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Psychology is a conceptual apparatus that now functions as one of the most important disciplinary mechanisms in contemporary
neoliberal society. It provides and furnishes dominant models of the self in much of the English-speaking world, and it operates as a moral compass for how we should make sense of our behaviour, our thoughts and our sentiments. It is also one of the most powerful pretenders to scientific legitimation of psychotherapeutic practice, and so it is a force that professionals working in all fields of mental health have to reckon with. There have been many critiques over the years, but psychology has succeeded quite well so far in defending itself against various Marxist, feminist, humanist and psychoanalytic attempts to displace it from centre stage, to challenge its peculiar normalizing definitions of what health and happiness should be like. The resources psychology mobilizes in response to these critiques - resources it often mobilizes without even having to think about what it is doing - have been the focus of critical analytic work in the last 30 years, work that draws on the theory of Michel Foucault. Now Derek Hook has seized the baton and runs faster and further than other foucauldians to date.
Foucault provides an invaluable alternative historical vocabulary, a counter-language and counter-memory, to tackle the way the discipline of psychology has become embedded in networks of practical-theoretical space, the “psy-complex”. Those networks of power-knowledge at the one moment warrant the turn to the individual subject as target of programmes of social engineering. At the very same moment, apparatchiks in those networks call upon this particular discipline, psychology, to implement those programmes. The detailed analytic study undertaken by Foucault and a number of associated historians and social theorists begs a question as to how psychology could really continue when it has been dismantled by such critics so effectively, so many times. I