Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives

Emotion New Psychosocial Perspectives

Edited by

Shelley Day Sclater, David W. Jones, Heather Price and Candida Yates

Emotion

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Emotion New Psychosocial Perspectives Edited by

Shelley Day Sclater David W. Jones University of East London, UK

Heather Price University of East London, UK

and

Candida Yates University of East London, UK

Selection and editorial matter © S. Day Sclater, D. W. Jones, H. Price and C. Yates 2009 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21685–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

1 Introducing Psychosocial Studies of Emotion Shelley Day Sclater, Candida Yates, Heather Price and David W. Jones

1

Part I A Psychosocial Approach to Emotion 2 The Missing Dimension: Emotions in the Social Sciences Michael Rustin

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3 Representation, Affect and the Theory of the Subject Anthony Elliott

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4 Using Winnicott Juliet Mitchell

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Part II Emotions in the Public Sphere 5 Explosive Humiliation and News Media Barry Richards

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6 ‘As if ’ Intimacy? Mediated Persona, Politics and Gender Jessica Evans

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7 Masculinity, Flirtation and Political Communication in the UK Candida Yates

85

8 ‘Count the Beats of Your Heart not the Fingers on Your Hand’: The Emotionalisation of Promotional Culture Helen Powell

97

Part III Emotions in the ‘Private’ Sphere 9 Thinking Psychosocially About Difference: Ethnicity, Community and Emotion Simon Clarke 10 Panic and Perjury: A Psychosocial Exploration of Agency Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson v

111 123

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11 Separation and Changing Identity in Becoming a Mother Cathy Urwin 12 What Is This Thing Called Love? Narratives from Two Generations Joanne Brown

139

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Part IV Practices, Interventions and Therapies 13 ‘Be Quiet and Listen’: Emotion, Public Policy and Social Totality Andrew Cooper

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14 Emotions and Contemporary Developments in Criminology Loraine Gelsthorpe

183

15 Emotional Literacy in Schools: A Psychosocial Perspective Heather Price

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16 A Psychosocial Understanding of Personality Disorder: The Historical Problem of Moral Insanity David W. Jones

212

17 Between the Body and Social Trauma: Working with the Aftermath of Torture Nicola Diamond

227

18 Conclusions: Psychosocial Studies – A Therapeutic Project? Barry Richards, David W. Jones, Candida Yates, Heather Price and Shelley Day Sclater

242

Index

255

Acknowledgements We are aware of, but do not have the space to fully thank, all those whose work has contributed in recent years to psychosocial understanding within the academic world. We must also acknowledge the particular support that the University of East London has given to Psychosocial Studies. With apologies for the inevitable omissions we would like to thank Mike Smee, Amal Treacher, Naheed Kahn, Linda Talbot, Robin Stinson, Cheryl Wiley, Darren Ellis, Angie Voela, Lurraine Jones, Jo Sherman, Caroline Oremeyi David, Lynne Frogget, Margie Wetherall, Lisa Blackman, Michael Parkes, Gary Smith, Gavin Poynter, Steve Trevillion and Andrew Day Sclater. We would very much like to thank Zsuzsa Mathe for so generously allowing us to use her haunting and powerful image ‘She Let Me Go’ for our book cover. For further details of the artist and her work, see www. zsuzsamathe.com. Our biggest thanks goes to the many hundred of students who have supported the psychosocial project by signing up for the Psychosocial Studies BA at the University of East London since the mid-1980s.

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Notes on Contributors Joanne Brown is Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of Southampton. She previously taught in the Psychosocial Studies subject area at the University of East London and in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Tavistock Clinic, London. Her research at the University of Southampton has focussed on increasing access to psychological therapies in secondary mental health services. Her recent publications include A Psychosocial Exploration of Love and Intimacy (Palgrave, 2006), and ‘New ways of working in mental health: How mental health practitioners perceive their training and role’ (Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 2008). She also practises as a psychodynamic counsellor. Simon Clarke is Professor of Psychosocial Studies and Director of the Centre for Psychosocial Studies at the University of the West of England. His research interests include the interface between sociological and psychoanalytic theory; emotions; Kleinian and post-Kleinian thinking, and the social application of psychoanalytic theory and practice. He has published numerous articles, essays and reviews on the psychoanalytic understanding of racism, ethnic hatred and social conflict. Simon is the author of Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave, 2003); From Enlightenment to Risk: Social Theory and Contemporary Society (Palgrave, 2005); and Emotion, Politics and Society (Palgrave, 2006) (co-edited with Hoggett and Thompson). Simon is a member of the board of directors of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society and Consulting Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (Palgrave). He is currently editing with Paul Hoggett a book series titled Exploring Psychosocial Studies for Karnac Books. Andrew Cooper is Professor of Social Work at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London. He has a long-standing interest in the applications of psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinking and practice in the public sphere. His most recent publication in this area (with Julian Lousada) is Borderline Welfare (Karnac Books, 2005). Shelley Day Sclater is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Law at the University of East London. She has published widely on topics including narrative methods in social science, auto/biography, and families and close relationships, most recently writing Family Studies course materials for the Open University. Her extensive socio-legal work includes books on divorce, parenthood, law and the human body, surrogacy and, most recently, Regulating Autonomy: Sex, Reproduction and Family (Hart, 2009). She now works as a freelance writer and lives by the sea in Northumberland. viii

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Nicola Diamond is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies University of East London. She trained with the British Association of Psychotherapists and also practices as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Women’s Therapy Centre and the Helen Bamber Foundation, as well as having a small private practice. Her areas of special interest are the body and trauma; the interpenetration of social relations and bodily processes, including biology; and attachment studies. Recent publications include a co-authored book Attachment and Intersubjectivity (Whurr Publishers, 2003), various articles in academic and professional journals such as Psychodynamic Counselling, and in edited collections. She is currently working on a book Between Skins: The Body in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Perspectives, to be published by Wiley & Sons. Anthony Elliott is Professor of Sociology at Flinders University, Australia, and Visiting Research Chair at the Open University, UK. He is presently Head of Department at Flinders University, Australia, and has served as Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). He was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, as well as Foundation Director of the Centre for Critical Theory, University of the West of England. His writings have been published in over 20 languages, and he is internationally acclaimed for his research in social theory, the sociology of culture and psychoanalytic studies. His recent books include Critical Visions (2003), Social Theory Since Freud (2004), The New Individualism (with Charles Lemert, 2006), The Contemporary Bauman (2007), Concepts of the Self (2007, 2nd ed.), Making The Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery Is Transforming our Lives (2008) and Identity In Question (co-edited with Paul du Gay, 2008). Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the Open University. She has written widely on visual culture within a psychosocial framework. Her current research interests are the psychoanalytic aspects of the public sphere and its governance, particularly policy development based on practices of civic renewal. More broadly she is interested in therapeutic culture and the place of emotions in public life. Among her publications are Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (2005, co-edited with David Hesmondhalgh), Identity in Question (2000, co-edited with Paul du Gay and Peter Redman), Visual Culture: The Reader (1999, co-edited with Stuart Hall). Loraine Gelsthorpe is Reader in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. She has extensive publications in the areas of women, crime and criminal justice, youth justice, and community penalties in particular. Her most recent book is The Handbook of Probation (Willan Publishing, 2007, co-edited with Rod Morgan, former Chair of the Youth Justice Board). Current research revolves around women and resettlement issues and about the ‘arts’ in prisons. When not engaged in

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research or teaching in criminology (as Director of Postgraduate Programmes at the Institute) she practices as a UKCP registered Psychotherapist. Wendy Hollway is Professor in Psychology at the Open University. Her research centres on applying psychosocial principles to theorising subjectivity, to methodology and to empirical research on identity. Her recent ESRC-funded project was about the identity transition involved in becoming a mother for the first time. Her most recent books are: Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method (2000, with Tony Jefferson, Sage), Social Psychology Matters (2007, co-edited with Helen Lucey and Ann Phoenix, an Open University text) and The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity (2006, Routledge). She currently has an ESRC-funded Fellowship titled ‘Maternal Identity, Care and Intersubjectivity’. Tony Jefferson is Professor Emeritus at Keele University. He has just completed a year as a Visiting Presidential Scholar in the Sociology Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He has researched and published widely on questions to do with youth subcultures, the media, policing, race and crime, masculinity, fear of crime and, most recently, racial violence. His recent published works include: Psychosocial Criminology (2007, with Dave Gadd); Doing Qualitative Research Differently (2000, with Wendy Hollway); Masculinities, Social Relations and Crime (1996, special issue of the British Journal of Criminology, co-edited with Pat Carlen). David W. Jones is Principal Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Myths, Madness and the Family (Palgrave, 2002) and Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Approaches to Criminality (Willan Press, 2008). Juliet Mitchell is Professor Emerita of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge where she is also a Fellow Emerita of Jesus College. She is the Founder Director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Human Geography. Her most recent books are Mad Men and Medusas (2000) and Siblings (2003). She is a Full Member of the International Association of Psychoanalysts. Helen Powell previously worked in the advertising industry and is now Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in advertising at the University of East London. Her research interests and publications explore the role of cultural intermediaries, including celebrities, as informers of consumer choice and brand selection. At present she is working as lead editor and contributor to the third edition of the The Advertising Handbook (Routledge, Spring 2009). Heather Price is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at The University of East London and Deputy Course Tutor of the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at

Notes on Contributors xi

the Tavistock Clinic. Her area of research interest is theories of development and learning in childhood. She is interested in psychosocial approaches to childhood studies, and the use of psychoanalytic observational methods in the study of classroom practice. She has published articles in journals such as Psychoanalytic Studies, Infant Observation, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the Journal of Social Work Practice. Barry Richards is Professor of Public Communication in the Media School at Bournemouth University, and Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Research there. Previously he was Professor of Human Relations at the University of East London. His books include Disciplines of Delight: The Psychoanalysis of Popular Culture (1994) and Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (2007). His major interests are in the emotional dimensions of politics, particularly in relation to conflict and security. Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. He is an Honorary Affiliate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and is currently Chair of its Applied Section. He is the author of many works on applications of psychoanalysis to cultural and sociological questions. These include The Good Society and the Inner World (1991), Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science, Culture (2001); and with Margaret Rustin, Narratives of Love and Loss; Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction (1987/2001) and Mirror to Nature: Drama, Psychoanalysis and Society (2002). He is currently working on two books – Reading Klein (with Margaret Rustin), to be published by Routledge/Institute of Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy and Methods of Psychoanalytic Research, to be published by Karnac. Dr Cathy Urwin is Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Adult Psychotherapist working in the National Health Service and in private practice. She has a background in teaching and research and currently holds the post of Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Research Fellow at the Tavistock Centre, London. Her research interests include the use of infant observation as a research method, the evaluation of the effectiveness of child psychotherapy and parallel work with parents from the points of view of parents, child patients and therapists, and the emotional dynamics of baby-only groups. She worked for many years in the East End of London where the research and clinical work referred to in the chapter presented in this volume were based. Candida Yates is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at The University of East London. She researches in the areas of gender, affect and cultural change and her publications include Masculine Jealousies and Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave, 2007) and Culture and the Unconscious. She has also published articles in journals such as Psychoanalytic Studies, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the Journal of Cultural Research.

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1 Introducing Psychosocial Studies of Emotion Shelley Day Sclater, Candida Yates, Heather Price and David W. Jones

Introduction This chapter provides an introduction to the papers that make up this book. The psychosocial contributors represented here all share an interest in affect, the emotions and emotional life. Some recent writers (e.g. Blackman and Cromby, 2007) make clear distinctions between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’, with, for example, ‘emotion’ being used to refer to conscious experience, and ‘affect’ to a more basic drive – or bodily based phenomenon. We agree with Greco and Stenner’s (2008) suggestion that such distinctions are not always fruitful, partly because the terms are used highly inconsistently. Emotions exist partly in the body, but they are also in our minds, in our language and in the cultures that surround us. They can be understood as a crucial bridge between the individual and the social, and are quintessentially psychosocial phenomena. They have a mercurial status, not existing without an individual to experience the emotion, but often having little significance without a socio-cultural framework that imbues feelings with meaning. The contributors to this volume assume a subject who is social to the core,1 and a society that, at its heart, for better or for worse, is created and sustained by the everyday practices of living, breathing and passionate people. Contributors also share in common a belief that disciplinary splits such as those between the sociological and psychological can hinder processes of inquiry into the mutual constitution of such individuals and the social relations in which they are enmeshed. The psychosocial contributions offered here therefore aim to challenge the fixity of disciplinary boundaries, and to work instead towards transdisciplinarity. The history of the psychosocial thinking that motivates this book is only just beginning to be written,2 and to date little attention has been paid to the development of psychosocial studies as a ‘discipline’ (although see the ‘Conclusion’ in this volume). This is perhaps a symptom of the interest in working across disciplinary boundaries, rather than building them. 1

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However, as Walkerdine (2008, p. 341) notes, the project of psychosocial studies emerged ‘institutionally’ from the University of East London (UEL) in the early 1980s, and many of the authors in this book have a connection with psychosocial studies at UEL. The fact of its institutional birth at what was then called North East London Polytechnic (NELP) – and not a wealthier, longer established university is significant. The polytechnic history meant that there has always been a strikingly practical orientation rather than a strictly abstract flavour to the pursuit of the psychosocial. It is notable that centres of psychosocial thought have emerged in other ‘new’ universities (e.g. the University of the West of England and the University of Brighton). The emergence in East London is also perhaps no accident. East London has been an intense crucible of social change. The close-knit working-class communities documented by the ethnographic studies of the 1950s (e.g. Young and Wilmott, 1957) have been transformed and have become globalised communities marked by high levels of transience, migration and unprecedented levels of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity (Eade, 1997; Butler, 2000). The personal histories of the students of the ongoing B.A. in Psychosocial Studies have reflected this diversity; their interest is in making sense of their own experience in the post-modern world they have been actively creating, as they themselves transcend national, cultural and social boundaries. In our experience of working with students at UEL over many years, they are additionally attracted to the psychosocial studies programme because they have been seeking work in the various caring or welfare or therapeutic industries. One could argue that they have been wanting, in very immediate ways, to make their world a better place (see discussions of teaching in this context in Brown and Price, 1999; Yates, 2001). The aim of trying to ‘make things work better’ has also distinguished much psychosocial research, at UEL and elsewhere,3 from traditions grounded more centrally in deconstruction, for example, or (post)-Lacanianism. The aim in these latter traditions tends to be to maintain space for more radically critical and explicitly ‘negative’ critiques. A further difference between the psychosocial research presented in this volume, and most discursive psychology, cultural studies, literary studies and sociology, is in the use made of psychoanalytic ideas. The latter disciplines have largely turned away from clinically based psychoanalysis in this country. Clinical practice in the UK is still dominated by the work of Melanie Klein and the British ‘Object Relations’ tradition. It is the latter thinking that has been most influential upon psychosocial theorising in the UK. These traditions have been particularly alive at UEL thanks to the strong academic links with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, founded to provide research, training and treatment in the fields of mental health and mental disorder.4 An important question for this tradition of psychosocial studies, and its students, therefore concerns the theoretical and practical consequences of privileging (a particular) psychoanalysis, and offering positive or reformist

