Mapping community psychology
The discipline of psychology (the ‘psy complex’, Rose 1999) is usually better known
for its professional manifestations. The ‘psy complex’ refers to the ways in which the
discipline of psychology has proliferated professions and institutions which aim to
understand, rehabilitate, educate and treat the human subject. A number of professional
chartered2 routes in forensic, educational, occupational and clinical psychology
leads to distinct bodies of knowledge and separate chartered identities. A chartered
psychologist can then practise and be licensed to advise utilising this body of
knowledge. A rather less well-known sub-discipline (in the UK) is that of CP, which
is a non-chartered and non-professionalised route. Space precludes an analysis of
how branches of psychology are mapped across the UK (Burton et al. 2007) and
historically beyond (see Reich et al. 2007) but in the UK, CP is practised in a particular
way, utilising the principles of action research. Whilst there is not a definitive
definition of CP, there is an agreement on how problems are conceptualised using this
approach. Traditional psychological approaches tend to converge on understanding
the individual and ‘abnormal’ processes intra-individually. Community psychologists,
however, are more interested in seeing the individual within a context. Here, the focus
is not on the individual problem per se but rather understanding how the problem
arises within a particular setting. A definition from the UK community psychologists
may be helpful: