ABSTRACT
The central concern of this book is to explore what happens to concepts when they are deployed in contrasting contexts and used in the analysis of new objects of study. More specifically, the book explores the way psychoanalytic concepts are used within empirical social scientific research. The broad, underlying argument, or perhaps presumption, of the book is that concepts are necessarily reiterated and transformed in the process of research and analysis. We can either try to police the use of established terminologies, or else we can explore the transformations brought about in new instantiations of old concepts. My preference is for the second of these alternatives. Rather than arguing for or against the use of psychoanalytic concepts within social research, this book is an attempt to look closely at the ways in which different aspects of psychoanalytic ideas are repeated and transformed when they are articulated in the context of social theory and research. Each chapter traces the instantiation of one concept in instances of both psychoanalytic and social scientific analysis. The book aims to develop a picture of concepts as constituted in a cluster of ideas that are connected in chains of meaning, but that tug in different directions, with some chains well established and some threads hanging loose, waiting to be extended, or knotted into a relation with threads from elsewhere in the tangle of conceptual frameworks and ideas. The use of psychoanalytic ideas to construct new ways of understanding social and political questions is, clearly, not new. Freud began this work himself, and social and political theory has consistently drawn on his ideas. This makes perfect sense to me. Social and political theory must find ways to conceptualize the relation between human subjects and our social environment; and the distinctive and intense observation of individual psychical structuring afforded within clinical psychoanalysis has given rise to rich theoretical and methodological resources for doing just this. The use of psychoanalytic approaches within empirical social research might be justified in a similar way: if psychoanalysis can help us to understand the mechanisms by which the subject is constituted in relation to the social fabric, surely it will be productive to draw on these ideas in the production and analysis of empirical research data? Some of the earliest empirical studies
using psychoanalytic approaches to explore social and political contexts emerged in the 1950s and 1960s (Trist and Murray, 1951; Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 1967 [1975]) and the production of psychoanalytically informed empirical social research has continued more or less consistently ever since.Within the UK there have recently been moves to institutionalize this work in journals, conferences and academic departments, under the heading ‘psychosocial studies’. This attempt to bring together a diverse body of research has given rise to heated debates over legitimate ways of using psychoanalytic ideas in empirical work outside the clinical context. These debates sometimes seem to me to close down the meanings of psychoanalysis, claiming one school or another as the legitimate version, and reifying the clinic as an originary point of reference for an understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. Nevertheless, they are a useful starting point for marking out some key conceptual distinctions that constitute the field. In the recent flurry of writing about the status of psychoanalysis in ‘psychosocial’ research, there seems to be a tussle over meanings and practices and a policing of ‘correct’ usage in ways that sometimes conflict with the broader theoretical or epistemological positioning of the authors. Discussions have tended to focus on particular concepts and pieces of research as the basis for more generalized claims about the potential for recontextualizing psychoanalysis into non-clinical contexts. There have been particularly heated interventions over the possibility of using notions of ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’ outside the clinical setting. This discussion is inflected by contrasting epistemological orientations in relation to psychoanalytic concepts. More constructionist perspectives foreground the dangers of claims to authoritative expert knowledge and the distinctiveness of the clinical setting (Frosh and Baraitser, 2008; Parker, 2010). The constructionist sensibility draws attention to the inevitability of the relation between knowledge and power: Foucault’s claim that ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’ (1977, p. 27). Constructionism also foregrounds the context of production of knowledge and evinces scepticism about the possibility of replicating psychoanalytic technologies outside this context of production. Frosh and Baraitser note:
The phenomena of the psychosocial are produced through the actions of analyst and analysand, researcher and researched. This means that cherished psychoanalytic ideas have to be rethought for the different context of investigation and expression: transference and countertransference, for example, are simply not the same in and out of the consulting room.