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critiques rather than adopting a more negative stance. It is important to ask in what way psychosocial studies is a product of ‘therapeutic culture’ (Richards and Brown, 2002; Furedi, 2003), and whether it – and such a culture – is potentially emancipatory, or constraining and regulating. This is a crucial question to which we return in the conclusion. It is clear that there is no one psychosocial approach, no single theory to frame thinking, and no tried and tested methodology by which to elaborate the psychosocial world. Nevertheless, psychosocial theorists have attempted to elaborate psychosocial studies as praxis, a way of conducting research (e.g. Clarke, 2002, and in this volume). At UEL, the development of particular psychosocial methodologies to explore a diverse range of research questions has generated innovative work that has been driven by problems, interests and topics, rather than by discipline boundaries. The result has been the marking out of a distinctively interdisciplinary territory that encompasses innovations in observational, biographical, clinical and narrative methods, that seeks to integrate theory, method and practice. This psychosocial work has generated new debates and set new research agendas that flag up the centrality of emotion in personal lives and social and cultural worlds. Early examples include Barry Richards’s Crises of the Self (Richards, 1989) in which he began to explore the relationships between internal states and features of the external world, particularly culture and politics. Richards’s later innovative work on advertising (Nava et al., 1997; Richards et al., 2000) applied psychosocial thinking to explore the ‘dynamics’ of advertising, the appeal of advertisements and the ways in which they modulate emotion and so made an important contribution to a broader sociology of consumption as well as having practical implications. In her psychosocial study of divorce, Shelley Day Sclater (1999) built on the seminal work of Henriques et al. (1984/1998) to develop a narrative methodology, informed by Object Relations psychoanalysis and discourse theory, and so addressed crucial issues of family policy. More recently, scholars at UEL and elsewhere have further developed the psychosocial project in fields as diverse as mental health (Jones, 2002), education (Price, 2006), film studies (Yates, 2007), crime (Jones, 2008) and methodology (Andrews et al., 2000; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). Many others have deepened and broadened the psychosocial project, exploring crucial issues of subjectivity, identity and belonging. Joanne Brown (2006a, 2006b and in this volume) has suggested that this praxis can be characterised by the use of a ‘psychosocial imagination’. She follows C. Wright Mills’s discussion of the ‘sociological imagination’ as ‘. . . a quality of mind that “seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the internal realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities”’ (Mills, 1959, p. 15, quoted in Brown, 2006b, pp. 18–19). She characterises his sociological project as humanist and interventionist, and notes that it aims to ‘conjoin the biographical and historical’ (p. 19) as well as

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providing meta-theory. In extrapolating from this to the idea of a psychosocial imagination, Brown suggests that a ‘sociological imagination’ could be in danger of reductionism (the individual is best explained by locating them in their socio-historical context). Brown notes that in bringing psychoanalytic accounts of affective life into dialogue with sociological discourses, the effort is made to hypothesise, in different contexts, the ‘dialectic relation between social and psychic change’ (p. 22). There is no single theory, psychoanalytic or otherwise, that can claim to capture the fullness or all the nuances of the psychosocial imagination. The essays in this book reflect an eclectic plurality of approaches; each has something different to offer the exploration of the psychosocial approach to emotion. What follows is an overview of the four parts of the book.

Overview Part I: A Psychosocial Approach to Emotion The three remaining chapters in Part I are theoretical in focus, and present very different conceptual contributions to the psychosocial understanding of emotional life. The three theorists, Michael Rustin, Anthony Elliott and Juliet Mitchell, present contrasting sociological, (post)-Lacanian and clinical Object Relational psychoanalytic accounts respectively. Michael Rustin opens with an exploration of why most social scientific perspectives, in thrall to a ‘norm’ of rationality, have historically found it difficult to incorporate emotions into their disciplinary schemas, leaving complex and elaborate exploration and theorisation of the emotions to the arts and humanities, and to psychoanalysis. However, Rustin reviews a range of original sociological theories that ‘bucked’ the general rationalist trend, and have been characterised as ‘historicist’ (Perri 6 et al., 2007) in their conceptualisation of the relations between the social body and emotions.5 Among others, Rustin cites Elias’s (1939/1978) thesis that a ‘civilising process’ was evident in the transition in Europe from a medieval to a modern society, with its accompanying changes in the regulation of behaviours, and Hirschman’s (1977) argument that in the move from pre-market to market societies, a shift occurred from the organisation of social life in terms of war and honour, to one in terms of rational ‘interest’. Rustin then discusses the rehabilitation of the emotions in (social) scientific and philosophical discourse as itself a ‘psychosocial’ phenomenon. He follows the sociological, historicist accounts above in suggesting that the interest in emotional life is itself concomitant with a major societal transition, to a consumer society which encourages ‘. . . the release of inhibitions, and an efflorescence of emotionality’ (see Section 3, Chapter 2 in this volume). In reviewing the contemporary emotional construction of social life, Rustin draws on Reddy’s (2001) term, ‘regimes of emotion’, describing how particular constellations of emotion are regulated in a given context. Rustin makes the suggestion

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that ‘regimes of emotion’ can be studied psychosocially, at societal (macro), organisational (meso) and interpersonal (micro) levels. In the remainder of his chapter, he goes on to give some research examples of each. Anthony Elliott’s chapter builds upon contemporary developments in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1998) and Julia Kristeva (1974) to present a re-thinking of the relationships between affect, fantasy, representation and processes of repression. Elliott briefly re-examines Lacan’s work in order to argue that the free-floating power of complex, primally unconscious configurations of representation and affect was systematically downgraded in Lacanian-inspired approaches to the study of cultural and social processes of representation. He argues that Lacan’s particular reading of Freud’s discussion of the unconscious as being structured like a language led to a mis-representation of Freud’s theory as tying unconscious expression to organised signifiers. He comments, ‘The Freudian point against Lacan is that the unconscious is resistant to ordered syntax [. . .] The unconscious precedes language’ (see Section 2, Chapter 3 in this volume). Elliott suggests that this in turn has had major consequences for psychoanalytically inspired theories of the relations between self and society in sociology and cultural studies. He discusses recent attempts in European psychoanalysis to recover the radical Freudian notions of representation and affect in Castoriadis and Kristeva. He argues the case for reconstructing a psychosocial account of the desiring subject in which both representation and affect are accorded due recognition. Juliet Mitchell’s chapter might seem at first glance to be out of place in this volume as it appears to be not overtly concerned with ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ phenomena. But as her previous work has demonstrated (Mitchell, 1974, 2003) an exploration that begins in the most apparently private, intimate world of individual psychic development will inevitably lead to the social, and vice versa. In her now classic book Psychoanalysis and Feminism Mitchell argued that an exploration of the unconscious dynamics of gender development could lead to a better understanding not only of the subjectivities of gender, but also of more ‘structural’ issues such as patriarchy. Here Mitchell, while still clearly working within a psychoanalytic framework challenges a great deal of psychoanalytic orthodoxy by examining the significance of sibling relationships both to individual psychic development and thus ultimately to social formations. Drawing upon Winnicott’s work (see Hoggett, 1992; Price, 2006; Caldwell, 2007; and Yates, 2007 for other psychosocial examples), Mitchell demonstrates the psychosocial thinking that is at the core of Winnicott’s work. In her chapter, she makes the case for the centrality of an organising stage in the psyche based around sibling (lateral) relations. She argues this is as significant as the Oedipus complex, or the early identification with the maternal object, in its developmental implications. Mitchell suggests that sibling ‘object relations’ are ‘creative but not procreative’ in the unconscious.

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In building her argument, she draws on Winnicott’s conceptualisation of the ‘use of an object’, and his idea that aggression and destructiveness are implicit in creativity. She reviews Winnicott’s suggestion that to move beyond primary narcissism requires toleration of the subject’s act of destructiveness against an object (or the other), and perception of the survival (obdurateness) of the object or other. Mitchell suggests that the dynamics of love and hate in relation to sibling figures, like those in relation to parental figures, are core to understanding the placing of self in the world. The latter part of her chapter unpacks the implications of sibling relations for gender (as opposed to sex) identity. Sexual identity, in classical psychoanalytic terms, is organised through the perception of sexual difference as refracted through the Oedipus complex, and is assigned in the unconscious according to binary and procreative relations. Mitchell notes that gender identity is concerned with sexual assignment by culture, coinciding with the rise of the perception of the significance of sibling or lateral relationships, and free from reproductive concerns or binaries: ‘It is Freud’s polymorphously perverse child of the “Three Essays on Sexuality” grown up.’ Mitchell concludes by arguing that sibling or lateral relationships are connected to the laying down of pro-social and anti-social patterns of relating. Her thesis has considerable implications for those psychosocial researchers interested in key contemporary phenomena – the rise of the significance of lateral or friendship and peer relations (see Roseneil, forthcoming, for a related psychosocial discussion), and of laterally organised, networked social groups and organisations (see Cooper and Lousada, 2005, for another). Part II: Emotions in the Public Sphere Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 in Part II (Barry Richards, Jessica Evans, Candida Yates and Helen Powell) explore emotions in the worlds of politics and popular culture, using a range of media case studies. While addressing a variety of themes and concerns, the chapters each utilise a psychosocial approach that locates the study of unconscious fantasy within historically specific cultural, social and political contexts. These applications might also be called ‘psycho-cultural’, as the chapters focus on cultural concerns such as advertising imagery, celebrity culture and broadcast news and terrorism. They each explore the affective processes that underlie the ‘mediatisation’ of contemporary cultural life. The theme of Barry Richards’s chapter is emotional governance, or the advisability of public emotion management. In relation to the specific example of the potentially ‘toxic’ emotion of humiliation, he suggests that certain images and reports circulating in the Western media have the potential to be read as a humiliation of Islam, and of Muslims personally, even if this is not the media intention. Richards describes how the experience of humiliation can be a catalyst for explosive violence on the part of some individuals, and he makes a link with fundamentalism, extremism and jihadi

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terrorism. Quoting the work of Volkan (2004) on the significance of ‘chosen traumas’ in sustaining group national, religious and ethnic identity, he suggests that shared trauma can generate and amplify a sense of personal humiliation. Noting that intense, direct experiences of oppression and humiliation do not in themselves lead to terrorist action, Richards explores the developmental and unconscious roots of humiliation in the individual, distinguishing it from shame. Richards discusses how, in some individuals, the narcissistic wounding inherent in experiences of humiliation may be experienced as insurmountable, leading to a sustained sense of grievance and the desire for active, violent revenge. Richards’s argument leads him to conclude that those in political authority should pay more responsible and strategic attention to the content of (news) media. Jessica Evans’s core argument is that politicians must now project a particular identity, a managed ‘mediated persona’ which is ‘celebrified’. Such celebrification, she says, involves the projection of an illusion of one-to-one intimacy with the electorate, holding out the promise of confession or revelation of the private self. Evans notes that the ‘as if’ quality of the intimacy points towards the consumer’s disavowal: the viewer both knows and does not know that the relationship is manufactured from the sum of the politician’s media appearances. Evans plots the rise of celebrification in politics and connects it to Sennett’s (1977) argument about the ‘fall of public man’: a politician ‘. . . must surmount the disability of appearing to have a merely political will’ and offer integrity (see Section 5 in Chapter 6). She goes on to review the media campaigns of Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin in the run-up to the US presidential election of 2008, arguing that ‘female agents in the public sphere have a particular pact to make with personalisation’ (Section 1, Chapter 6). Making a similar point to that of Richards, that a mediation’s form is one precondition for the form of emotional affect made possible in the public sphere, she describes how both Clinton and Palin faced a genderspecific double bind. Personalisation encouraged them to ‘reveal’ a feminine, private emotional self, which, once on display, was simultaneously accepted, thus disqualifying them from ‘serious’ public engagement, and rejected as manipulative, thus undermining their integrity as public figures. Candida Yates’s chapter also discusses the gendered nature of emotion in the public sphere, but her focus is upon fantasies of masculinity and the play of emotion within the flirtatious strategies of political communication in the UK and elsewhere. Through her analysis of flirtation, Yates’s chapter explores the potential failure of emotion in the public sphere of political communication as represented by the superficial pleasures of flirtatious communication and the refusal to commit to a particular position, policy or party. She suggests that the ideology of intimacy is evident in the public fascination with the personality of politicians. The precarious underpinnings of the ‘as if’ persona of celebrity culture outlined by Evans in the previous chapter are echoed in Yates’s review of the flirtatious nature of political communication,

8 Emotion

where the substance of policy and debate is increasingly replaced by the seductions of ‘spin’ and the fantasies invoked by particular representations of leadership personalities. Yates notes that some of the tensions surrounding representations of female politicians (as described by Evans) are also present in relation to male politicians who, on the one hand, project traditional masculine qualities of leadership associated with mastery yet, on the other, are increasingly expected to project less authoritarian, ‘metrosexual’ images of masculinity. As Yates discusses, the extent to which such representations signify a meaningful hegemonic shift in masculinity, or whether the mobilisation of such images merely signifies the shoring up of patriarchal masculinity in a new guise, is open to debate. Finally, in Chapter 8, Helen Powell also takes up the theme of emotion and promotional culture by examining the ‘affective turn’ in consumer culture and advertising imagery. The chapter discusses the powerful role of emotion and its symbolism in generating brand ‘loyalty and trust’ and the emotional attachment that consumers experience in relation to certain branded goods such as the ‘i-phone’. Powell then moves on to look at the role of the celebrity in promotional culture. She notes that images of stars and celebrities have played a key role in the history of the emotionalisation of promotional culture and the psychosocial shaping of consumer identities. Powell takes the supermodel Kate Moss as a contemporary case study, and makes links with Barthes’s essay on Garbo and Hepburn in noting Moss’s idiosyncrasy and her transparency about her own identity construction, through her changing relationship with fashion. Powell draws on both Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas to consider the nature of the late-modern consumer’s identification with celebrities such as Moss. On the one hand, she notes, celebrity endorsement may fuel problems of identity construction in the consumer, creating cycles of ‘desire–acquisition–use– disillusion–renewed-desire’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 90), as the self falls short of the ideal image the celebrity provides. On the other hand, Powell suggests, the identificatory use the consumer makes of a celebrity like Moss may be more active, complicated and less ‘enamoured’ than that implied by the Lacanian reading – consumers may use celebrities as resources and ‘sites for experimentation’ on their own terms.

Part III: Emotions in the ‘Private’ Sphere All the chapters in this part (Chapters 9–12) take topics that have often been regarded as belonging simply to the ‘private’ worlds of individuals. Each of the topics discussed – racism, employment and exploitation, motherhood and romantic love – could have, and indeed have been, studied through conventional social science methods. However, here, all benefit from a specifically psychosocial concern with reflexivity in discussing how to interpret the empirical material gathered, whether by depth interviewing

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(see also Jones, 2004), life history research or psychoanalytically informed observation. Chapter 9, by Simon Clarke, presents interview material from a study researching community cohesion, and it notes the significance of local tribal structures for the white communities in Bristol and Plymouth where his interviews were conducted. Clarke argues that notions of racism need to be understood in terms of the emotional commitments to a sense of locality, rather than more abstract notions of nationalism. In common with the points made in the Introduction above, Clarke’s discussion of the psychosocial emphasises a plurality of psychosocial studies, exploring a range of diverse phenomena. For Clarke, as for Brown (cited above), the psychosocial can be characterised not by allegiance to a particular theoretical position or methodology per se, but by a distinctive ‘stance’. He suggests the psychosocial encapsulates several concerns: with researcher reflexivity in relation to unconscious dynamics; with the ability of research to give voice to research subjects; with consideration of the unconscious in relation to the transmission of an identity into the research environment; and finally, with the role of imagination in research. Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson’s chapter, Chapter 10, recapitulates a 2005 article for the British Journal of Social Psychology, which sought to engage with (critical) social psychology in offering a distinctively psychosocial perspective upon the conceptualisation of affect, emotion, agency and intentionality.6 Hollway and Jefferson distinguish between emotion and affect, using Blackman and Cromby’s (2007) definition of emotions as phenomena more consciously identifiable by the subject, and then focussing on affect, particularly unconscious anxiety. They emphasise the need to consider the personal historical conditions under which individuals make affective investments in particular discursive positions. The case study of ‘Vince’ documents one interviewee’s discussion of his dilemma in relation to whether to stay or leave a particular job. The authors suggest his decision has intersecting social, discursive and psychic dimensions: he is restricted in employment choices, has a commitment to his role as family provider and, unconsciously, is caught by a particular repudiation of his father and identification with his mother. Hollway and Jefferson read the ‘decision’ to go off sick as a highly over-determined, complex act of conscious and unconscious agency, about which the subject feels little choice. Hollway and Jefferson’s research deliberately explores questions of central importance for a psychosocial approach: how warranted and equipped psychosocial researchers are methodologically, when they are interpreting unconscious dynamics in contexts outside the consulting room; and how effective they can be in using concepts originating in a clinical context. In taking a psychosocial approach to identity in Chapter 11, Cathy Urwin draws firstly on Hall’s (1988) observation that identity can be described as the ‘. . . unstable point at which the “unspeakable stories of subjectivity” meet

10 Emotion

the narratives of history and of a culture’ (p. 440). Focussing on that instability, Urwin then looks at how a small group of mothers sought to build a sense of personal continuity as they actively re-worked their identities following the births of their first children, and gradual separation from them. The mothers observed were grappling with cultural, geographical and personal historical dislocation, and Urwin argues that it was in the face of such dislocation that paradoxically, they were able to articulate and work towards a sense of enhanced continuity. She hypothesises that the maternal task of separation from the young child might foreground this process (a child’s apparent difficulty separating may be connected to a mother’s difficulty in letting go). Urwin is one of a small number of psychosocial researchers employing empirical observational methods rooted in psychoanalytic (infant) observation (see Brown, 2006a, Urwin, 2009, Price in this volume and Price, 2006). In presenting her observational material and its analysis, Urwin argues that culture enters the psyche in the work of separation, and that cultural processes provide a psychic resource contributing to individuals’ reflexive identities, generating a relatively stable sense of ‘who we are’. Joanne Brown’s chapter, Chapter 12, argues that romantic love is particularly appropriate for psychosocial study, because the ‘binocular vision’ of the psychosocial can address the fundamental attachment needs and sociohistorical scripts that romantic love speaks to. She notes Day Sclater’s (1999) description of how individuals can be ‘hailed’ by a discourse, which invites identification with a particular self-image, and she suggests that what the psychosocial approach can study is the specific ‘cathexis of the social’ by individuals, in contrast to a psychoanalytic focus on the ‘landscape of [their] internal world[s]’ (see Section 2, Chapter 12). Brown considers two groups of interviewees discussing romantic love and intimacy, contrasting ‘thirtysomething’ and ‘eighty-something’ reflections. She notes that the younger age group engaged in active ‘sociological’ and ‘psychological’ deconstruction of romance, and suggests, drawing on Giddens (1992), that ‘. . . a transformation of intimacy is conducive to a psychosocial sensibility (and vice versa)’. As noted in the Introduction, she begins to explore the very interesting question of the praxis of psychosocial research, arguing that it may contribute reflexively to self-transformation, functioning as a ‘transformational object’ (Bollas, 1992). She notes this raises reflexive questions for psychosocial researchers, pace Craib (1994), about the nature of their endeavours in relation to conceptual as well as empirical research. As noted above, these questions are explored in more depth in previous work by Brown (2005, 2006a). Part IV: Practices, Interventions and Therapies As the Introduction began to suggest above, one of the central debates in a psychosocial approach to emotion concerns the social and political meanings of potentially ‘therapeutic’ practices. Frank Furedi (2003), like

