Critical psychology is a perspective on psychology that draws extensively on critical theory. Critical psychology challenges the assumptions, theories and methods of mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in different ways.

The field of critical psychology does not fall under a monolithic category^{[clarification needed]}. One can observe different starting points of critiques, similarities, as well as substantial differences. Thus, critical psychology should be perceived as an “umbrella term” that includes various critiques against the status quo of mainstream psychology. A common theme of critical approaches in psychology is the assessment of the social effects of psychological theories and practices. Critical psychology is a movement that challenges psychology to work towards emancipation and social justice, and that opposes the uses of psychology to perpetuate oppression and injustice.

Critical psychologists believe that mainstream psychology fails to consider how power differences and discrimination between social classes and groups can impact an individual's or a group's mental and physical well-being. Mainstream psychology does this only in part by attempting to explain behavior at the individual level. However, it largely ignores institutional racism, postcolonialism and deficits in social justice for minority groups based on differences in observable characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, religious minority, sexual orientation, or disability.

Psychology, draws a history filled with theoretical and political conflict. Within its history various stream of critiques have emerged, some of them sharing similarities, as well as different starting points and substantial differences. Criticisms of mainstream psychology consistent with current critical psychology usage have existed since psychology's modern development in the late 19th century. Use of the term critical psychology started in the 1970s at the Freie Universität Berlin. The German branch of critical psychology predates and has developed largely separately from the rest of the field. As of May 2007, only a few works have been translated into English. The German Critical Psychology movement is rooted in the post-war student revolt of the late 1960s; see German student movement. Marx's Critique of Political Economy played an important role in the German branch of the student revolt, which was centered in West Berlin. At that time, the capitalist city of West Berlin was surrounded by communist-ruled East Germany, and represented a "hot spot" of political and ideological controversy for the revolutionary German students. The sociological foundations of critical psychology are decidedly Marxist.

One of the most important and sophisticated books in the German development of the field is the Grundlegung der Psychologie (Foundations of Psychology) by Klaus Holzkamp, who might be considered the theoretical founder of German critical psychology. Holzkamp wrote two books on theory of science and one on sensory perception before publishing the Grundlegung der Psychologie in 1983. Holzkamp believed his work provided a solid paradigm for psychological research because he viewed psychology as a pre-paradigmatic scientific discipline (T.S. Kuhn had used the term "pre-paradigmatic" for social science).

Holzkamp mostly based his sophisticated attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated set of categories defining the field of psychological research on Aleksey Leontyev's approach to cultural–historical psychology and activity theory. Leontyev had seen human action as a result of biological as well as cultural evolution and, drawing on Marx's materialist conception of culture, stressed that individual cognition is always part of social action which in turn is mediated by man-made tools (cultural artifacts), language and other man-made systems of symbols, which he viewed as a major distinguishing feature of human culture and, thus, human cognition. Another important source was Lucien Séve's theory of personality, which provided the concept of "social activity matrices" as mediating structure between individual and social reproduction. At the same time, the Grundlegung systematically integrated previous specialized work done at Free University of Berlin in the 1970s by critical psychologists who also had been influenced by Marx, Leontyev, and Seve. This included books on animal behavior/ethology, sensory perception, motivation and cognition. He also incorporated ideas from Freud's psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology into his approach.

One core result of Holzkamp's historical and comparative analysis of human reproductive action, perception and cognition is a very specific concept of meaning that identifies symbolic meaning as historically and culturally constructed, purposeful conceptual structures that humans create in close relationship to material culture and within the context of historically specific formations of social reproduction.

Coming from this phenomenological perspective on culturally mediated and socially situated action, Holzkamp launched a methodological attack on behaviorism (which he termed S–R (stimulus–response) psychology) based on linguistic analysis, showing in minute detail the rhetorical patterns by which this approach to psychology creates the illusion of "scientific objectivity" while at the same time losing relevance for understanding culturally situated, intentional human actions. Against this approach, he developed his own approach to generalization and objectivity, drawing on ideas from Kurt Lewin in Chapter 9 of Grundlegung der Psychologie.