ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts presents in the subsequent chapters. This part deals with practices and techniques which make up for some sense of deficit, loss or trauma in modern life in Britain: from overly rapid rates of change to the ‘massification’ of social life, entrepreneurial pressures to consume and succeed, and unemployment and retirement. It examines the role that leisure plays in the lives of retired and elderly ex-miners, their spouses and friends, in the former coal-mining town of Ashington. The part explores the phenomenon of psychic ‘dissociation’ as a cognitive strategy for both dealing with trauma and achieving ecstasy in everyday life. Public interest in these institutions amounts to something of a pilgrimage, according to Macdonald, and an extremely popular and widespread recreational practice since at least the 1960s. Dissociation may be deliberately employed in the service of religious experience, or spontaneously and pathologically deployed as a kind of psychical escape.
