The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed.

Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn:

How to Rethink Human Behavior

The book begins by discussing the significance of the key metaphor underlying mainstream psychology today – the ‘particle’ or ‘causal’ metaphor – and explains the need for a shift towards new ‘wave’ or ‘contextual’ metaphors in order to appreciate how individual and social actions truly function. It explores new metaphors for thinking about the relationship between language and reality, and teaches the reader how they might reimagine the processes involved in the act of thinking itself. The book concludes with a consideration of how these new metaphors might be applied to practical methods of research and understanding change today.

How to Rethink Psychology

A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader:

Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.

‘Mental health’ behaviours are carefully analysed as ordinary behaviours which have become exaggerated and chronic because of the bad life situations people are forced to endure, especially as children. This shifts mental health treatments away from the dominance of psychology and psychiatry to show that social action is needed because many of these bad life situations are produced by our modern society itself. By providing new ways for readers to rethink everything they thought they knew about mental health issues and how to change them, Bernard Guerin also explores how by changing our environmental contexts (our local, societal, and discursive worlds), we can improve mental health interventions. This book reframes ‘mental health’ into a much wider social context to show how societal structures restrict our opportunities and pathways to produce bad life situations, and how we can also learn from those who manage to deal with the very same bad life situations through crime, bullying, exploitation, and dropping out of mainstream society, rather than through the ‘mental health’ behaviours.

By merging psychology and psychiatry into the social sciences, Guerin seeks to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than being isolated inside their heads with a ‘faulty brain’, and this will provide fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and for counsellors and therapists.

of people by merging psychology with the social sciences. It is part of a

trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people’s

social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than

internal and individualistic attributions.

Putting the ‘social’ properly back into psychology, Bernard Guerin turns

psychology inside out to offer a more integrated way of thinking about and

researching people. Going back 60 years of psychology’s history to the

‘cognitive revolution’, Guerin argues that psychology made a mistake, and

demonstrates in fascinating new ways how to instead fully contextualize the

topics of psychology and merge with the social sciences. Covering perception,

emotion, language, thinking, and social behaviour, the book seeks to

guide readers to observe how behaviours are shaped by their social, cultural,

economic, patriarchal, colonized, historical, and other contexts. Our brain,

neurophysiology, and body are still involved as important interfaces, but

human actions do not originate inside of people so we will never fi nd the

answers in our neurophysiology. Replacing the internal origins of behaviour

with external social contextual analyses, the book even argues that thinking

is not done by you ‘in your head’ but arises from our external social, cultural,

and discursive worlds.

Offering a refreshing new approach to better understand how humans

operate in their social, cultural, economic, discursive, and societal worlds,

rather than inside their heads, and how we might have to rethink our

approaches to neuropsychology as well, this is fascinating reading for

students in psychology and the social sciences.

By showing that we engage directly with our complex social, political, economic, patriarchal, colonized, and cultural contexts and that what we do and think arises from this direct engagement with these external contexts, Bernard Guerin expertly demonstrates that Western ideas have systematically excluded the ‘social’ but that this is really where the major determinants of our behaviour arise. This book works through many human activities that psychology still treats as individualized and internal and shows their social and societal origins. These includes beliefs, the sense of self, the arts, religious behaviours, and the new and growing area of conservation psychology. The social structures found by sociology, anthropology and sociolinguistics are shown to shape most ‘individual’ human actions, and it is shown how the main points of Marxism and Indigenous knowledges can be better merged into this new and broader social science.

Replacing the ‘internal’ attributions of causes with external contextual analyses based in the social sciences, this book is fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and provides exciting new ways to conceptualize and observe human actions in new ways and to resist the current individualistic thinking of ‘psychology’.

The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed.

Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn:

How to Rethink Human Behavior

The book begins by discussing the significance of the key metaphor underlying mainstream psychology today – the ‘particle’ or ‘causal’ metaphor – and explains the need for a shift towards new ‘wave’ or ‘contextual’ metaphors in order to appreciate how individual and social actions truly function. It explores new metaphors for thinking about the relationship between language and reality, and teaches the reader how they might reimagine the processes involved in the act of thinking itself. The book concludes with a consideration of how these new metaphors might be applied to practical methods of research and understanding change today.

How to Rethink Psychology

A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader:

Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.