PINS 1983 - 1998 and the construction of an alternative discourse : text and psychology in South(ern) Africa from apartheid to liberation.
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Date
1999
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Abstract
This study analyses the journal Psychology in Society for the period 1983 to 1998. It does so with
a view to determining whether collectively the contributors fulfilled the editors' call for the
construction of discourses alternative to those of mainstream psychology, both during apartheid
and after liberation. In other words, it seeks to assess whether PINS constitutes a local critical
psychology in print. Mainstream discourse is chiefly understood in terms of formulations in
PINS and only indirectly from my readings of mainstream publications.
Analyses suggest that, from 1983 to 1990, contributors to PINS aligned themselves with the
editors' brief to challenge "mainstream conformist" psychology in "apartheid capitalist" South
Africa. More than half of the articles have a critical Marxist thrust with the others given over to
liberal humanist or progressive positions. Almost all the domains of psychology are represented.
Black writers and women appear but in small numbers compared to their white, male colleagues.
With the socio-political shifts of around 1990, a significant decline is evident in Marxistorientated
discourses and an increase in those from liberal humanist, post-marxist, feminist and
psychoanalytic sources. Africanisation also becomes an urgent issue. The dominant DA themes
for the journal of "relevance", "critique", "oppression" and "indigenous" remain consistently
in focus. While individual contributors cannot be said to have constructed an alternative
discourse, they drew collectively on discourses mostly at odds with, or marginalised by,
mainstream psychology. Some tried to include indigenous approaches to mental distress.
Although the approach adopted is critical Marxist Discourse Analysis (DA), I have incorporated
"deconstruction" theory. The difficulties posed by a combination of Marxism and poststructuralism
are eased by employing Bhaskar's "critical realism". This allows for the analyst
to '"discover" patterns of discursive features, to understand that these are also a "construction"
based on assumptions and theoretical preferences, and to anchor the process in the historical
contingencies of economics, power and language. The critical Marxism driving the analysis is
located in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and active today in the work of social
psychologists such as Ian Parker (1992, 1993, 1996). In testing my assumptions about PINS, I
followed modified versions of Parker's theoretical stance and the methodological framework
provided by Potter and Wetherell (1987, 1988, 1995).
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.