Beyond Developmentalism?

Abstract

Developmental psychology is understood in this paper as one of the `grand metanarratives of science' through which modernity has been characterized. The objects `the child' and `development' are held up for question, examining the way in which these are discursively constructed and produced within specific conditions of possibility which locate them in the government of the social and the production of the historically specific form of the subject, the individual. Although it has been argued that postmodernism's critique of modernity evacuates `the real', it is argued here that developmental psychology universalizes the masculine and European, such that peripheral subjects are rendered pathological and abnormal. Postmodernism's peripheral challenge to the centre allows the possibility of the production of thinking in historically and geographically specific practices and does not fetishize western rationality as the universal pinnacle of development. In such work, an understanding of discourse, practice, semiotic systems and fantasy is taken to be central.

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