Is Profound Boredom Boredom?

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom insofar as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom

Phenomenology and critical social psychology: directions and debates in theory and research

There has been significant growth in critical approaches to social psychology in recent years. Phenomenological, discursive and psychoanalytically informed perspectives, amongst others, have become increasingly popular alternatives to ‘mainstream’ cognitive social psychology. This paper describes the fundamental philosophy and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology along with discussion of a number of key issues in qualitative research in social psychology. In particular, I discuss the role of interpretation, the turn to language and need for political engagement within critical social psychology. More recently, there has been a growth in phenomenologically informed narrative theories and methodologies and in this paper I introduce my own development of a critical narrative analysis. In the process I discuss some of the most pressing debates about research within the phenomenological tradition and provide rebuttals, solutions and possible future directions for phenomenological theory and research that may lead to yet greater recognition for this social psychological perspective

Psychological jurisprudence and the relational problems of de-vitalisation and finalisation: Revisiting the society of captives thesis

This chapter describes the relational problems of de-vitalisation and finalisation guided by the socio-cultural insights of Psychological Jurisprudence (PJ). De-vitalisation and finalisation are non-reflexive states of human relatedness in which reciprocal consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and mutual power are neutralised (i.e. forestalled and/or foreclosed). These neutralisations function to limit and/or to deny the project of shared struggle and the experiences of collective overcoming. The chapter asserts that this project and these experiences are necessary ontological and epistemological conditions for interdependent human flourishing to occur, including the becoming of human justice (as restorative and transformative) for a people yet to be. The chapter explains how the excess forms of de-vitalisation (e.g., limits on relational being, harms of reduction, and bad faith) and the excess forms of finalisation (e.g., denials of relational becoming, harms of repression, and negative freedom) nurture a society of captives. This is the ontological and epistemological captivity of the kept and those who keep, manage, observe, treat, and/or inspect them. The ubiquity of this captivity is made evident in the relations of humanness that populate this society. The chapter proposes how these relations—derived mostly from the deficit and desistance models of offender therapy, recovery, and reentry—are totalising (i.e. socio-culturally harm-generating and injury-producing) in their iterative effects on reciprocal consciousness, subjectivity, and power. Maintaining or cultivating these de-vitalising and finalising relations of humanness is an exercise in co-productive madness. Examples from the mental health and prison literatures suggestively highlight the chapter’s central thesis