DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

human agendas that shape knowledge. Nothing is discovered as such, but is
constructed in the act of interpretation (Potter, 1996).
The postmodern impulse has manifested in psychology in a number of ways.
Firstly it emerged as critical psychology – the endeavour to demonstrate how there is
no such thing as knowledge independent of power and therefore theories and
psychological vocabularies have a power mandate and a dominant party with vested
interests who protect these interests. It also manifested in feminist psychology, whose
agenda is to challenge the male-centric nature of psychological theory and research,
and thirdly in social constructionism, whose aim is to demonstrate how psychological
theory is shaped by the historical and social relations of the researcher rather than an
independent reality, and that knowledge is therefore only accurate or true within a
given social and historical context (Gergen, 1985).
All of these three postmodern strands have had a positive effect on
psychology, in that they have exposed genuine phenomena of power agendas and
biased theory in psychological theory and knowledge. However, if taken to the
extreme, postmodernism can lead to a kind of impasse of relativism, for it tends
towards the nihilistic position that nothing is more right or wrong than anything else
outside of its context. Postmodernists have been criticised for turning relativity and
plurality into a rigid dogma:
“Ironically, in this way postmodernists are often the mirror image of the
Enlightenment universalists they challenge, making of difference – especially
Derrida's difference – an absolute as rigid as unitary identity or universalism is to
their enemies. And if positive, unitary identity is a form of violence against
difference, so absolutized difference is a form of violence against intersubjectivity or,
more specifically, the human will to bridge the gap between people, traditions,
cultures.” (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000, p.175)
While postmodern social constructionists and quantitative realists lie at opposite poles
in psychology, there is a middle ground that is growing in influence in qualitative
psychology, which asserts that there is a reality but our interpretations of it are
imperfect and our perceptions are selective. This view says that as humans we are
bound by the limits of our cognition and perception, but can know reality partially and
can communicate it imperfectly. This middle way is often called ‘critical realism’
(Bhaskar, 1997; Bhaskar, 1998), and it is to this philosophy that the current thesis is
most closely aligned. Critical realism is the philosophy that some of our sensory data
and cognitive structures can represent external objects and events, while other sensory
data are non-representative and constructive. It therefore acknowledges a knowable
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