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Christopher Lasch before him (Lasch, 1979, 1980), is deeply sceptical of ‘therapy culture’ and sees the constitution of ‘problems’ requiring ‘treatment’ or ‘modes of relating’ requiring ‘improvement’ as a way of achieving social and political aims. Foucault argued that the ‘taming’ or domestication of the unconscious in some therapies, and in accounts of the right conduct of emotional life that derive from them, is part and parcel of disciplinary power. Some of the chapters below refer to Foucault; all engage, implicitly or explicitly, with the ‘proper’ use of a ‘therapeutic project’ as it connects to their area of research. Andrew Cooper, in Chapter 13, begins by noting David Armstrong’s comment that ‘No emotional experience in organisational life is a suitable case for treatment. It is rather a resource for thinking, for releasing intelligence’ (2004, p. 27). His chapter is a critique of ‘top down’ approaches to policymaking, and it argues for serious value to be given to emotional responses to policy, in place of a simple focus on rational consultation about it. Cooper cites the example of a child protection worker who experienced an inarticulate mix of angry resistance and depression in the face of organisational policy in relation to the progression of casework. The worker eventually articulated her experience as akin to being on a factory line, producing as many ‘finished’ cases as possible. Cooper discusses how the collapse of strong intermediate collectives engaging in the political process within the contemporary social polity may leave individual ‘policy actors’ particularly exposed to emotional experiences which are psychosocial in origin, not merely personal: ‘What might once have registered and been available at the level of social conflict, instead becomes inscribed as part of subjective experience.’ The chapter presents one analysis of why policy initiatives may attract little commitment, and highlights the importance of a different kind of engagement by policy makers with their reception. In Chapter 14, Loraine Gelsthorpe focuses firstly upon the development of the discipline of criminology, before turning her attention to contemporary political discourse surrounding criminal justice, and the emotionalisation of the legal system. She notes how criminology underwent ‘scientisation’ in order to establish itself as a discipline. Emotional life has consistently been apparent in criminology, yet has not been theorised. Feelings are there, if indirectly: in radical (critical) criminology’s focus on the possibilities of deviance as a ‘fully authentic action’; in feminism’s deconstruction of the myth of ‘hygienic’ criminological research, and sensitivity to affective dimensions of criminality and victimhood (Smart, 1976; Heidensohn, 1996); and in writing on the sensuality of crime (Katz, 1988). More recently there has been a move to grasp the unconscious investments in crime and victimisation (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007) and a more over-arching psychosocial approach to understanding criminality (Jones, 2008). Gelsthorpe’s argument about contemporary political discourses about crime is that although restorative and expressive justice appear therapeutic and can be

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democratising, in their political performance and rhetoric, they have taken a punitive and victimological turn. This is in line with wider policy shifts in the responsibilisation of citizens in relation to crime, and a managerialist approach to the justice system. Heather Price, in Chapter 15, considers emotional literacy teaching in contemporary UK state schools as a phenomenon of what Furedi (2003) negatively characterises as ‘therapy culture’, and what Richards and Brown (2002) characterise subtly differently as a ‘therapeutic culture’. Thus she treats the newly institutionalised teaching of what has been enthusiastically characterised as the ‘fourth “R”’ (alongside reading, writing and arithmetic) as an example of the emotionalisation of contemporary life, and of a preoccupation with its management. Price applies Ian Craib’s (1994) discussion of the psychologisation and proceduralisation of grief and mourning, to her discussion of the recent (2005) creation of a school curriculum for ‘social and emotional competence’. She notes Craib’s emphasis upon the ‘dark’ or negative side of this process: it can prescribe, sanitise and marketise a dimension of human relations. At the same time, by using a psychoanalytically informed observational methodology to present vignettes from emotional literacy teaching and learning in the infant school, Price shows how teachers and pupils do not simply either receive or oppose such a curriculum, but are engaged immediately in translating it into terms where they can exhibit and negotiate a lively sense of individual potency and understanding. David Jones, in Chapter 16, looks at the category of personality disorder, and the problems society has in understanding individuals who appear to perceive the world in a rational manner but whose emotional responses and connections often seem highly abnormal. He notes that legal discourses of responsibility and psychological models of identity and agency don’t ‘fit’ these individuals, and within psychiatry, the ‘Personality Disorder’ diagnosis remains liminal – are these patients ‘really’ mad? Jones notes how such categories expose societal controversy and irresolution about human nature, and the constitution of self, emotion and thought in relation to the social body. He makes a strong argument for the importance of historicisation in the study of contemporary psychosocial phenomena. His account of the transmutation of ‘moral insanity’ into ‘personality disorder’ revisits the way that the loss of reason, certainly in legal and medical discourses, came to be equated with madness. He highlights the concurrent societal emphasis upon new kinds of ‘civilised’ masculinity. Jones shows how a gradual submergence of the significance of emotion in conceptualising mind and human nature silenced questions about the coherence of human consciousness, and the origins of distinctive human faculties, particular sensibilities or higher feelings, although he notes how elements of psychoanalytic thought (particularly the work of Henderson, 1939) continued to represent this marginalised tradition within psychiatry. His historical analysis clearly shows why policy initiatives, and the legal and criminal

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justice systems, continue to struggle at the present time with ‘what to do’ with individuals who not only do not ‘fit in’ but can do great harm to themselves and others. Chapter 17 in the book, by Nicola Diamond, references Foucault’s account of torture as public spectacle, designed to horrify and instruct. In developing a psychosocial argument, she notes that in late-modern society, torture takes place in private, but exists as a social practice. She describes her work as a therapist with victims of trafficking and of abuse under particular political regimes. In arguing that torture inscribes dynamic power relations upon the body, she shows how these relations continue at the level of affective somatic states and experiences of self-disintegration, and can be transmitted inter-generationally and in the therapeutic relationship. Her emphasis throughout is on the unbearability and unthinkability of the reality of the torturer–tortured relation, which is a social relation, and in this her argument has links to Cooper’s (2007) analysis of the explosive effects of the exposure of child sexual abuse. Diamond notes that the raw affect she describes is not the deep affective material of the drives that classical psychoanalysis posits at the inner ‘navel’ of the individual unconscious. Rather, it is inter-subjective, coming from external reality. This inflection of the social affectively within the subject has been less explored and countenanced in the psychoanalytic tradition (but see Layton, 2007). Diamond’s use of neuroscientific insights illustrates one way that a link between the psychosocial and neuroscience need not bring about a ‘domestication’ (Radstone, 2007, p. 189) of psychoanalytic, psychosocial thought and practice. Overall, the chapters in this book demonstrate the utility of a psychosocial approach to the world of emotion. Psychoanalytic ideas have been an important thread within psychosocial studies and yet as many chapters demonstrate, it is important that we are able to understand psychoanalytic ideas themselves as both products and shapers of the social and cultural world. The growth of ‘psychosocial’ thought in the last few decades is itself arguably symptomatic of important social shifts. It is possible to celebrate this move to a more emotionally intelligent culture, while it is also possible to view this as a more worrying trend that further signals the colonisation of the internal worlds of the individual. As noted in the opening section, this issue will be returned to in the conclusion.

Notes 1. Or almost to the core, in the case of some of the more classically psychoanalytically influenced authors. 2. There is some sign of change in this respect. For example, in 2007, a relatively informal group of people who felt they worked ‘psychosocially’, set up a network in the UK (see Hollway 2008), and Valerie Walkerdine (2008) has traced a brief history of psychosocial studies.

14 Emotion 3. But by no means all of it – see the debates represented in the December 2008 issue of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and within the Psychosocial Studies network. 4. The Tavistock Clinic is also an established ‘home’ of Kleinian psychoanalysis. 5. Perri 6 et al. (2007) note that such approaches ‘. . . propose that patterns of emotions change markedly between periods . . . [the] fundamental logic of “different times and places, different feelings” is consonant with . . . theory that holds that emotional structures have developed differently in different, geographically or socially separated societies’ (p. 12). 6. It has been the subject of major, recent debate within psychosocial studies; see Note 3 above.

