New Voices in Psychosocial Studies

Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030327576
• eBook ISBN: 9783030327583
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

Psychosocial studies in the UK is a diverse area of work characterised by innovation in theory and empirical research. Its extraordinary liveliness is demonstrated in this book, which showcases research undertaken at the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, highlighting three domains central to the discipline – psychoanalysis, ethics and reflexivity, and resistance. The book engages psychosocially with a wide variety of topics, from social critiques of psychoanalysis through postcolonial and queer theory to studies of mental health and resistance to discrimination. These 'New Voices in Psychosocial Studies' offer a coherent yet wide-ranging account of research that has taken place in one 'dialect' of the new terrain of psychosocial studies and an agenda-setting manifesto for some of the kinds of work that might ensure the continued creativity of psychosocial studies into the next generation. 

This book demonstratesthe ongoing development of psychosocial studies as an innovative, critical force and will inspire both new and established researchers from across the fields that influence its transdisciplinary approach, including: critical psychology and radical sociology, feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, critical anthropology and ethnography and phenomenology. 

© The Author(s) 2019

S. Frosh (ed.)New Voices in Psychosocial StudiesStudies in the Psychosocialhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32758-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. New Voices in Psychosocial Studies: Introduction

Stephen Frosh¹

(1)

Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

Stephen Frosh

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A New Space

Psychosocial studies in the UK has emerged over the last three decades and is now a diverse area of work characterised by innovation in theory and empirical research. Part of its liveliness has been the way it has resisted establishing a formal canon of acceptable work or laying down too strongly ‘correct’ ways of thinking or practice. It has also, on the whole, resisted becoming institutionalised within the university system, although sometimes this has not been a matter of choice, as various ‘centres’ for psychosocial studies have formed amongst interested researchers without ever having quite the institutional leverage to create permanent structures. This situation has gradually changed, helped by the formation in 2013 of the Association of Psychosocial Studies (APS), which offers some ballast to attempts to register psychosocial studies as an important contributor to the social science arena. There have also been some other solidifying moves, such as the formation of a ‘Sociology, Psychoanalysis and the Psychosocial’ Study Group within the British Sociological Association, attesting to the growth of interest in the area and also to its development from a loose network of individual researchers to a more aspirational discipline or, perhaps better, ‘disciplinary space’.

But what is psychosocial studies? The website of the APS as at July 2019 (http://​www.​psychosocial-studies-association.​org/​about/​) offers the following description:

It studies the ways in which subjective experience is interwoven with social life. Psychological issues and subjective experiences cannot be abstracted from societal, cultural, and historical contexts; nor can they be deterministically reduced to the social. Similarly, social and cultural worlds are shaped by psychological processes and intersubjective relations.

This relatively incontestable paragraph (only ‘relatively’ because some psychosocial warriors might challenge the possibility of talking at all about ‘psychological issues’ or ‘social and cultural worlds’ as separate entities) is filled out by a slightly more specific list of what characterises psychosocial studies:

(a) its explicit inter or trans-disciplinarity, (b) its development of non-positivistic theory, method and praxis and (c) its orientation towards progressive social and personal change.

The APS then lists the various ‘sources’ from which psychosocial studies ‘draws inspiration’ (‘sociology, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, critical theory, post-structuralism, process philosophy, feminism, postcolonial theory, queer theory and affect theory’). And finally, there is a coy indicator of what the future holds: ‘Various “dialects” are in the process of emergence.’ As this suggests, there are some agreed parameters for the ‘language’ of psychosocial studies despite the various ‘dialects’, for example that psychosocial studies is inter- or transdisciplinary in nature; that it deals with the coming-together of ostensibly ‘social’ and ‘psychological’ factors; that (consequently) it treats humans as social subjects; and that it is multimodal in its methods. In addition, there would probably be widespread agreement that psychosocial studies has a strong but not fixed or universal relationship with psychoanalysis; that it is critical in orientation in being (a) interested in exploring the unspoken received assumptions present in traditional disciplinary approaches and (b) committed to the deconstructing and egalitarian principles loosely gathered under the term ‘critical theory’; that it prizes reflexivity in theory and research; and that ethics is a significant focus of attention, both in the broad sense of examining the ethical imperatives involved in creating the conditions for human flourishing, and in the narrower sense of being centrally concerned with the ethics of research practices. The APS description also points out how psychosocial studies draws on a very wide range of influences, from critical psychology and radical sociology, through feminist, queer and postcolonial social theory, critical anthropology and ethnography and phenomenology, to psychoanalysis. As might be expected, given this huge range, it is a very varied area of work; yet perhaps more surprisingly, it is developing with relatively little rancour between exponents of different kinds of psychosocial studies. As evidenced by the series in which the current book is placed, Studies in the Psychosocial, it seems currently possible for a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to be gathered together under the general rubric of psychosocial studies and to add to the creativity and sense of excitement of the field.

