Rethinking psychoanalysis in the psychosocial

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.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

This article discusses the development of a psycho-cultural approach that brings together object relations psychoanalysis and cultural studies to explore the psychodynamics of culture, politics and society. While foregrounding the work of Donald Winnicott and other psychoanalysts influenced by his ideas, I contextualise that approach by tracing my own relationship to the study of psychoanalysis and culture since I was a Cultural Studies student in the 1980s and 1990s and also my engagement with the psychoanalytic scene that existed in London at that time. I have since applied a psycho-cultural lens to the study of masculinity and emotion in cinema and more recently to the study of emotion and political culture in Europe and the US. The article provides an example of that work by discussing the populist appeal of Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK, where the contradictory dynamics of attachment, risk and illusion are present when communicating with their supporters and the general public.

2008

This paper examines the way in which debates over the place of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies are developing in the British academic context, from the position of sympathetic criticism both of psychosocial studies and of psychoanalysis. The general argument is that both these approaches have real objects of study and considerable legitimacy, and that bringing them together is in principle productive. However, the loose and sometimes pious way in which psychoanalysis has been theorized within psychosocial studies has not done favours to either approach. The paper offers a critique of psychoanalytic certainty -of the type of reading of psychoanalysis that sees it as harbouring the deep truths of human nature -and utilizes the broader concept of reflexivity to suggest that psychoanalysis' contribution might usefully become more tentative and disruptive than has so far been the case.

2010

I will present some material from a preliminary research interview, applying psycho-social analysis, discourse and rhetoric analysis and cultural theory.

Mens Sana Monographs, 2007

The paper reviews some ways that the social and psychic have been understood in psychoanalysis and argues that a model for understanding the relation between the psychic and the social must account both for the ways that we internalize oppressive norms as well as the ways we resist them. The author proposes that we build our identities in relation to other identities circulating in our culture and that cultural hierarchies of sexism, racism, classism push us to split off part of what it means to be human, thereby creating painful individual and relational repetition compulsions. These "normative unconscious processes" replicate the unjust social norms that cause psychic pain in the first place. The paper concludes with thoughts about contemporary US culture, in which the government has abdicated responsibility toward its most vulnerable citizens and has thus rendered vulnerability and dependence shameful states.

Subject, Action, and Society: Psychoanalytical Studies and Practices, 2021

This paper is a response to Salvatore, Picione, Bochicchio et al's. (2021) application of psychoanalysis to understand and remediate current socially destructive processes. The authors conceptualize current anti-social tendencies as due to primary process thinking and meaning making brought about by the dominance of affect in the social field. I present some questions and challenges, including: revisions of Freud's concept of primary and secondary process, the ubiquity of affect links and primary process associations in all social life, the notion that affect is not discharge but is the link to the other and to meaning, a qualitative analysis of prosocial emotions in contrast to the authors' apparently quantitative and mechanistic analysis, and some alternative psychoanalytic formulations of social problems and of the relationship of the individual and the social. I propose that some destructive social phenomena prevalent today, rather than being manifestations of primary process-affective meaning making, are due to failure of social institutions to cultivate the right emotion in the right measure and failure to cultivate prosocial attitudes, values, and capacities, subject to qualitative analysis.

2016

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely. Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about. The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists. “This anthology sets out to 'do the impossible' in interrogating the paradoxes of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impressive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice, film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media, the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption, and anxiety. A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, language, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.” (Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis, University of Roehampton, UK) “This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture. It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at times provocative essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.” (Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis, University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema [2014])

Psychoanalysis, Culture &# 38; Society, 2004

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.