This book reviews the significance of deconstruction for a new generation of psychologists, and shows how deconstructive approaches question underlying assumptions in psychology about language and reality, the self and the social world.

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 Deconstruction 1. Qualitative Data and the Subjectivity of 'Objective' Facts 2. Critical Reflexive Humanism and Critical Constructionist Psychology 3. Deconstructing Accounts 4. Constructions, Reconstructions and Deconstructions of Mental Health 5. Deconstruction and Psychotherapy 6. Deconstructing Diagnosis: Psychopathological Practice 7. Deconstruction, Psychopathology and Dialectics 8. Lacanian Social Theory and Clinical Practice