Critical Educational Psychology: Fostering Emancipatory Potential within the Therapeutic Project

Abstract

This article explores the history of educational psychology in order to problematise the links between psychology as a therapeutic project and its potential to pursue an emancipatory agenda. Utilising Taubman's framework, which describes two parallel projects, termed therapeutic and emancipatory, this article explores the history of tensions within educational psychology in the United Kingdom. The notion of a scientific educational psychology practice is seen to be allied to the overarching therapeutic project of the modern liberal state. The argument is developed that a commitment to an emancipatory practice requires grappling with modern forms of ideology in which its dominant modes of functioning are cynical. Developing and applying Žižek's argument, identity in a psychologised age is increasingly experienced at an ironic distance and this is recognised as a situation that inhibits emancipatory possibilities. Three tasks are outlined for critical educational psychology, urging the move beyond critique as talk to the more engaged position of critique as action. While it remains necessarily unclear what a critical psychology in education would produce, it is also clear that a commitment is required to move beyond the ironic distancing of what psychology in education inevitably produces. Working within and beyond psychology it is argued that the therapeutic project inherently masks a particular form of exploitation. It is in the collective insistence in the need to take this reality seriously that emancipatory potential may be found.