The threat mental health professionals perceive in managed care, as indicated by their writings on the subject, is re-examined in light of evidence from an ethnographic study. Fieldwork focusing on clinician experiences of managed care was carried out at an urban community mental health center. Existing explanations of "the threat"--the possibility of deprofessionalization and the potential for deterioration in the quality of care--proved inadequate to account for the power it wielded at this site, perhaps because its full impact had yet to be felt at the time of data collection. A "rereading" suggests the meaning of managed care for this group of clinicians lies in the prospect of being gradually, unknowingly, and unwillingly reprofessionalized from critics into proponents simply by virtue of continuing to practice in a managed care context, and in losing a moral vision of good mental health treatment in the process.
In this paper, it is argued that efforts to devise a unified theory of psychological knowledge are problematic, and that the cultivation of multiple theoretical lenses contributes to a more useful and self-aware psychology. Various forms of unificationism, and the rationales behind such efforts, are discussed. Two drawbacks of unified theories are then explored, along with the virtues of multiplicity. First, the assertion of a single perspective on psychological reality unduly limits the possibilities for usefully conceptualizing and engaging with the world; it can also hamper critical reflection on the sociocultural embeddedness of psychologists' theories and practices. Second, the type of unified theory likely to achieve hegemony will not be congenial to sociocultural theories and methods.When it comes to the age-old problem of the One and the Many, it is clear that, in many cultural traditions, there is a deep and widespread attraction to the idea of the One, a longing to uncover the underlying sameness that is alleged to be the true essence of seemingly disparate things. In European-American cultures, heavily influenced by Christianity, this affinity for unity and reconciliation is in tension with another tendency, one that is born of the Judaeo-Christian (and especially Protestant) emphasis on innerworldliness and individuality (Nelson, 1965;
College of the Holy CrossCritical thinking always involves logical and metacognitive skills. However, different modes of thinking critically with regard to psychology evince diverse sensibilities, that is, different ways of envisioning what might be wrong with a project or approach and how it could be improved. Fostering critical thinking thus is about developing distinctive modes of responsiveness and discernment, of which there can be more than one type. Literature on critical thinking for psychologists can be parsed into several ideal types. Critical-thinking-in-psychology texts display a sensibility that accords great legitimacy and status to forms of psychological inquiry that emulate a certain vision of the natural sciences, as well as what Max Weber called formal rationality. Texts that advocate "critical thinking about psychology" or identify themselves as "critical psychology" all argue that psychologists need to analyze and challenge fundamental assumptions that usually go unquestioned in the conventional literature, but they also diverge significantly from one another. They generally embody one or more of four distinctive sensibilities: experiential, relational, emancipatoryactivist, or emancipatory-ironic.
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