This book reviews the significance of discourse analysis for a new generation of psychologists, and shows how discursive approaches question underlying assumptions commonly made about the nature of 'thinking' and 'behaviour' in the discipline.

Ian Parker was Co-Founder and is Co-Director (with Erica Burman) of the Discourse Unit. He is a member of the Asylum: Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry collective, and a practising psychoanalyst in Manchester. His research and writing intersects with psychoanalysis and critical theory. He is currently editing a book series Lines of the Symbolic (on Lacanian psychoanalysis in different cultural contexts) for Karnac Books. He edited the 2011 four-volume Routledge major work Critical Psychology, and is editing the series Concepts for Critical Psychology: Disciplinary Boundaries Re-Thought. His books on critical perspectives in psychology began with The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology, and How to End It (Routledge, 1989), and continued with Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology (Routledge, 1992). His recent books include Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research (Open University Press, 2005) and Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation (Pluto Press, 2007).

Introduction: Psychology after Discourse Analysis 1. Discourse Analysis: Dimensions of Critique in Psychology 2. Four Story-Theories About and Against Postmodernism in Psychology 3. Discourse Analysis and Psycho-Analysis 4. Discursive Complexes in Material Culture 5. Against Discursive Imperialism, Empiricism and Constructionism 6. Discourse Analysis and Micronations of the Self in Times of War