Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Psychoanalysis has a central yet contested position in the emergence of psychosocial studies as a new 'transdisciplinary' space. Psychoanalysis potentially offers a vocabulary and practice of crossing boundaries that seems to be at one with the psychosocial project of understanding psychic and social processes 'as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process.' The intersection 'psychoanalysis, culture, society', with its promise of an explicit engagement with social, political and ethical relations, and its traversing of disciplinary boundaries across the arts, humanities and social sciences, should therefore be crucial for the psychosocial project. This paper will consider where we are with 'psychoanalysis, culture and society' in relation to the 'psychosocial'-and what this means for a world much in need of more fluid, trans/disruptive boundaries.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2008

Of the limitations and possibilities raised by Frosh and Baraitser's discussion of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, three themes are particularly deserving of further attention. The first concerns the epistemological and ethical break that divides psychoanalysis' clinical praxis from its role as a means of qualitative or interview methodology. A second deals with the status of psychoanalytic discourse as a touchstone of authority, as a 'master's discourse'. Debating such problems opens up two possible routes of methodological enquiry: the potential of using psychoanalysis, following Parker (2008), as a means of subverting effects of mastery, individuality and truth, and the idea of focusing on libidinal economy rather than on individual subjects when it comes to combining textual and psychoanalytic forms of analysis. The paper closes by discussing the notion of a trans-individual unconscious, proposing that psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies might find some common ground with reference to the Lacanian idea of the unconscious as the subjective locus of the Other.

Table of contents: Braddock & Lacewing, Introduction. Part I. Psychoanalysis. Brearley, What Do Psychoanalysts Do? Budd, Reading and Misreading. Rusbridger, Elements of the Oedipus Complex: A Kleinian Account. Tuckett, Civilization and its Discontents Today. Part II. Philosophy. Cottingham, A Triangle of Hostility? Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Religion. Lacewing, Do Unconscious Emotions Involve Unconscious Feelings? Harcourt, Guilt, Shame, and the ‘Psychology of Love’. Braddock, Psychoanalysis as Functionalist Social Science: The Legacy of Freud’s ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. III. Perspectives. Rustin, How Do Psychoanalysts Know What They Know? Robertson, Freud’s Literary Imagination. Connors, Force, Figuration, and Repetition in Freud. Fletcher, Gender, Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction.

Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2011

This paper explores the complex relationships between psychoanalysis, psychotherapies and ways we can think relationships between the psyche and the social in a globalised world. It explores both the promise and the limitations of post-structuralist traditions and the need to think beyond its terms if we are to open up a meaningful dialogue between diverse traditions and illuminate different levels of embodied experience. Drawing upon formative process of class, 'race', gender and sexualities it questions traditions of identity politics that might 'fix' identities into pre-given categories, so opening up spaces to explore complex embodied identities and diverse historical and cultural legacies. Drawing upon a range of empirical examples it seeks to open up new spaces for psychosocial research and new languages within which we can explore the psychosocial not as a space between discrete disciplines but as potentially transforming disciplinary legacies that have sought to separate 'psychology' and 'sociology' in ways that make it harder to illuminate transformations in contemporary globalised and transnational lives.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2014

Karnac, London, 2012; 448 pp; £29.99 paperback This is a remarkable collection of essays, each closely argued and quietly sceptical of orthodoxies. It aims to be a 'staging post' (p. xiv) in the development of Independent thinking and technique, alongside Gregorio Kohon's The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition (1986) and Eric Rayner's The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (1991). A sense of history and the importance of history taking indeed characterizes the Independents' approach. In a detailed and masterly opening chapter, John Keene traces the multiple strands of contemporary Independent thinking to a common source: Freud's over-estimation of the capacity of average maternal care. For Ferenczi and the Hungarians, this could not be taken for granted. Their observation that the infant is the dynamic product of an interrelationship opened the way from one-to two-person psychology; mother and baby, analyst and patient, like conscious and unconscious, internal and external, are in constant interaction. In a later chapter, 'The Inter-Subjective Matrix', Joan Raphael-Leff brings this line of thought to a new 'staging post': long overdue acknowledgement that the mother is a fully experiencing subject in her own right effects a further paradigm shift. Both parties in the relationship change, baby and mother, patient and analyst; and there are as many models for inter-subjective relating as there are subjectivities. Theorizing, Keene emphasizes, always takes its emotional colouring from the social and political context: in Freud's case, a late 19th century idealization of motherhood; in the case of the Controversial Discussions in the 1940s, a struggle for orthodoxy and succession following Freud's death which, as Keene writes, led to examples of institutional pathological thinking 'as convincing as one could wish for'. Notable among these was (and is) the polarization 'tough, challenging, superegoish, "pure" psychoanalysis', deriving its authority from the Freud of the life and death drives, versus 'tender, excusing, cosy psychoanalytic psychotherapy based on environmental factors' (p. 34). Keene carefully charts the points of theoretical divergence between Kleinians and the emerging 'Middle Group', especially around assumptions about mothers and babies, noting significant areas of overlap too, between Klein and Fairbairn, for instance, over the nature of aggression: innate or/and reactive? As he suggests (p. 20), the question of whether Independent objectrelations theory is consistent with the Freudian account of the instincts and drives is still open. Is it, the reader might ask, more than a conceptual sleight of hand to regard libido as object-rather than purely pleasure-seeking, as Fairbairn did, or might we need to learn from group analysis and posit a fourth, social, agency, a 'nos' to supplement ego, id and superego, as another Hungarian, Tom Ormay (2012), has recently done?

Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2007

This article discusses the question of the basis of changes in psychoanalytic concepts, theory, and treatment. Illustrative examples discussed include the "widening scope" of the use of "parameters" in psychoanalytic treatment; the rejection of the "Enlightenment Vision" and the concomitant de-emphasis on the role of insight; the concept of "narrative truth"; and the "totalistic" reconceptualization of the meaning of countertransferase. I then discuss the relationship between research and clinical practice and argue that if it is to grow, psychoanalysis must be open to and attempt to integrate findings from other related disciplines.

American Imago, 2008

In each chapter there is a discussion of practical, clinical issues. Then the authors exemplify an analytic attitude and possible interventions. This illustrates the attitude of the authors: ''According to our opinion it is the quality of the psychoanalytic space that is decisive for whether the initiated process can be called psychoanalytic' ' (p. 69). The suggested definition of the psychoanalytic space is as follows: ''The psychoanalytic space is constituted by the sum of the psychological qualities that activate, focus, enlarge and maintain the patient's transference to the therapist'' (p. 86). In the chapter about the therapist's interventions there is a short passage about interpretation of dreams. The authors clearly state that they do not give dreams a special place when listening and see the material in the same way as anything else, where the meaning and importance are decided by the actual clinical situation. Then follow two clinical examples. Part Three, 'Theory about Change' describes curative factors in a psychoanalytic tradition and in a short chapter how to validate psychoanalytic processes by the narrative of the patient and by an in-depth interview. The Epilogue ends with the following dictum: ''The narrative of life is inscribed in the form' ' (p. 233). The whole book is rooted in clinical work, the daily relation to the patient, to the analyst and the relation between them. Underteksten can be recommended for the experienced therapist who wants to be challenged by new ways of thinking about classical psychoanalytic thought as well as for the student who wants to understand and experience the spirit of psychoanalytic therapy and how long-term treatment in depth works. The book is written in nuanced and accurate language and is well supplied with a table of contents, references, name index and index. Since its publication the book has been translated into Danish and has found a place in the curriculum in different psychotherapeutic trainings.

Concerning the Nature of Psychoanalysis - The Persistence of a Paradoxical Discourse, 2019

Much has been written in recent decades about both critical social theory and psychoanalysis. Such writings have addressed the question of human subjectivity and the development of the self as well as the intricate, difficult, complex connections between these phenomena and social processes. Many authors have attempted, in different ways and from different points of view, to construct, develop and critically evaluate theories that concern the place of the subject within modern culture. They have described in contemporary ideologies the prevalence of political values imposed by the affluent consumerist society, the corresponding commodification of culture, the apathy of the individual towards social commitment and the consequent crises and breakdown of the ethical foundations of social concern.

Revista PsicoFAE: Pluralidades em Saúde Mental, 2021

The interview centres on Ian Parker's book Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography. London: Routledge (2019). In this publication Parker provides an account of psychoanalysis and history, situating his own biography. In this critical analysis of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Parker explores key psychoanalytic concepts based on Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, through a biographical journey. Parker brings important contributions to a critical view on psychoanalytic theory and practice, exploring deadlocks of psychoanalytic theories and insights towards subjectivity. Interwiever: First of all, thank you very much for participating in the interview. We could start by talking about your book Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2019), which brings important insights into psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly on the contributions from Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and Marxist perspectives for critical perspectives in and outside psychoanalysis. Ian: What you have been describing are all of the things that are in the book, and I think the first thing to say is that the book, is one book simply focusing on psychoanalysis, there is going to be another book that will be published next year that will be focused on psychology. I think those are two very difficult questions for us here in Britain. I am not sure whether the same applies for you in Brazil, but in Britain the discipline of psychology usually treats psychoanalysis as a strange subspeciality and usually gets Freud out of the way in the first year of the degree, and then there are studies of developmental psychology, neuro psychology, cognitive psychology, etc., etc. without any references to psychoanalysis. So, that's one thing, psychoanalysis, which we are focusing on in this book, is a study and experience of human subjectivity in the practice of care in the clinic that has operated usually outside the discipline of psychology and usually outside the universities. So, I'm focusing on the way that I encountered psychoanalysis, the way that I trained in psychoanalysis, and I look at the limitations of psychoanalysis as an epistemological framework to comprehend political matters and matters that psychology should be concerned with.

In the following essay I’m going to take a radical position concerning the tendency to eliminate psychoanalysis from the European Academic field and the failure of psychoanalysts and relational therapists to defend psychoanalysis from such aggression. My question is why in Italy—just to make a local example, which I am involved in—different kinds of psychoanalytical traditions are not able to defend themselves from this attack while in France, for another example, all the different branches of relational therapies have been able to unite in making a common effort to take a position for psychoanalysis. One of the main problems, in my opinion, concerns the constitutive marginality of psychoanalysis in relation to Academic Institutions. In my way of writing, I will use psychoanalysis, with “P” in capital character, when referred to Academia, and psychoanalysis, with no capital character, when referred to clinical practice. Keywords Psychoanalysis, Academy, Transmission, Subject, Relationship, Epistemology, Ontology