Discursive psychology

For other uses of the word, see discursive.

Discursive Psychology (DP) is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text and images.

As a counter to mainstream psychology’s treatment of discourse as a “mirror” for people’s expressions of thoughts, intentions, motives, etc., DP’s founders made the case for picturing it instead as if a “construction yard” wherein all such presumptively prior and independent notions of thought and so on were built from linguistic materials, topicalised and, in various less direct ways, handled and managed. Here, the study of the psychological implies commitment not to the inner life of the mind, but rather, to the written and spoken practices within which people invoked, implicitly or explicitly, notions precisely like “the inner life of the mind”. Discursive psychology therefore starts with psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. An evaluation, say, may be constructed using particular phrases and idioms, responded to by the recipient (as a compliment perhaps) and treated as the expression of a strong position. In discursive psychology the focus is not on psychological matters somehow leaking out into interaction; rather interaction is the primary site where psychological issues are live. It is philosophically opposed to more traditional cognitivist approaches to language. It uses studies of naturally occurring conversation to critique the way that topics have been conceptualised and treated in psychology.