It challenges the modernist view of psychology as the science of the individual,[1] in favour of seeing humans as a cultural/communal product, dominated by language rather than by an inner self.
[2] 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.
[6] Postmodern psychology has also been linked to the Tetrad of Marshall McLuhan:[7] "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"[8] - aspiring to cure mental problems through integrated intervention into the human mind and body combined.