Changing the Subject,
originally published in 1984, is a collection of articles advocating a radical
approach to psychology.  It contains six
papers, two by Wendy Hollway and one by each of the other authors.  As they authors note in their original
introduction, they were three white women and two black men, close friends
influenced by the radical and sexual politics of the late 1960s.  The book was reprinted with a new foreword
in 1998, updating the information about the authors, documenting their considerable
achievements in promoting their interests. 
Henriques co-founded a film production company, and has produced several
films.  Hollway is author of Subjectivity
and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning and Science and Work
Psychology and Organizational Behavior, as well as co-editor of Mothering
and Ambivalence.  Urwin and
Walkerdine are joint editors of Language, Gender and Childhood.  Walkerdine has also published Daddy’s
Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. 
Venn published Occidentalism: Essays on Modernity and Subjectivity. 

The themes in Changing the
Subject are as relevant to psychology now as they were twenty years
ago.  The authors attempt to move
psychology from an apolitical individualism to a politically-sensitive
integration of psychology and sociology, influenced by the methods of
post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and Marxism.  The book was written in Britain during the
Thatcher years, and it has many of the hallmarks of British left psychology.  It is a brave work, challenging the
orthodoxy of academic psychology, grounded in the everyday realities of
experiences of oppression and struggle, searching for inspiration from
theorists such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. 

Since it is so many years since the
book’s original publication and even its updated edition, it is not my aim to
review the book in detail, but simply to draw readers’ attention to it.  It is a book I discovered when I was in
graduate school, and which impressed me for its combination of theoretical
reach and grounding in common experience. 
While other books in left psychology either tend to be highly
theoretical hard to put into practice, or highly personal and hard to make
strong theoretical points from, Changing the Subject attempted and was
reasonably successful at bridging this divide. 
I was particularly impressed with Wendy Hollway’s "Gender
difference and the production of subjectivity," which analyzes how couple
talk about their relationships using relatively sophisticated post-structuralist
theory.  The paper discusses the ways in
which new ideas about gender enter our culture and affect the ways that people
conceive of themselves and their roles in relation to others, offering a rich
although rather loose methodology. 
Rereading the paper now, about 15 years after I first discovered it, I’m
glad to report that it still stands up as an impressive work of scholarship.

© 2005 Christian Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of
the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at
Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online
Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine,
psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical