Never the twain shall meet: a critical appraisal of the combination of discourse and psychoanalytic theory in studies of men and masculinity

In recent years there has been a number of attempts by different researchers to study men and masculinity using a combination of discourse theory and psychoanalysis. The main reason for this development is the sense that, on its own, discourse theory provides an incomplete account of masculine subjectivity. Psychoanalysis is thought to be able to fill those gaps. In this paper I want to begin by reviewing these arguments. I will provide an outline of the alleged deficiencies in discursive approaches to men and masculinity before going on to examine some of the work that has attempted the above synthesis. What I aim to show is that, for a number of reasons, such attempts are bound to fail. Instead, I will argue that better progress can be made in studies of masculinity by remaining within the theoretical boundaries of Discursive Psychology

Relationality in a time of surveillance: narcissism, melancholia, paranoia

This paper explores apparent shifts in the cultural use of psychoanalytic concepts, from narcissism, through melancholia, to paranoia. It tries to track these shifts, very loosely, in relation to changes in sociocultural and political atmospheres, noting that none of the shifts are complete, that each one leaves previous states of being and of mind at least partially in place. Narcissism was perhaps the term of choice for examining the problem of forging relationships that feel meaningful in a context of rapid change and neoliberal expansion; then melancholia was (and is) drawn on to conceptualise the challenge of confronting loss and colonial ‘theft’; and now the annexation of the polity – and of everyday life – by massively insidious surveillance produces a culture and subjecthood that is fundamentally, and understandably, paranoid

Agony at a Distance : Investigating Digital Witnessing on YouTube

Peer reviewe

On waiting for something to happen

This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which “live encounters” impact on their participants, and hence with the conditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of human subjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentary analysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, the theatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the “publication of liveness”. We argue that these “redundant” forms of human contact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting

Research encounters, reflexivity and supervision

Reflexivity in qualitative and ethnographic social science research can provide a rich source of data, especially regarding the affective, performative and relational aspects of interviews with research subjects. This paper explores by means of three case examples different ways of accessing and using such reflexivity. The examples are drawn from an empirical psycho-social study into the identity transitions of first-time mothers in an inner-city multicultural environment. Fieldnotes and supervision were used to engage with researcher subjectivity, to enhance the productive use of reflexivity and to address the emotional work of research. The methodology of the supervision was psychoanalytic, in its use of a boundaried frame and of psychoanalytic forms of noticing oneself, of staying engaged emotionally as well as creating a reflective distance. The examples illustrate how this can enhance the knowledge gained about the research subjects

Witnessing and re-enacting in Cambodia: reflection on shifting testimonies

Thirty years after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) how do Cambodians cope with the traumatic legacy of Pol Pot's reign of terror? What forms does witnessing take on in post-socialist and transitional Cambodia as senior Khmer Rouge leaders await prosecution at the Cambodian Tribunal? The paper examines aspects of witnessing in today's Cambodia, expressing each in its own way the idea of the 'shifting' of witnessing: the transformation of testimonies due to time passing and contrasted systems of justice through a comparison of testimonies in the trial of the 'Pol Pot/Ieng Sary clique' (1979) and the current Cambodian Tribunal; the complex forms of witnessing emerging from participatory projects developed with Western authors in 'We want (u) to know' (documentary movie made by an international film crew with the inhabitants of the village of Thnol Lok in 2009) and 'Breaking the silence' (theatre play realised by the Dutch dramaturge Annemarie Prins that premiered in Phnom Penh in 2009 and toured Cambodia in the following years); the relationship between documentary and legal forms of witnessing through the example of Vann Nath, a survivor of S-21/Tuol Sleng, the prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of their fellow countrymen. The paper analyses the difficulty Western organisers of participatory projects experienced in applying the hybrid model of transitional justice to sociocultural contexts of witnessing. Nevertheless it points out their contribution to processes of 'recognition beyond recognition' in which cultural differences in coming to terms with historical trauma are expressed and recorded

Large Group Work: Identity Development and Its Significance for Achieving Race Equality

