Derek Hook

Biography 

Until joining the LSE in September 2003, I was a senior lecturer in Psychology in the School of Human and Community Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where I taught developmental psychology, qualitative research methodology, social psychology, and a course on psychoanalysis and gender. My PhD, focussing on Foucaultian notions of power as they pertain to the clinical arena of psychotherapy, was completed at the same institution in 2002.

I was one of the founding members of a the 'Critical Methods Collective', an organization of critically-minded social psychologists interested in issues of power, identity, knowledge and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. The collective was responsible for a series of publications (including Body Politics (edited by Terre Blanche, Bhavnani & Hook, 1997) and From Method to Madness (edited by Hook, Smith & Bowman)) and a series of Annual Qualitative Research Conferences (1996-2002), which aimed to develop a politically-minded approach to South African psychology.

Research interests 

My research interests are fairly varied, stretching from the socio-political applications of psychoanalysis, to the 'space-power-identity complex', and the 'social psychology' of postcolonial theory. Discourse theory remains an abiding interest, as does the work of Michel Foucault (especially the notion of governmentality) and Lacanian psychoanalysis. My current research project, based on the idea of 'technologies of racism', concerns the intersection of postcolonial and psychoanalytic formulations of racism, and centres largely on the work of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Julia Kristeva. I have acted as a guest editor for special editions of both Psychology in Society and South African Journal of Psychology. I am also the editor of the forthcoming Critical Psychology (2004) and the co-editor of both Psychopathology and Social Prejudice (2002) and Developmental Psychology (2002) (all of University of Cape Town Press).

Publications

Hook, D. (2003). Psychotherapy and 'ethical sensibility'. International Journal of Psychotherapy. Vol. 8, No. 3, December, pp. 1-17.

Hook, D. (2003). Foucault's psychoanalysis. Psycho-analytic psychotherapy, Vol 11, Numer 2, pp. 24-39.

Hook, D. (2003). Language and the Flesh: Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Discourse. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 43-64.

Hook, D. (2003). Analogues of power: Reading Psychotherapy through the sovereignty-discipline-government complex. Theory & Psychology, 13 (5), October, pp. 605-628.

Hook, D. (2003). Reading Geldenhuys: Constructing and deconstructing the Norwood Killer. South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 33, Number 1, pp. 1-9.

Hook, D. (2002). The other side of language: The body and the limits of signification. Psychoanalytic Review, 89 (5), October, pp. 681-713.

Hook, D. & Parker, I. (2002). Deconstruction, psychopathology and dialectics.

South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 32, Number 2, pp. 49-54.

Hook, D. & Vrdoljak, M. (2002). Gated communities, heterotopia and a "rights" of privilege: A 'heterotopology' of the South African security-park. Geoforum, 33 (2002), 195-219.

Hook, D. (2001). Discourse, knowledge, materiality, history; Foucault and discourse analysis. Theory & Psychology. 11 (4), 521-547. London: Sage.

Hook, D. (2001). Therapeutic discourse, co-construction, interpellation, role-induction; psychotherapy as iatrogenic treatment modality? The International Journal of Psychotherapy, Volume 6, Number 1, 47-66. London: Carfax Publishing.

Hook, D. (2001). The disorders of discourse. Theoria. Number 1, (97), June, 41-68.

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