Deconstructing personal-professional development in UK clinical psychology: disciplining the interdisciplinarity of lived experience

Personal-professional development (PPD) is central to clinical psychology in the UK. A qualitative research study of the disciplining role of psychological discourses about PPD and their contribution to perpetuating social power inequalities was conducted. Interviews with ten clinical psychologists from minority and majority groups in the profession were subjected to a critical analysis that theoretically interrogated power relations and identities in their PPD stories.

Wider societal power relations were reproduced in the psychologists’ narratives. For participants from Black and minority ethnic (BME) and working class backgrounds, there were tensions between personal and professional identities arising from experiences of discrimination. They drew on social discourses outside mainstream psychology to create meaning and coherence. Contrastingly, men, a small minority in the profession, constructed majority narratives resourced largely by individualised models of PPD. Greatest congruence occurred for White women, the professional majority, whose subjectivities and PPD discourses closely mirrored each other.

The research findings are discussed from a Foucauldian perspective on the disciplining role of professional knowledge using two case examples to illustrate individuals' idiographic management of power relations. PPD can be seen as on of psychology's technologies for regulation of unequal social relations via practices of the self. BME psychologists challenged the dominant discourses of PPD whilst the paradox of individualism (that its diversity generates innovative contestations of power) was evident in some White psychologists’ narratives. In spite of PPD being a conservative epistemic process, there are possibilities for new knowledge creation when psychological practitioners generate alternative discursive affordances derived from their own experiences. However, a significant distinction remains in the positioning of the disciplinary power of psychology: BME psychologists often took a transformational position to resist psychology’s role in minimising their experiences of social inequality, whereas majority psychologists were concerned with psychology assimilating a greater diversity of knowledges, but without second order change.