Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapies and the Psychosocial

Abstract

This paper explores the complex relationships between psychoanalysis, psychotherapies and ways we can think relationships between the psyche and the social in a globalised world. It explores both the promise and the limitations of post‐structuralist traditions and the need to think beyond its terms if we are to open up a meaningful dialogue between diverse traditions and illuminate different levels of embodied experience. Drawing upon formative process of class, ‘race’, gender and sexualities it questions traditions of identity politics that might ‘fix’ identities into pre‐given categories, so opening up spaces to explore complex embodied identities and diverse historical and cultural legacies. Drawing upon a range of empirical examples it seeks to open up new spaces for psychosocial research and new languages within which we can explore the psychosocial not as a space between discrete disciplines but as potentially transforming disciplinary legacies that have sought to separate ‘psychology’ and ‘sociology’ in ways that make it harder to illuminate transformations in contemporary globalised and transnational lives.