Evolución del romance hasta los primeros años del siglo XX

Psychoanalysis is a clinical treatment technique, and a body of theories about mental and emotional states of organisms (see Freud, 1926). According to Rusbridger (2012) psychoanalysis took some time to break free from Freud’s emphasis on the biological aspect of affects, and to include a fuller account of the subjective experience of feelings.

Frosh & Saville-Young (2011) argue that psychoanalysis as an approach to studying the human ‘subject’ that claims its own disciplinary status and also infiltrates other disciplines across the entire spectrum of the social sciences and humanities, has been controversial since its beginning in the late 19th century.

Psychosocial study is research in social science which draws on psychoanalytic principles (Clarke and Hogett, 2009). Bibby (2011) argues that psychosocial is a non-rationalist understanding of the human subject; attempts to take the unconscious into account; the data collected in a research environment will be co-constructed by the researcher and the participants; and the ‘psycho’ doesn’t mean ‘psychology’. Lucey et al. cited in Redman (2005, p.532) suggests, the ‘psycho-social’ as it has appeared in recent sociological and social psychological debates references the specifically irrational and unconscious dimensions of social life. According to Frost (2008) psychosocial theory for social work, both historically and contemporarily, draws on various traditions in psychology and sociology, and therefore it is a very difficult concept to hold in place. Its past and present can be hard to extrapolate. Hollway (2009) used the label ‘psycho-social’ for the developing alternative as a way of conveying that its central precept is to hold together an

understanding of the workings of the psyche and the social without reducing one to the other. Redman (2005) also alludes to the ways in which the social and the unconscious might be said to be mutually constituted such that the one is always already present in the other. Thomson (2007) contends that it helps to access experience in a way that conveys inner life as well as outer circumstance. According to Thomson (2010b) psychosocial makes it possible for a researcher to turn his or her mind to a more sophisticated approach to voice and narratives, that does not take what people say at surface value but understands us as situated and shaped by both historical, biological and psychic trajectories (Thomson, 2010b).

Frost (2008) contends that in sociology with its intellectual inheritance of critical theory, the ‘psycho’ part of the term ‘psychosocial’ refers to psychoanalytically informed theory.

Unconscious processes and the unconscious dimension of people, organisations and social structures are a fundamental tenet of such psychosocial theory (Hollway

&Jefferson, 2013). However it is noted that how the unconscious is defined is a matter of some dispute within psychoanalysis (see Frosh, 1999; Redman, 2005). The internal world and its struggles, for example with anxiety, ambiguity and defence mechanisms, is a key site for enquiry. The ‘social’ part of the term psychosocial is also contingent and emerging (Frost, 2008). For a psychosocial researcher emotional engagement is both necessary and inescapable. This can be both burdensome and beneficial, both problem and solution (Finlay & Gough, 2003). From a sociological perspective, Wetherell (2003) contends that psychoanalysis is suspected of having strong individualizing tendencies.

According to Frosh and Baraitser (2008, p347) there are scholars from a background of post-structuralism and/or influenced by discursive interpretive strategies who problematize the ‘expert-knowledge epistemological strategies of psychoanalysis’. In the face of this there are many researchers who seek a language for psychosocial studies that is reducible neither to psychology nor to sociology (see Frosh & Saville-Young, 2011).

Controversies are also rife about the type of psychoanalysis that might fit into psychosocial studies (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008; Hollway, 2008). For instance in the British academic context in which much of this debate has been developed, this has

produced a stand-off between Kleinian and Lacanian thinkers (see Clarke, Hahn, &

Hoggett, 2008; Frosh & Emerson, 2005; Hook, 2008; Hollway, 2008). This has led to the question about whether what some regard as the possible critical edge of psychoanalysis is being blunted by a humanistic rendering that appropriates psychosocial studies to what is effectively object relational thinking (Hoggett, 2000), or whether the move to the

‘intersubjective’ is one that will at last allow psychoanalysis some empirical hold (Clarke, Hahn, & Hoggett, 2008; Frosh & Baraitser, 2008). Furthermore and most importantly, the concern of psychosocial studies with the interplay between the social (external) and inner/psychic (internal) formations has occasioned a turn to psychoanalysis as the discipline that might offer convincing explanations of how what the “inner”

becomes “outer” and vice versa (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008). According to Redman, Epstein, Kehily, and Mac An Ghaill (2002), Benjamin argues that there is an inherent tension between those psychoanalytic accounts that are committed to a notion of an irreducible ‘inner-world’ which are populated with primitive feelings, the capacity for identification and unconscious defence mechanisms and other accounts which are

‘committed to the proposition that discursive practices attribute personhood to individuals in their passage through social institutions’ (p.190).