This book presents one of the emerging ‘dialects’ mentioned by the APS, associated with the work of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. In many ways, the history of this Department marks out some of the core issues for psychosocial studies in general, even though it has its own particular take on psychosocial studies and of course its own specificity in relation to institutional, professional and personal processes. The Department was set up in 2008 as a breakaway from the then School of Psychology at Birkbeck, within which it had existed in a kind of shadow form for several years as a Centre for Psychosocial Studies. The early history and founding principles of this Centre were written about in Frosh (2003) and generated a substantial amount of interest; but the break with psychology when it came was a kind of ‘traumatic birth’. This was caused in part by the move of the psychology discipline towards cognitive neuroscience and its accompanying hostility towards critical and theoretical work (and psychoanalytic thinking) of the kind that characterised many members of the Centre. It was also a response to pressures produced in university life by the conservative disciplinary structures promoted by the then Research Assessment Exercise (RAE—now the Research Excellence Framework, REF), a grading process on which the distribution of research funds for universities was based. These trends, which were by no means unique to Birkbeck, produced an exclusionary atmosphere that was antagonistic to imaginative work (and mental well-being!) but which also created new possibilities, in that it allowed a small group of academics within psychology to start to fantasize freely about what they might want to work on if they could invent their own disciplinary space—a remarkable and unusual opportunity in the context of the university system. Not being wanted but wanting something ourselves, we were able to grab the opportunity to make that something happen, which is how the Department of Psychosocial Studies formed. Straight away, the very small group of psychologists who had made up the Centre were supplemented by some new appointments from other disciplines (initially sociology and literary studies) and then radically transformed when a restructuring of the university enabled the Department to absorb other psychosocially minded colleagues to create a genuinely multidisciplinary staff group. This should not be made to sound too easy; it was accompanied by much uncertainty and risk-taking, political manoeuvring and the calling-in of favours owed, and a heightened sense of pressure and drama that has had long-term consequences for the atmosphere of the Department. But it also enabled our new academic home to be established and psychosocial studies to become formally part of the institution, with the difficulties (auditing, accountability, rules, regulations, struggles for resources) but also the recognition that brought with it.

From multidisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity is a substantial move, but the philosophy of the Birkbeck group has always been towards that ‘explicit inter- or trans-disciplinarity’ noted in the APS definition, particularly the latter. There is a fair amount that can be said about this (see Frosh 2019; Baraitser 2015) but for the purposes of this Introduction the key point is that transdisciplinarity is an attempt to move across disciplines in a disruptive way, without settling into any formal new shape. This means that in many ways it is inherently unstable, with the tensions and uncertainties but also the potentially creative new encounters that follow from that instability. The combination in one Department—especially one in initially precarious circumstances in a university undergoing significant restructuring and within a broader international context of neoliberal attacks on critical thought—of people working from deeply felt yet often opposed positions (for example, feminism and queer theory, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis) is certainly unstable and has produced a culture of quarrelsome solidarity. Currently, the major issues revolve around racism and decolonization within the university setting, and particularly whether the claims to criticality that psychosocial studies makes can be substantiated in relation to its predominant ‘whiteness’ and its relative neglect to date of perspectives derived from black studies and the decolonizing movement. Something new is emerging, but not without its birth pangs. In particular, whilst it is probably true that all academic disciplines are riven with disputes because researchers within them are largely defined by the quality and reputation of their ideas, and are in competition with one another for recognition, the particularly personal nature of much psychosocial research—its interest in relationships, subjectivities, oppressive practices and resistance—heightens the intensity of conflicts, which are rarely over ‘mere’ ideas but also over the identities that are bound up with them. This is not new, of course, as the history of philosophy shows especially clearly; but it is often hard, yet in a peculiar way rewarding, to live through it. Standing somewhat outside regular disciplinary structures means that we are constantly inventing ourselves as scholars, researchers and teachers, which is vertiginous and therefore both troubling and exciting.

The ten years of the Department of Psychosocial Studies’ existence to date...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. New Voices in Psychosocial Studies: Introduction
• Part I. Psychoanalysis
• Part II. Ethics and Reflexivity
• Part III. Resistance
• Back Matter