Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet

For more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed in rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In the course of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology led us inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation of this inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology and relationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotional experience

Selfhood and Relationality

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other

Beyond "the Relationship between the Individual and Society": broadening and deepening relational thinking in group analysis

The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality

War As Morally Unintelligible: Sovereign Agency and the Limits of Kantian Autonomy

Kant’s treatment of war is usually discussed as part of his political philosophy or philosophy of history. In contrast, this essay locates these discussions in direct reference to major elements of his moral philosophy: autonomy, the categorical imperative, and the moral relationality of the kingdom of ends. Within this context, Kant’s account of war, particularly in writings from the 1790s, can be read as affirming war as morally unintelligible: It is the expression of a collective withdrawal from the constitutive relationality of moral community. This results in a radical disparity in the exercise of moral autonomy by the sovereign agency of the state with respect to peace, on one hand, and with respect to war, on the other

Relationality

The aim of this paper is to outline and briefly illustrate an approach to the analysis of ceremonial events largely inspired by the work of Gregory Bateson, in which ritual performances are envisaged as experiences afforded by the enactment of special relationships. Particular emphasis is thus placed upon the interactions that occur between ritual participants and the relational configurations these interactions imply

Caring after death: issues of embodiment and relationality

Death most fundamentally would seem to concern the absence of presence, and the loss of the living embodied other is the apparently hard inescapable truth to be faced. This brings sharply into relief the part that bodies play in our relationships and in caring for others. In this chapter I explore the significance of the absence and presence of material bodies for care practices, and for the understandings of relationality that may underpin caring after death. At the same time I also consider the bodies of the living and the ways in which grief and loss may be experienced as physical pain in one's own body. Drawing on published autobiographical materials, I suggest that the relationality of caring - even in contemporary US and European societies - may incorporate an embodied relational self in which threats to the physical wellbeing of another may be experienced directly as implicating one's own physical wellbeing. Such 'embodied relationality' highlights one of the deep paradoxes in the costs and benefits of care, which arise when we recognise how individual well-being and flourishing may be bound up with that of others

Negotiating Relationally: The Dynamics of the Relational Self In Negotiations

Although negotiation research is thriving, it has been criticized as having an arelational bias—emphasizing autonomy, competition, and rationality over interdependence, cooperation, and relationality. In this article, we advance a new model of relationality in negotiation. Drawing on research in social psychology, we describe the construct of relational self-construals (RSC) and present a temporal model of RSC and negotiation. After delineating the conditions through which RSC becomes accessible in negotiation and conditions that inhibit its use, we discuss how RSC affects negotiators\u27 pre-negotiation psychological states, early and later tactics, and negotiation outcomes. We illustrate a number of distinct relational dynamics that can occur based on the dyadic composition of RSC, each of which brings distinct benefits and costs to the negotiation table. Implications for the science and practice of negotiation are discussed

Racialisation, relationality and riots: Intersections and interpellations

This paper takes up Avtar Brah's (1999) invitation to write back to the issues she raises in her mapping of the production of gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities in west London. It addresses two topics that, together, illuminate racialised and gendered interpellation and psychosocial processes. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first draws on empirical research on the transition to motherhood conducted in east London to consider one mother's experience of giving birth in the local maternity hospital. The maternity ward constituted a site where racialised difference became salient, leading her to construct her maternal identity by asserting her difference from Bangladeshi mothers and so self-racialising, as well as ‘othering’ Bangladeshi mothers. The paper analyses the ways in which her biography may help to explain why her experience of the maternity hospital interpellates her into racialised positioning. The second section focuses on media responses to the riots in various English cities in August 2011. It examines the ways in which some media punditry racialised the riots and inclusion in the British postcolonial nation. The paper analyses three sets of commentaries and illuminates the ways in which they racialise the debate in essentialising ways, reproducing themes that were identified in the 1980s as ‘new racism’ and apportioning blame for the riots to ‘black gangster culture’. While these media pronouncements focus on racialisation, they are intersectional in implicitly also invoking gender and social class. The paper argues that the understanding of the mother's self-racialisation is deepened by a consideration of the racialised discourses that can be evoked (and are contested) in periods of social unrest. The paper thus draws on part of the methodology of ‘The Scent of Memory’ in layering media readings and biographical narratives to analyse the contemporary psychosocial space of racialisation

Towards an Ethics of Distance: Representation, Free Production and Virtuality

This article takes it inspiration from a crisis between Deleuzian free production and representation in contemporary virtual and digital culture. The aim is to sketch a different ethics to the ethics of difference between free production and representation as described by Deleuze and Guattari and invoked by Michel Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipe. This article outlines the case for an ethical relationality between these two structures which reflects the socio-political and ethical exigencies of our virtual and digital cultures: specifically, an ethics of relationality derived paradoxically from the distance inscribed in ethical philosophy. Drawing on an amalgamation of Ricoeurean ethics and social constructionism in a definition of selfhood, I argue for the need to stand back from the distanciating effects of the virtual revolution – not with a view to approximating the cultural politics of specificity in the logic of representation – but to see in the gap in "distance from" specificity, a space of ethical and philosophical agency wherein lies the value-added of otherness

Children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse: siblings’ accounts of relational coping

This article explores how young people see their relationships, particularly their sibling relationships, in families affected by domestic violence, and how relationality emerges in their accounts as a resource to build an agentic sense of self. The ‘voice’ of children is largely absent from domestic violence literature, which typically portrays them as passive, damaged and relationally incompetent. Children’s own understandings of their relational worlds are often overlooked, and consequently existing models of children’s social interactions give inadequate accounts of their meaning-making-in-context. Drawn from a larger study of children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse, this paper uses two case studies of sibling relationships to explore young people’s use of relational resources, for coping with violence in the home. The paper explores how relationality and coping intertwine in young people’s accounts, and disrupts the taken for granted assumption that children’s ‘premature caring’ or ‘parentification’ is (only) pathological in children’s responses to domestic violence. This has implications for understanding young people’s experiences in the present, and supporting their capacity for relationship building in the future