Introduction

This introduction provides an account of key ideas in psychoanalysis, including Freud's work and the way his ideas are usually represented and misunderstood inside psychology today. The debate between these different psychoanalytic traditions, which is explored in greater detail in the course of the book, is what gives psychosocial studies its lively character and which has enabled it to take forward the 'new paradigm' revolution in the discipline that began back in the late 1960s. Psychoanalysis is now re-emerging inside psychology, but in a form that is very different from earlier incarnations of the approach in the discipline. There are some kinds of psychoanalysis that are very 'psychological', of course. Psychosocial research into the contradictory and transformative nature of human subjectivity turns 'critical' when it is also critical of psychoanalytic concepts. It argues that the impact of psychoanalysis needs to be understood in the context of other radical movements inside and outside the discipline.