Refiguring Self and Psychology (Benchmark)

The present volume contains the major papers of one of psychology's most iconoclastic scholars. In a series of controversial and groundbreaking articles and books, Kenneth Gergen has not only offered a radical challenge to psychology's traditional concept of the self, but to its foundation as a science. Where traditional psychology defines the self as the private possession of individuals, operating on the basis of universal principles made manifest through inspection by scientific procedures. The psychologist as a private, rational being, thus accumulates knowledge of the personal world of "the other". The present collection of papers traces the development of Gergen's thought, through its initial explorations of self preservation, its recasting of social psychology as a historical endeavour, the development of a social constructionist alternative to science and the self, and the elaboration of a constructionist perspective in topic areas such as narrative psychology, relational selves and psychotherapy.