“Every human being is an artist”: from social representation to creative experiences of self

In a chapter I wrote for the first Researching Beneath the Surface book (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009), I suggested that there was room within the panoply of psycho-social methods for a method focused on visual imagery and affect rather than words (Manley, 2009). In that chapter, titled “Words are not enough”, I concluded that psycho-social studies should work towards an understanding of how unconscious images are intimately linked to affect, an inclusion of this understanding in our research, and the creation of new methodologies that allow for the assessment and evaluation of affect in psycho-social research (2009, p. 96). The reason for needing to do this was, I suggested, to reach the “beneath the surface” understandings of complex situations that defied discursive explanations. At the time of writing, 2009, it was only social dreaming (Lawrence, 2005; Manley, 2014), with its emphasis on dream images and free association, which went some way towards satisfying these demands. However, at the time, social dreaming was largely practice-based rather than research-orientated. Work using social dreaming in research is now under way (Berman & Manley, in press; Karolia & Manley, in press; Manley & Trustram, 2016) 98; however, until recently, the practice-based orientation of social dreaming had stymied its development as a psycho-social research method (Manley, 2009). Furthermore, the use of dreams is itself problematical, since they are perhaps our most abstract and incomprehensible expressions of thought, undoubtedly emerging from our unconscious and difficult to interpret with any degree of certainty. This is partly a philosophical and epistemological question. In other words, it depends on your point of view. In 2009, I went on to say that it would be easier to accept the use of social dreaming and related methods in research by approaching them through a Deleuzian lens. It was through Deleuzian ideas of “affect”, “difference”, and “becoming” that I tried to make sense of aspects of working with the visual imagination (Manley, 2009).