Critical psychology: subjects in situated social practices

This chapter presents the theoretical approach of critical psychology founded in Berlin by Holzkamp and a group of colleagues. The open-ended development of this conception is in focus. As a whole, it exemplifies what a cultural-historical, critical psychology must comprise and how it can be constructed. The subject matter of psychology is grasped as involved in nexuses of social practice. Individual human beings are basically grasped from the standpoint and perspective of individual subjects participating as agents in relation to their societally mediated scopes of possibilities. They are also grasped as involved in conducting their everyday lives in complex structures of social practice. This theoretical conception is critical in relation to mainstream psychology and to societal relations of contradictory interests, inequalities and exclusions. It also offers subjects living in societal nexuses ridden by contradictions of power and interest critical concepts to clarify how they are entangled in such contradictory nexuses and how they may deal with them and take part in changing them in the direction of more generalized societal scopes and relations.