Discursive Psychology

Discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text and images. Rather than treating discourse as a mirror reflecting a speaker's inner thoughts, its founders conceived of it as a construction yard in which psychological notions are built from linguistic materials and managed through interaction, so that interaction itself, rather than something leaking out from cognition, becomes the primary site where psychological issues are live. The field emerged in the late 1980s through collaborative work at Loughborough University's Discourse and Rhetoric Group, with Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell's 1987 book Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour as a landmark early text, and it draws on post-structuralism, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology to examine naturally occurring and experimental human interaction, analyzing how evaluations, attitudes and psychological phenomena such as memory and identity are constructed through talk treated as social action rather than as a window into mental content.