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Contributing to work that locates the place of psychology in countering coloniality, we explore in this article what and for whom is a decolonising African psychology. We answer these questions not with a definitive statement, but through several moves, signals, and routes. First, we conceptualise African psychology as a kind of transdisciplinary praxis that occurs within psychology as well as outside of the received bounds of the discipline. However, rooting this praxis-oriented psychology within a decolonial attitude ensures that African psychology takes emancipated visions of Africa and of the world from Africa—rather than the disciplinary dictums of psychology—as its starting point. Then, in considering for whom a decolonising African psychology is for, we insist that such a psychology, taken as transdisciplinary praxis, is ultimately for everyone in its humanistic commitment to those lives that have been partialised under coloniality. This commitment does not, however, render a decolonising African psychological praxis immune to recuperation, and measures must be taken to guard against this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self and the concept of despair introduces another approach to the self that is different from the one found in humanistic psychology. Rather than seeing the self as something organic, something universally and privately given to the individual to develop, Kierkegaard presented a dialectical and a relational understanding of the self, wherein the notion of “the other” is central. Central in Kierkegaard’s analysis in Sickness Unto Death are two modalities when it comes to despair: the despair of not willing to be oneself and the despair of willing to be oneself. Kierkegaard’s analysis of the despair of willing to be oneself can be read as a strong critique of the notion of self being constituted by itself, as argued by humanistic psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology are treated as exemplars that demonstrate the salience of social factors in the constitution of the discipline of psychology. There have been a number of efforts that have addressed this impertinent social factor that compromises psychology's claim to being a sort of natural science. Within the current climate of alternative positions in the discipline, it is often assumed that psychology can be absorbed into historical formations, as in social constructionist critique, science studies and the endorsement of indigenous psychologies. Within contemporary mainstream psychology, other disciplines (such as biology) seem to give warrant to psychology's cherished claim to objectivity. Drawing on theories in which psychologists addressed subjectivity, the paper examines psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology to see how each attempts to articulate its disciplinary basis. In this paper, I attempt to understand how the respective theories attempt to account for and finesse the inherent sociality of the psychological dimension. In the case of psychoanalysis, the basic reference point is Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the case of humanistic psychology, the concepts of potential and experience are interrogated to better understand their ethical and ontological function within a humanistic understanding of subjectivity. It is asserted that humanistic psychology may need to extend its basic precepts beyond its current appropriation of phenomenology in order to more fully understand the question of the subjective dimension in its relationship to its social foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology's place is secure within the history of ideas even if systematically overlooked by those who would professionalize intellectual inquiry. At base the controversy featured here is between a misplaced positivism and the humanistic project of History. Exercises in the sociology of knowledge are not paths to understanding but departures from those paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]