This article examines and analyses the effectiveness of experiential large group work (between 24–35 students) in delivering community and youth work training at Goldsmiths1. It specifically focuses on students’ development and experience in their understanding of racism and identity. The training has refined a model of learning and teaching that combines large group work and experiential learning. It is in this arena that students explore and critically reflect on their life and work experiences. They learn to process and articulate their feelings and understandings across a wide range of issues that come from learning how to inwardly reflect and to develop an awareness of themselves and change. The article explores the experience of group work training and the significance of students’ development of their racial identity in effectively addressing racism. It draws on both the work of Paulo Freire (1972; 1995) on education and Pat de Maré (1975; 1991) on large groups. The article begins by examining some of the literature on both race and large groups followed by an exploration of racial identity and its development in the group work process in terms of distinct phases. It then discusses the importance of the large group and its relevance to development of racial identities. It concludes by highlighting the significance of the issue of racial identity in addressing racism

Education then and now: making the case for ecol-agogy

The processes, settings and outcomes of human education have distinctive impact on the human and non-human world: this paper sets out to discuss what may have motivated the initiation of human education, how it has been maintained why the outcome has wide-ranging, and often negative, planetary impact. The analysis offers a multi-disciplinary account of education, from pre-history to the present, noting that humans, past and present are born into an ‘open world’ that requires world building or, niche construction. As a result, cultural and genetic evolution are out of synchronisation instigating an existential threat and the anxious experience of ‘adaptive-lag’ leading to the motive for continued niche construction. Education is presented as a particular type of niche construction requiring teachers and the use of symbolic verbal language to help learners move from simplistic ‘split’ thinking to the more mature position where the needs of self and others can be met

A clinical study of kuru patients with long incubation periods at the end of the epidemic in Papua New Guinea

Kuru is so far the principal human epidemic prion disease. While its incidence has steadily declined since the cessation of its route of transmission, endocannibalism, in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s, the arrival of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD), also thought to be transmitted by dietary prion exposure, has given kuru a new global relevance. We investigated all suspected cases of kuru from July 1996 to June 2004 and identified 11 kuru patients. There were four females and seven males, with an age range of 46–63 years at the onset of disease, in marked contrast to the age and sex distribution when kuru was first investigated 50 years ago. We obtained detailed histories of residence and exposure to mortuary feasts and performed serial neurological examination and genetic studies where possible. All patients were born a significant period before the mortuary practice of transumption ceased and their estimated incubation periods in some cases exceeded 50 years. The principal clinical features of kuru in the studied patients showed the same progressive cerebellar syndrome that had been previously described. Two patients showed marked cognitive impairment well before preterminal stages, in contrast to earlier clinical descriptions. In these patients, the mean clinical duration of 17 months was longer than the overall average in kuru but similar to that previously reported for the same age group, and this may relate to the effects of both patient age and PRNP codon 129 genotype. Importantly, no evidence for lymphoreticular colonization with prions, seen uniformly in vCJD, was observed in a patient with kuru at tonsil biopsy

Introduction : narcissism, melancholia and the subject of community.

Sigmund Freud’s twin papers, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 [1915]), take as their formative concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds, and of preserving a stable image of a boundaried self. Whilst it is true that the term narcissism especially has come to be deployed in ways that seem foreign to the complexities of Freud’s 1914 paper (by its reduction to a personality disorder or its use as a broad-brush cultural diagnosis), we suggest in this introductory chapter that neither narcissism nor melancholia can be thought about today without expressing some debt to Freudian metapsychology. However, whereas Freud was most evidently concerned to describe the structure of ego-formation, subsequent commentators have preferred to emphasize the cultural and normative dimensions of these terms. Accordingly, we consider the respective discursive histories of narcissism and melancholia and find that although they have been put to work in very different ways they remain grounded by a shared concern with mechanisms of relation and identification. Indeed, this shared concern is the basis upon which they’ve been most productively reanimated in recent years: the rise of melancholia as a critical aid to the study of cultural displacement and dispossession, and the determined redemption of narcissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social. We argue that what is most noteworthy in this post-Freudian literature is the increasing relevance of metapsychology to social and political theory. The language of psychoanalysis, extrapolated from the clinic, permits a detailed examination of the boundaries which construct and challenge the terms of social solidarity. Specifically, this takes place though careful reading of the complex practices of (dis)identification at the heart of ego-formation (at both individual and group levels), and the associated mechanisms of defence, for example: introjection, incorporation, projective-identification, and splitting. By recognising the complexity of how communities get made, and connecting this with recent literature on counter publics and the commons, we demonstrate that Freud’s frameworks of narcissism and melancholia remain essential for any contemporary understanding of political association