Postmodern psychology is an approach to psychology that questions whether an ultimate or singular version of truth is actually possible within its field.
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It also challenges the modernist view of psychology as the science of the individual, in favour of seeing man as a cultural/communal product, dominated by language rather than by an inner self.
Cal postmodern psychology p6
Characteristics
Postmodern psychology relies on using a range of different methodologies rather than a singular approach, to embrace the complexity of reality and avoid oversimplification. Post-modernism challenges a systematic, analytical approach to the understanding of the human psyche, as inherently flawed by the impossibility of taking a detached, 'objective' position; and favours instead a transmutable position which may maintain the possibility of taking conceptual hold of a self that is itself decentered.
Some would maintain that the very project of a postmodern psychology is self-contradictory, in the wake of the deconstruction of the unified self - the fading or aphanisis of the subject that psychology is traditionally supposed to investigate.
Tetrad and transmodern
Postmodern psychology has also been linked to the Tetrad of Marshall McLuhan: "Tetradic logic" supposedly allowing us to accept knowing without knowing in the context of changingness.
Paul Vitz refers to yet a further development, that of "transmodern" psychology, as a "new mentality that both transcends and transforms modernity ... (where) psychology would be the handmaid of philosophy and theology, as from the beginning it was meant to be" - aspiring to cure mental problems through integrated intervention into the human mind and body combined.