Despite these controversies, psychoanalysis, both in its Lacanian and Object Relational nature is well favoured and drawn on because of the importance its places on how irrationality permeates the social sphere, and the premium its places on fantasies (see examples Butler, 2004a; Redman, 2005; Redman et. al 2002; Skeggs, 2005; Wetherell, 2008; Zizek, 2000). Even though the details of psychoanalysis and psychosocial debates are beyond the scope of this study, it is possible to argue that

what the different psychoanalytic traditions hold in common is a conception of the unconscious as a ‘realm’ or register of ‘psychic reality’

that is in excess of and cannot be reduced to the external reality of the social world; that is consequential, not least in the sense that it is said always to press on and frequently to interrupt this external reality; and whose content is by and large unconscious or, at the very least, the subject of systematic attempts to avoid paying it attention (Redman, 2005, p. 532).

3.2.1 Understanding defended psychosocial subjects

The term “defended subjects” is principally associated with Hollway & Jefferson (2013).

Defended subjects invest in particular positions in discourses to protect vulnerable aspects of self, an essentially psychosocial phenomenon noted by Gadd (2004).

Walkerdine, (1997) describes the need that is sometimes felt, perhaps unconsciously, by subjects in ethnographic work to keep levels of anxiety down. Of primary importance to the notion of the psychosocial subject then, is their habitation in a world of lived experience, including cultures of differentiation and oppression; of the realities of class and gender, disability, age, sexuality and ‘race’ and culture (Frost, 2008, p. 252). In recent years, a number of scholars have highlighted and challenged prevailing conceptualisations of humans in different disciplines and areas of research in the social sciences (Buckner, 2012). Focusing her critiques on views of humans as socially constructed and rationally motivated, Buckner (2012) has argued in favour of a psychosocial understanding that does justice to the complexity of human beings.

In a similar vein, Roseneil (2006, p.849) adopts a critical view on the model of the subject assumed in much sociological work on personal life. She notes a prevalence of “a social constructionist ontology, which assumes the existence of a rational, unitary intimate subject”. Roseneil (2006) highlights a lack of attention of constructionist approaches in general to irrational and unconscious motivations, which for her are critical in understanding humans. Inadequate views of the human subject have also been perceived to have predominated in research on crime and the fear of crime. Hollway and Jefferson (2013) point out a tendency among criminologists and sociologists studying fear of crime to assume a socially constructed and/or rationally driven research subject.

They consider such conceptualisations problematic as they fail to enable adequate explanations of (often puzzling) differences in people’s fear of crime.

As Hollway and Jefferson (2000) argue, taking the inner world seriously as part of a psychosocial project demands an understanding of people and their actions as not only consciously but also unconsciously motivated, and this points to the need to incorporate

psychoanalytic understanding into social science. Hollway and Jefferson (2013) work with a psychoanalytic ontology in conceptualising humans as non-rational, non-unitary

‘defended subjects’ as a way of accommodating a dynamic unconscious that defends against anxiety and affects people’s positioning and investment in available social discourses. The notion of the defended subject is also adopted by Roseneil (2006) in her effort to incorporate attention to the unconscious dynamics that contest the rational mind in her psychosocial study of personal life. Gadd and Jefferson (2007, p.4) argue that

“taking the inner world seriously involves an engagement with contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing because only there, in our view, are unconscious as well as conscious processes, and the resulting conflicts and contradictions among reason, anxiety and desire, subjected to any sustained, critical attention”. Making a case for a conceptualisation of the human subject as psychosocial that is informed by psychoanalytic thinking, Henriques et al. (2004, p. 206) emphasise that “psychoanalysis challenges any attempt to separate the individual and the social, and to think about this individual in terms of its consciousness of self or a unitary capacity for rational action”.

Within psychosocial theory, psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity are the preferred psychological approach, as they assume a dynamic and mutually constituting relation between the psychic and the social (Buckner, 2012). The next section discusses some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud.