also critically on how this psychology operates and participates in this production of specific orders in our community. So, I'm going to say something that anyway, so this is a fundamental question, not only on how to work on different geographical context, but also how specific groups come to be seen as the other in our context, being exoticized, marginalized, for example. I'm particularly concerned with how the encounter between psychology and the other operates. What are the discursive reproductions that impact and constitutes the way that side professionals see the other? This encounter between the other and psychology crucially reveals also how psychology is a situated knowledge, and the importance of considering the social context and how the social categories interplay locally, providing, and I think this is a point that I've been researching and thinking a lot, providing space to listen to the other, because I'm particularly concerned on how this encounter happens. And I think a critical perspective on this is fundamental, that we're going to talk later anyway. Maybe if I could pick up from the conversation about that Anglo-Eurocentrism, which I have to say was a new term for me, so I had to write it down and check I was saying it right. I think that is, I mean, it is still something that we're struggling with so much, and I was still thinking to myself in terms of the original question about the discourse unit and so on, and I think one of the lasting effects for me has been less about the content of things that we were discussing at that time and more about a way of an approach to critical reflection that can really work across time and contexts. And I think one of the things I've noticed is that I've found myself returning recently to what seem like old critiques of psychology, but they seem to be coming back a lot. So through the crisis that has been the COVID epidemic, I have seen, and I know colleagues in the UK are in a similar position, increasingly difficult ideas about psychology, finding a kind of popular currency, very problematic notions around resilience that are completely individualised. And I've found myself going back to things I haven't thought about for many, many years around the risks of individualising what are really structural and economic inequalities and those kinds of issues. And so those remain very relevant. They're not new, but they remain very relevant for me and have become more so over the last year. And I, for example, have been teaching an undergraduate course in conflict studies, and I was really struck when I started teaching that work how much of it, even outside of psychology and the sociology department, was a very decontextualised notion or worked with very decontextualised notions of conflict that really surprised me in a context like ours, where conflict was seen as something between two individuals or between groups without any attention to its history in apartheid history, in colonisation, in the ways in which race and class and gender were erased from what were seen as interpersonal conflicts. And so still, we're sort of having these battles around how to engage with an idea of psychology that doesn't do that, but nevertheless recognises people's kind of distress. So I think those critiques remain very central. And yet, the challenge I have, not ever having been in a psychology department, but working in a more interdisciplinary way, is that psychology in our context is a hugely popular degree. The numbers of students who want to access psychology are enormous. And so I often wonder if it is as simple as saying that psychology lacks relevance across zones. I think maybe the question is a little more complicated than that, because people do want it very, very much. And I think the other thing, of course, is that it depends what we think psychology is, as to whether it doesn't translate or does translate across contexts. So part of the problem around translation is, I think, that we assume that psychology is what happens in Anglo-European contexts, and therefore that it isn't appropriate elsewhere. And yet, some of the work I have done has been in my own city, which is Johannesburg, which is a very diverse city. And we've been looking at people's systems of coping and healing. It's an incredibly violent city with, you know, a lot of opportunity, but a lot of very serious challenges. And what we know is that people do not access psychologists. And so what do they do? And when you ask those questions and you see what people do, I think the picture becomes a little more complex. And people do find meaning in a psychological notion of trauma, for example. But alongside that, they interweave it with the US-influenced Pentecostal churches' notions of trauma, and the healing rituals that go alongside that. And then alongside that, there is a bit of so-called traditional healing practices that go alongside that. And so to say that it does or doesn't translate, it feels like it sort of misses an enormous complexity, and also maybe even risks reinforcing this kind of far too rigid division between, you know, what people think in Africa and what they think in Europe, which of course, you know, in some ways through social media and other things, we're all accessing all kinds of information all the time. So I think if we also ask, take more of a learning position of like, so what is psychology in different places, even if that means completely loosening the boundaries of what, you know, how we define psychology ourselves, then I think actually there's enormously interesting things happening. So that was something I wanted to add.