A Characterisation of South African Psychology (1948–1988): The Impact of Exclusionary Ideology

Abstract

The deliberate and sometimes unwitting complicity of psychology with apartheid social formations has received limited attention in the psycho-historical literature. This paper, in an attempt to break the silence, offers a descriptive characterisation of South African psychology. Details obtained from a content analysis of seven journals show South African psychology, between 1948–1988, to be characterised by five features. Firstly, white males affiliated to the historically white universities dominate knowledge-production in the discipline. Secondly, English is the majority language in publications. Thirdly, although the majority of analysed articles are empirical in nature there is an increase in the production of articles that scrutinise the ideological premises of the discipline. Fourthly, empirical studies tend to select both male and female research subjects who are mainly white. Fifthly, journal publications are dominated by conventional areas such as psychometrics, research methodology, industrial psychology and educational psychology. The more recently developed sub-areas such as community psychology and the psychology of oppression receive marginal attention. The findings of the content analysis are interpreted from within two perspectives, thus yielding a nuanced characterisation of South African psychology. When the findings are initially reviewed from within the respective journals' editorial objectives, research and theoretical enquiry within the discipline may be viewed as varied and diverse. However, at a more profound level, when the findings are contextualised within the argument that South African psychology is an extension of the colonial and western ethnoscientific enterprise, psychology is shown as neglecting the black psychosocial experience and alienating blacks and women from the processes of knowledge production.