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School of Psychology
In partnership with the Family Centre
Lower Hutt, Wellington, and the Taos Institute
Post-Graduate
Diploma in Discursive Therapies
M.Phil in Psychology
175.771:
Contemporary theoretical perspectives
This paper has been divided into two parts. In Part 1, Andy Lock and Tom Strong will guide you through some of the important sources that provide the underpinning of many of the ideas and traditions that collectively inform the work of a variety of discursive practitioners. The lecture notes usually address the works of particular individuals or schools of thought. While, as we shall see, there are many positions taken as to how meaning is 'extracted' from texts, the lecture notes aim to stick as close as they can to primary sources, and thus to outline, uncritically, the main ideas that particular theorists put forward. Certainly these notes can be read as interpretations of different traditions, but we have not had a preconceived 'party line' guiding us in our interpretations. Rather, we have tried to be quite dispassionate, and to capture and illustrate as well as we can what someone else was trying to say. Sometimes this has been quite easy for us to do, because in some cases the lecture notes here were constructed in close collaboration with the original thinkers-through of them. For example, most of our material on the work of John Shotter and Rom Harre was provided through their generosity and their commitment to seeing their ideas represented accurately in this context. There is a sense, then, in which if the material here is seen as interpretive, then at least Shotter's interpretation of Shotter's work can be regarded as being as close to the mark as possible.
By contrast, the discussion sessions will focus more on issues. The ideas we survey have influenced many present thinkers, commentators and practitioners in different ways. This will become clearer in the companion paper to this one that deals with some of the different contemporary 'schools' of discursive therapies. Most of our substantive topics have specific points for discussion listed. For more details of what is involved you should see the details on the assignments required for this course.
In Part 2 we hand over the reins to Mary and Ken Gergen. They have structured their participation around the material they have collated for their book of readings that illuminates areas of the intellectual landscape that contributes to the contemporary school known as Social Constuctionism. Their 'Reader' is divided into seven sections, and they will be providing six on-line sessions focussing on issues that are raised in each of those sections.
Part 1: Sources and Stirrings
1. Vico: The New Science (1725)
Giambatista Vico The verum ipsum factum principle: that we can only know 'the truth' of
those things that we make.
2. Phenomenology
Particularly Husserl, Alfred Schutz and Merleau-Ponty
3. Symbolic Interactionism
George Herbert Mead on the social nature of meaning and the creation of perspectives
4. 'Marxism'
Particularly Vygotsky and Bakhtin
5. Wittgenstein
6. Gregory Bateson
7. Foucault
Discourse, Power, and 'technologies of the self'
8. Microsociology: Interaction and Ethnomethodology
Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel
9. Discourse Analysis
Potter, Edwards, Wetherell, Fairclough
10. Landscapes of Meaning
From Jakob von Uexkull on the notion of the Umwelt, through the cultural theory of Basil Bernstein, and the sociolinguistics of William Labov, to the The macrosociology of Anthony Giddens
11. Constructing the Occidental self
Charles Taylor, Sources of the self, Elaborating the self, The construction of time, A. Irving Hallowell: Orienting selves, and Norbert Elias
12. Post-structuralism
Deleuze, Kristeva, Lyotard, Derrida and Baudrillard
13. John Shotter
14. Rom Harré
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