ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and discursive psychology have been in conversation with one another through the work of critical social psychologists for some years now, from Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody’s (1991) Growing up Girl to Hollway’s (2008a) research on becoming a mother for the first time, to Parker’s (2010, Chapter 4 in this volume) Lacanian reading of an ‘interview’ from the film The Negotiator. This body of work, spanning two decades, has been brought together under the terms ‘Psychosocial research’ or ‘Psychosocial studies’ to specify an approach or way of theorising that challenges the traditional divide between the social and the psychological/individual. The term ‘psychosocial’ aims to capture an emphasis on how the social and the psychological are interwoven, both mediating the other such that it is impossible and undesirable to theorise them in isolation (Frosh, 2003). The moebius strip is frequently evoked as a metaphor for the way in which the psychological and the social are ‘underside and topside’ of the same thing (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008: 349). The notion of concentric objects has also been drawn upon as a useful way of understanding how psychosocial perspectives all share the same axis – frequently a text that is the focus of analysis – but do not necessarily have the same radius, with each concentric reading drawing reflexively on social theories or psychological theories to produce polyvocal readings that take different perspectives and yet remain concentrically ‘inside’ one another (Saville Young & Frosh, 2010).
