The Dialogical Self, Flexibility and the Cultural Production of Psychopathology

This article considers recent arguments on ‘dialogism’ within the discipline in order to reflect upon the coherency of the institutional position of critical psychology and the conventionalized responses which tend to characterize this position. The main focus of the article explores how arguments about the dialogical self radically reconfigure psychopathology, bringing understandings more in line with those produced across a range of social and cultural practices which ‘make up’ our lives. This shift is explored through considering arguments within science studies and cultural studies of psychiatric culture which are exploring the new forms of subjectivity and psychology being produced within ‘flexible capitalism’. The article concludes with an argument which outlines the urgent need for critical psychologists and those interested in criticality to engage with the ‘psychological’ through frameworks which do not simply reinstate an ‘anti-essentialist’ mantra.