Affective normativity and the status quo

Affective normativity and the status qu

Fundamental questions for psychology

This paper argues that the mainstream of psychology is misconceived in ways which make it largely unsuitable as a basis for clinical interventions. Why do we need a new way of thinking about work with distressed individuals? What is wrong with the many different styles of therapy and intervention already in use

Reconstructing the person

This paper proposes that feelings, rather than cognitions or behaviours, are the core stuff of human experience and should provide the starting point for clinical understandings. So far in this special issue, we’ve suggested in various ways that cognition and it’s alternatives, narrative and discourse, are not primary in human experience. But what is

Depression: embodying social inequality

A critical realist social constructionist account of depression that attempts to thoroughly take account of embodiment, materiality and power by drawing on various resources, including neuroscience

Embodying psychology through neuroscience: conceptual and political issues

For the most part psychology is disembodied, the processes and mechanisms it proposes as capable of being enabled by silicon and wire as by flesh and blood. This disembodiment means that analyses tend to grant unwarranted primacy to the cognitive realm, the realm of conscious thought and discourse. As a result, much of psychology lends itself to idealism, voluntarism and a notion of the subject as more-or-less transcendent, bounded, insightful, consistent and controlling. By contrast, in sociology, social theory, anthropology and other social sciences there has in recent years been a renewed interest in notions of embodiment, an interest that may currently be mutating into a focus on affect, emotion and feeling. These are topics on which neuroscience has much to say – indeed, the subdiscipline of affective neuroscience is concerned primarily with these aspects of our experience

Paranoia: a social account

Both psychology and psychiatry are dominated by individualistic accounts of paranoia (and indeed, other forms of distress). As a corrective to these, this paper provides a social account of paranoia grounded in a minimal notion of embodied subjectivity constituted from the interpenetration of feelings, perception and discourse. Paranoia is conceptualised as a mode or tendency within embodied subjectivity, co-constituted in the dialectical associations between subjectivity and relational, social and material influences. Relevant psychiatric and psychological literature is briefly reviewed; relational, social structural and material influences upon paranoia are described; and some implications of this account for research and intervention are highlighted

Paranoia: contested and contextualised

In this chapter we discuss how paranoia might best be conceptualised and responded to. By paranoia we mean experiences of perceiving and relating to others that are characterised by suspicion, mistrust or hostility. Whilst such experiences are common in the general population, amongst people who receive clinical interventions they often include complex, self-insulating belief systems, distorted perceptions and marked distress. In psychiatry these experiences are usually associated with diagnoses of schizophrenia, delusional disorder and paranoid personality disorder. The problems with the reliability and validity of these diagnostic categories are well known (Bentall, 2004; Boyle, 2002; Pilgrim, 2001). One alternative approach is to focus on specific problematic experiences and behaviours (Boyle, 2002) or ‘complaints’ (Bentall (2004) rather than heterogeneous diagnostic categories. Doing so addresses the problem of heterogeneity – but how might we then conceptualise these experiences? Drawing on a discussion of Bleuler’s notion of schizophrenia, we present an approach to paranoia that considers both its social context and its embodied character. We then investigate the notion of ‘distress’. Given the well-established finding that many people have experiences similar in content to those of mental health service users but without any accompanying distress, we discuss the importance of context in the generation of distress – in particular how it may arise because of a lack of ‘fit’ in the way they negotiate their beliefs and unusual experiences with their social world. Finally, we discuss how one might offer help or support differently in relation to paranoia

It’s not always good to talk

This article discusses the ways in which individualism has become more prevalent in Western culture in recent years, creating a ‘culture of narcissism’, in which people are dependent on various forms of therapy as the everyday world has become an atomised space of interpersonal alienation. Increasingly, perhaps, we imagine that the proper place for emotional talk and reflection is the professionalized and relatively costly space of the therapeutic encounter. The article comments on the popularity of talk shows such as Trisha, the mass-marketing of books on ‘emotional intelligence’, and the manifold ways in which the vocabulary and terms of psychotherapy and counselling have entered everyday life and asks if psychologists should be preaching the importance of expressing and listening to emotional experiences informally, with friends and family and in other types of discursive practice

England’s Dreaming? UK critical psychology

We report and analyse a survey of UK critical psychologists conducted early in 2011. Our analysis constructed four themes from the data: positivity/optimism, negativity/pessimism, academic practice and institutional matters. First we sketch the current state of critical psychology in the UK. The themes are then described, and their meanings situated and interpreted with respect to a series of tensions related to method, theory, incoherence and marginalisation, and affects

Emotional inhibition: A discourse analysis of disclosure

Evidence generated within the emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) suggests that talking or writing about emotional experiences produces health benefits, but recent meta-analyses have questioned its efficacy. Studies within the EDP typically rely upon a unidimensional and relatively unsophisticated notion of emotional inhibition, and tend to use quantitative forms of content analysis to identify associations between percentages of word types and positive or negative health outcomes. In this article, we use a case study to show how a qualitative discourse analysis has the potential to identify more of the complexity linking the disclosure practices and styles that may be associated with emotional inhibition. This may illuminate the apparent lack of evidence for efficacy of the EDP by enabling more comprehensive theorisations of the variations within it