Stephen Frosh

Psychoanalysis outside the clinic

More than a hundred years after the founding of psychoanalysis, it remains influential and controversial far outside its core sphere of activity in the ‘clinic’. In a wide range of cultural and social disciplines, psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to explain human subjectivity and its relations with the social world. The book on which this talk is based explores these interventions of psychoanalysis through detailed examination of how they work in literature, politics, social psychology, philosophy and psychosocial studies. It shows how psychoanalysis can at times greatly illuminate these fields of study, and how at other times it might mis-read them. In this talk, I lay out some questions about how psychoanalysis comes to be ‘applied’, attending especially to the issue of the generality or otherwise of interpretations and transference.

Psychosocial Studies and Psychology: Is a Critical Approach Emerging?

This article describes a brand of ‘psychosocial studies’ that adopts a critical attitude towards psychology as a whole, yet remains rooted in an attempt to theorize the ‘psychological subject’. Principles for psychosocial studies work of this kind are discussed, arising out of the actual work of one academic centre within a university department of psychology. These principles are: concern with the human subject as a social entity; interest in the emergence of subjectivity in the social domain; interest in critique, defined as a concern with ideological issues in psychology; methodological pluralism, including an active assertion of the value of qualitative and theoretical research, as well as more traditional quantitative research; theoretical pluralism, including interest in discourses traditionally marginalized in academic psychology (e.g. psychoanalysis, systems theory, feminist theory, phenomenology); interest in inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to psychological theory and research; and interest in personal and social change, including psychotherapy. Some complicating issues relating to the process and content of this kind of work are also outlined.

Interpretation and over-interpretation: disputing the meaning of texts

In order to address issues concerning the ‘positioning’ of individuals in discourse, appeal has recently been made to psychoanalytic formulations offering plausible interpretations of how and why specific subjects take up the positions they do. This raises many problems concerning the relationship between ‘top-down’ or ‘expert’ interpretive strategies and the ‘bottom-up’ grounded approaches traditionally preferred by qualitative researchers. Along with these methodological issues go epistemological and political questions concerning power and accountability. The current article stages a dialogue around psychoanalytically and discursively driven interpretive strategies, centring on the analysis of material concerning a teenage boy’s attempt to develop a ‘non-hegemonic’ position with regard to masculinity. A psychoanalytic reading of the boy’s talk is given alongside a discursive analysis used to offer a critique of this approach. It is argued a) that psychoanalytic interpretive strategies require much more grounding than is usually available from conventional interview texts; and b) that a dialogue of psychoanalytic and discursive analytic interpretations serves to raise questions of difference as possibilities for collaboration.

But it's racism I really hate: Young masculinities, racism and psychoanalysis

This article addresses the issue of how discursive analyses revealing the way personal accounts of masculinities are constructed can be supplemented by theories providing plausible explanations of how individuals take up particular subject positions. It is suggested that psychoanalytic concepts are helpful in this regard. An analysis is presented of material from a participant in a study of emergent masculinities among boys in London schools. This material concerns the cross cutting of gendered and racialized identity positions. The use of psychoanalytic constructs enables the production of an account of this boys narrative in which reasons for his adoption and defense of particular positions, despite their contradictory and conflictual character, can be proposed

Lads, machos and others: developing ‘boy-centred’ research

This chapter provides some background to our project by investigating recent research which has explored the construction of masculine ‘identities’ through ethnographic, observational and interview methods. We are particularly interested in research that addresses the topic of boys’ experiences by allowing them to speak about it openly and in detail, rather than research which, for example, measures achievements, attitudes or behaviours. We are also concerned to maintain a view of masculinity in its relational aspects — that is, to understand how it comes to be constructed in relation to femininity- and how, in the context of ‘masculinity’ itself, there might be many varied ‘masculinities’, alternative ways of ‘doing boy’. Other key topics explored in research on masculinities and gendered identities include the ways in which what counts as being female or male is contested and resisted and how gendered identities are differentiated by, for example, social class and ‘race’.

Constructing and Experiencing Boyhoods in Research in London.

When Rob was about 14‐years‐old, at an all male boarding school, he was so glad that he did not have a tiny penis like another boy who was called girl. He was popular because he was good at sport, missed his mum and dog terribly but never showed it (except a little to his mum and dog) and talked a lot about girls he fancied. These memories were triggered by an interview based study on the identities of 11‐ to 14‐year‐old boys in London which we conducted from 1997–2000. Rob was the interviewer, and he interviewed boys in groups (45: 36 single sex and nine mixed) and individually (79) in 12 London schools.

‘And where were your brothers in all this?’: A psychosocial approach to texts on ‘brothering’:

This article offers a psychosocial analysis of interview material from a larger study on ‘brothering’, making an empirically grounded contribution to what are frequently abstract debates on the use of psychoanalysis to ‘read’ narratives. Recent psychosocial approaches which employ psychoanalysis alongside discursive psychology are reviewed, including a Lacanian approach which has been described as a less certain and potentially less individualizing and pathologizing gaze to take up in psychosocial studies. The authors put forward the notion of concentric reflexivity to apply Lacanian theoretical concepts to narrative material, ‘troubling’ sense-making, alongside recent calls for psychoanalysis to be employed in psychosocial work as a tool for ‘disintegrating’ and ‘disrupting’ text. The discussion argues for the interruptedness of narrative as an ethical necessity and for acknowledging fragmentation as central to the construction of an ethical subject.

Affective equality: love, care and injustice

But what are our selves? Everything, good or bad, that we have gone through from our earliest days onwards; all that we have received from the external world and all that we have felt in our inner world, happy and unhappy experiences, relationships to people, activities, interests and thoughts of all kinds—that is to say, everything we have lived through—makes part of ourselves and goes on to build up our personalities ... These earliest emotional situations fundamentally influence our relationships to ourselves. (Melanie Klein)

Fundamentalism, Gender and Family Therapy

Adherence to religiously and culturally defined communities is a complex affair, likely to be misconstrued by those perceiving such communities from the ‘outside’. This is a major reason why multiculturalism has failed to deal with the threat posed by religious fundamentalism. In particular, dissenting voices within these communities are marginalized. Fundamentalism is understood here as a specific anti-modern movement, a response to the crisis of rationality that draws on the same emotional forces as do postmodernism and feminism but to different ends. It is characterized by acceptance of the existence of absolute authority, militancy and anti-humanism. It casts women as both ‘ideal’ (as mothers and bearers of the culture) and ‘other’ (as sexual subjects). It embodies a failure of the imaginative capacity to tolerate difference and otherness, linking it with other narcissistic responses to the tensions of modernity. Challenging fundamentalism, in therapy and in politics, requires a more subtle understanding of the dynamics of dissent within cultural and religious communities too conveniently characterized by outsiders as homogeneous.

GROUP SOCIAL SKILLS TRAINING FOR YOUNG-CHILDREN IN A CLINICAL SETTING

Peer interaction problems are often difficult to ameliorate in a clinical setting. In this study, four boys, whose many problems included difficulties with peer relationships, were given social skills training in a group over ten sessions. The main aim was to improve cooperative play, effective communication and conflict resolution skills by using a general problem-solving framework combining behavioural and cognitive techniques. The formal measures failed to show change, which may be due in part to inadequacies in the measures. Reports from therapists, teachers and parents suggested that there was considerable change within sessions, some improvement at school but very little at home.