What does psychoanalysis offer to psychosocial studies?

2000 words, themes that should be included: Psychosocial studies draws on many different theoretical and practical bodies of knowledge, of which psychoanalysis is one particularly influential approach.

Psychoanalysis is transdisciplinary and is especially strongly focussed on the relationship between ‘internal’ psychological events and the demands and contraints of the ‘external” world.

Psychoanalysis offers a vocabulary for explaining the complexities of subjectivity in a social world.

ButPsychosocial studiesis also challenged by psychosocial studies, for example in relation to its gendered or colonial assumptions.

These resources come from areas of study that are concerned with questions about what we mean by the ‘self’ or ‘subject’; how knowledge and power might be related to one another; and how different historical and cultural perspectives may allow different claims to be made about the truth. They include a number of intellectual traditions that could be grouped under the term ‘critical theory’ in that they have all attempted to ‘undo’ the assumptions that we make about the personal, the individual or the self, and how it is constituted.

These theories include poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, critical social psychology, childhood studies, and critical theory. Psychosocial studies also has a ‘practice’ side visible in social psychiatry, social work and social policy; this is not the main orientation of our degree, but still needs to be understood. The discussion is based around the question of the different ways in which we can approach the ‘psychosocial subject’.

One distinctive feature of psychosocial studies is the emphasis it has placed on developing an account of ethics, not simply in the context of how to do ethical research, but what psychosocial studies might offer in thinking about what it means to be an ‘ethical subject’.

In practice, this gives rise to work on social responsibility, acknowledgment and reparation, as well as a complex set of issues around denial, social violence and the development of a personal and social ‘ethics of care’.

There is also an apparently simple but highly important set of practical issues around research – what does it mean to do ‘ethical’ research around the very sensitive topics that are characteristic of psychosocial studies (for example, psychological suffering, torture, trauma)? Even though this is very early in the course, we will start to think about what it means to study human phenomena in an ‘ethical’ way.