[2] He is an analyst member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, and Honorary Secretary of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK.
All the contributors to this book are Marxists, but using a variety of different psychological theories (and Parker’s chapter is on Trotsky and psychoanalysis).
[11] There is a reflection on this in the opening chapter by him of Critical Discursive Psychology, and Marxist ideas are outlined (alongside psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and feminism) in a paper 'Discursive resources in the Discourse Unit' written for the Discourse Unit, a research group which he founded with Erica Burman.
[12] Recent interviews[10] indicate that feminist arguments have become more important to Parker, and that Marxism itself may not provide a complete true theory (or alternative to psychology).
The discipline of psychology is now treated as an ongoing process of 'psychologisation' operating within institutions suffused with the power to define and manage individual behaviour and experience.
The book is a curious mixture of explication and analysis; Parker oscillates between a description of a psychoanalytic theory and a critical account of how it has come to seem to be true to people in Western culture.
The most important conceptual contribution by him in the book is that of the 'discursive complex' to explicate how psychoanalysis operates as a social construction and in lived experience.
He trained as a Lacanian psychoanalyst with the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London toward the end of the 1990s,[13] and has written on psychoanalytic social theory, in his book Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (2004).
[16] Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements, co-authored with David Pavón-Cuéllar was first published in Russian, and then in Italian and English in 2021, and then in Spanish, Bahasa Indonesian and Portuguese in 2022.