References Andrews, M., Day Sclater, S., Squire, C. and Treacher, A. (eds) (2000) Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial Perspectives, London: Routledge. Armstrong, D. (2004) ‘Emotions in organisations: Disturbance or intelligence?’, in Huffington et al. (eds) Working Below the Surface: The Emotional Life of Contemporary Organisations, London: Karnac Books. Blackman, L. and Cromby, J. (2007) ‘Editorial: Affect and feeling’, Critical Psychology, 21, 5–22. Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character, London: Routledge. Brown, J. (2005) ‘The compelling nature of romantic love: A psychosocial perspective’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 10(1), 23–43. Brown, J. (2006a) ‘Reflexivity in the research process’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 9(3), 181–197. Brown, J. (2006b) A Psychosocial Exploration of Love and Intimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, J. and Price, H. (1999) ‘Teaching psychoanalysis: An impossible art?’, Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies, 1(1), 87–101. Butler, T. (2000) (ed.) Eastern Promise: Education and Renewal in London’s Docklands, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Caldwell, L. (ed.) (2007) Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition: Interpretation and Other Issues, London: Karnac Books. Campbell, C. (2005) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism 3rd Edition, York: Alcuin Academics. Castoriadis, C. (1998) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: MIT Press. Clarke, S. (2002) ‘Learning from experience: Psycho-social research methods in the social sciences’, Qualitative Research, 2(2), 173–194. Cooper, A. (2007) ‘Surface tensions: Emotion, conflict and the social containment of dangerous knowledge’, in Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire and A. Treacher (eds) Public Emotions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, A. and Lousada, J. (2005) Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling in Modern Welfare, London: Karnac Books. Craib, I. (1994) The Importance of Disappointment, London: Routledge. Day Sclater, S. (1999) Divorce: A Psychosocial Study, Aldershot: Ashgate. Eade, J. (ed.) (1997) Living the Global City, London: Routledge. Elias, N. (1939/1978) The Civilising Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, London: Routledge.

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Gadd, D. and Jefferson, T. (2007) Psychosocial Criminology: An Introduction, London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy, Oxford: Blackwell. Greco, M. and Stenner, P. (2008) Emotions: A Reader, London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1988) ‘Minimal selves’. In Identity: The Real Me, ICA Documents 6, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 44–46. Heidensohn, F. (1996) Women and Crime, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henderson, D. K. (1939) Psychopathic States, London: Chapman and Hall. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984/1998) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Hirschman, A. O. (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Hoggett, P. (1992) Partisans in an Uncertain World: The Psychoanalysis of Engagement, London: Free Association Books. Hollway, W. (2008) ‘Turning psychosocial: Towards a UK network’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 13(2), 199–204. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method, London: Sage. Jones, D. W. (2002) Myths, Madness and the Family: The Impact of Mental Illness on Families, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, D. W. (2004) ‘Shame and loss: Narrative and identity in families with a member suffering from mental illness’, The International Journal of Critical Psychology, 10, 69–93. Jones, D. W. (2008) Understanding Criminal Behaviour: A Psychosocial Approach to Criminality, Collumpton: Willan Press. Katz, J. (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil, New York: Basic Books. Kristeva, J. (1974) Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press. Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton Paperbacks. Lasch, C. (1980) ‘Life in the therapeutic state’, New York Review of Books, 27(10). Layton, L. (2007) ‘What psychoanalysis, culture and society mean to me’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 5(1), 146–157. Mills, C. W. (1959/1967) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mitchell, J. (2003) Mad Men and Medusas, London: Penguin. Nava, M., Blake, A., MacRury, I. and Richards, B. (eds) (1997) Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, London: Routledge. Perri 6, Radstone, S., Squire, C. and Treacher, A. (eds) (2007) Public Emotions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Price, H. S. (2000) ‘Being happy is what matters most’, Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies, 2(1). Price, H. S. (2006) ‘Jumping on shadows: Catching the unconscious in the classroom’, Journal of Social Work Practice, 20(2), 145–161. Radstone, S. (2007) ‘Theory and affect: Undivided worlds’, in Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire and A. Treacher (eds) Public Emotions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 181–201. Reddy, W. M. (2001) The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, B. (1989) Crises of the Self, London: Free Association Books.

16 Emotion Richards, B. and Brown, J. (2002) ‘The therapeutic culture hypothesis: A critical discussion’, in T. Johansson and O. Sernhede (eds) Lifestyle, Desire and Politics: Contemporary Identities, Gothenberg: Daidalos, pp. 97–114. Richards, B., MacRury, I. and Botterill, J. (2000) The Dynamics of Advertising, London: Routledge. Roseneil, S. (forthcoming) Sociability, Sexuality, Self, London: Routledge. Sennett, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man, New York: W.W. Norton. Smart, C. (1976) Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique, London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Urwin, C. (2009) Psychotherapy and Infancy: Models of Mental Development in Psychoanalytic Theories, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Volkan, V. (2004) Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror, Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone. Walkerdine, V. (2008) ‘Introduction: Contextualising debates about psychosocial studies’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 13, 341–345. Yates, C. (2001) ‘Teaching psychoanalytic studies: Towards a new culture of learning in higher education’, Psychoanalytic Studies, 3, 314, 333–347. Yates, C. (2007) Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, M. and Wilmott, P. (1957) Family and Kinship in East London, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Part I A Psychosocial Approach to Emotion

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2 The Missing Dimension: Emotions in the Social Sciences Michael Rustin

There can be no academic discipline or research programme in psychosocial studies that does not take account of the emotions, and their central place in individual and social life. Yet the social sciences – including, perhaps surprisingly, psychology – seem to have found difficulty in dealing with emotions, until the last three or four decades. This chapter explores the reasons for this, and the ways in which emotions are now being ‘brought back in’ to a more inclusive understanding of human affairs. I suggest fields for investigation and research which this new recognition of the emotions now makes possible, as a significant element of psychosocial studies. From the eighteenth century, the development of the social sciences as organised bodies of knowledge was associated with a commitment to a new and modern kind of society which would be governed principally by Reason. The emerging social sciences conceived themselves as agents of transformation which would help to bring about this new order.1 The proclaimed norm of rationality carried with it several implied antitheses – the Cartesian opposition of mind and body was one; the positivist opposition of reason and superstition, and sometimes religion, was another; and reason versus emotion was a third.2 The consequence of these definitional oppositions was that most of the social sciences found it difficult to incorporate the emotions into their disciplinary schemas. The deep changes in common emotional experience which accompanied the development of urban and industrial societies – for example, those associated with what recent social theorists have called ‘individualisation’ – were largely left to be explored and represented through the work of the arts and humanities, rather than the sciences. A split which we now take for granted, between ‘imaginative’ forms of expression such as the novel, drama, poetry, painting and music, and ‘scientific’ forms of investigation, such as psychology, economics, political science and sociology, became established. The discipline which one might have expected to be most concerned to incorporate the emotions within its sphere of understanding – academic psychology – was in fact the one which felt most threatened in its scientific status by the emotions. Its agenda 19

