Critical psychology and queer-feminist perspectives

Abstract

Since its foundation in the 1970 the Berlin school of critical psychology offered a space for feminist debates in psychology. Understood as a local academic context, critical psychology was productive in supporting emancipatory approaches in psychology, including feminist endeavours. However, understood as a theoretical context, mainly circumscribed by Klaus Holzkamp’s «Grundlegung der Psychologie”, critical psychology cannot be directly adopted by queer-feminist psychology but needs a systematic reworking of its concepts of sexuality and gender. This article starts with an analysis of Klaus Holzkamp’s and Ute Holzkamp-Osterkamp’s work. Contrary to what can be expected from critical psychology they conceptualize sexuality only as biological-natural and not also as social-historical. This frameworks limits social and historical approaches to gender relations as well. In the second part of this article an alternative critical psychological approach will be discussed on the basis of Holzkamp’s concept of the «unavoidably social character of humankind”.