Critical psychology

Critical psychology is a perspective on psychology that draws extensively on critical theory. Critical psychology challenges mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in more progressive ways, often looking towards social change as a means of preventing and treating psychopathology.

One of critical psychology's main criticisms of conventional psychology is that it fails to consider or deliberately ignores the way power differences between social classes and groups can affect the mental and physical well-being of individuals or groups of people. It does this, in part, because it tends to explain behavior at the level of the individual.

Criticisms of mainstream psychology consistent with current critical psychology usage have existed since psychology's modern development in the late 19th century. Use of the term "critical psychology" started in the 1970s in Berlin at Freie Universität Berlin. The German branch of critical psychology predates and has developed largely separately from the rest of the field. As of May 2007, only a few works have been translated into English. The German Critical Psychology movement is rooted in the post-war babyboomers' student revolt of the late '60s; see German student movement. Marx's Critique of Political Economy played an important role in the German branch of the student revolt, which was centered in Berlin. Then Berlin was a capitalist city surrounded by communist-ruled East Germany, represented a "hot spot" of political and ideological controversy for the revolting German students. The sociological foundations of critical psychology are decidedly Marxist.

One of the most important and sophisticated books in the field is the Grundlegung der Psychologie (Foundations of Psychology) by Klaus Holzkamp, who might be considered the theoretical founder of critical psychology. Holzkamp, who had written two books on theory of science and one on sensory perception before publishing the Grundlegung der Psychologie in 1983, thought this major work provided a solid paradigm for psychological research, as he viewed psychology as a pre-paradigmatic scientific discipline (T.S. Kuhn had used the term "pre-paradigmatic" for social science).

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