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was set for many decades by William James (1890/1981), who wrote that emotions were in essence aroused by and the effects of bodily states, rather than mental states with their own existence and affectivity (James, 1884). Emotions were thus assigned minimal importance as a field of psychological investigation, which mainly focused on the cognitive and supposedly rational functions of the mind. It remains the case that one is more likely to learn about states of feeling and their complexity through engagement with works of art, than from study of the social sciences. In the societies in which emotions were repressively subordinated to the rationalised purposes of economic accumulation, they were also largely disregarded as appropriate subjects for science, though Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was an exception (Darwin, 1872/1998). The full exploration of the emotions was rather left, in developing market and industrial societies, to the arts and humanities. In the novel – which could almost be said to have specialised since its emergence in the eighteenth century in the exploration of states of feeling – and in many other art forms, new subjectivities and their emotional textures were explored, providing many opportunities for emotional education. Psychoanalysis has always occupied an exceptional position across this division between the humanities and the sciences, incorporating in its methods aspects of both, and perhaps for this reason developing the most complex and elaborate theories of the emotions (Rustin, 2007, 2008). More recently, however, this split between reason and the emotions has come to be called in question, and in many human science disciplines work has been done to reintegrate the emotions into scientific understanding (Rorty, 1980). This interest has fed through into more practical social interventions, with the demand for recognition of ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman, 1996) as a capacity to be valued along with the more conventional notions of intelligence and its measures.

Recognising the significance of emotion Let us look at a number of fields of inquiry in which the significance of the emotions has in recent decades become recognised. In philosophy in Britain and America (the continental philosophical traditions are somewhat different) emotions had been marginalised by the logical positivists’ insistence that the only kinds of statements which could carry meaning were those which were either statements of fact, or statements of logical entailment (like those of mathematics). All other kinds of utterance had been deemed by the logical positivists to lie outside the sphere of rational argument – they were ‘meaningless’ in A.J. Ayer’s (1936) notorious expression.3 But the widespread rejection of that positivist position, from the 1950s onwards, and the recognition through the influence of L. Wittgenstein (1958), J.L. Austin (1962) and J.R. Searle (1969, 1983) in

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particular, that many different meanings – and not only factual descriptions and statements of logic – were communicated through language, opened the way to detailed exploration of the emotions. It was argued, for instance, by A. Kenny (1963) that emotional utterances, like others, are customarily structured according to shared rules and conventions, and are not merely random and disordered. For example, it came to be understood that fear is an emotion which is appropriate and rational in the context of perceived danger, but is unreasonable in its absence. Jealousy is understandable as an emotion aroused by rivalry over loved objects, but it may be judged as rationally proportional or disproportional to its occasion. This connects with the view that emotions are normally experienced in relation to specific objects of consciousness or thought. This is the philosophical idea of intentionality. Emotions have thus come to be seen by philosophers to be integral to the mind, and not merely as aberrant signs of its failure to function rationally, or as the effects of bodily impulses. Emotions, like beliefs, can be rational or irrational to different degrees, and it is likely that all our purposes (even a commitment to science) are accompanied and motivated by feelings. Two alternative theories – the Kantian and the utilitarian – had largely dominated the field of ethics for several decades in English philosophy. Each of these in different ways discounted the role of emotions in the characterisation of moral behaviour. The ethical theory of Kant insisted that moral acts must be motivated by the rational will, not by feelings. Utilitarian ethics saw emotions merely as aspects of an innate desire for pleasure and aversion to pain. Both of these positions came to be seen by some philosophers as undervaluing the complexity of psychological experience, and the centrality of emotions to our moral outlook. Recent developments in neuroscience have also led to a deeper understanding of the significance of emotions for the mind. Antonio Damasio (2005), in Descartes’ Error, criticised the rationalist model of the mind which had dominated psychological thinking for centuries. In studies of the mind and brain (in many cases following lesions in patients which had destroyed specific brain functions) Damasio identified distinct capacities for feeling, separate from cognition, showing that patients’ abnormality or disability, following brain injury, might lie not in the inability to understand or to remember something, but in the failure any longer to recognise its emotional significance. Joseph LeDoux (1998), in The Emotional Brain, argued that emotional responses are ‘hard-wired’ into the brain, as they are into the brains of many mammals, and are organised as distinct systems or repertoires (such as fear). With human beings, these systems can give rise to emotions of which we are consciously aware, although we can also be possessed by feelings which we do not recognise or understand. (In this respect LeDoux endorsed Freud’s view of the unconscious mind.)

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Emotions are powerful motivators and organisers of our behaviour, but like other states of mind they are potentially subject to rational evaluation in regard to their objects. Rather than splitting reason and emotion, LeDoux’s ideas bring them together. Consistent with some of LeDoux’s assertions about the similarities between the ‘hard-wired’ emotional systems of man and other mammals are the investigations by Jaak Panksepp (1998a) of the behavioural repertoires of both mammals and humans, which develop Darwin’s original insights (Darwin, op. cit.). His work identifies basic emotional systems, which he sees as ‘modules’ located in distinct regions of the physical brain, each giving rise to different emotions. The basic systems include seeking, rage, fear, panic, play, lust and care.4 He has argued, for example (Panksepp, 1998b), that the epidemic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) which has apparently assailed American – and to a growing extent, British – children in recent years may be partially understood as a consequence of the deprivation of the faculties devoted to play – the ‘play system’ – which is needed for the development of the young of humans and other mammalian species. In another development, the scientific observation of mothers and babies, by developmental psychologists such as D. Stern (1985), C. Trevarthen (1998) and J. Bowlby (1988), has identified the central importance of emotions in the earliest relationships. Understanding the needs of babies requires understanding their emotional states as well as their physical needs. It has been shown that even the full development of the infant’s brain in the first two years of life depends on the benign emotional ambience surrounding the infant. As has been said, ‘love makes the brain grow’ (Gerhardt, 2004). John Bowlby (1969/1973/1980) and his successors developed an influential typology of different forms of attachment between infant and caregivers, which were the consequence of the consistency and emotional responsiveness of care available to infants. These researches have shown that emotions are fundamental in the formation of the mind, as part of our innate motivational system. Reason is not a faculty separate from, or higher than, emotion, but is the reflective capacity human beings have to regulate and elaborate their emotions in the light of their purposes.

The place of the emotions in the social sciences In recent decades, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have also given fresh attention to the emotions. There are many reasons for this, including the critique of an earlier ‘positivist’ orthodoxy in the social sciences, which had denied or minimised the differences between human beings and non-human objects of scientific study. There has been recognition that human societies are shaped through language and culture, and cannot be adequately understood only by reference to ‘hard facts’ such as

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those of demography, or material conditions. It became easier to see the relevance of emotional states to the understanding of societies once a more holistic, interpretative and ‘culturalist’ method of study was adopted, and where appropriate qualitative research methods were developed. The recognition that emotions are shaped by rules and conventions – that they possess their own rationality – has an affinity with the idea that emotions were liable to be ‘socially constructed’, as the philosopher of science Rom Harré (1986) has put it, and as sociologists and anthropologists had long implicitly recognised. But once contemporary sociologists turned their attention to the sociology of emotions, they could find important precedents for their work in several sociological classics.5 For example, Max Weber’s great work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), describes a configuration of emotions – a disciplining of the self, and an abstention from pleasures – which was inculcated by Puritanism. Weber argued that what we might call, using Raymond Williams’s useful concept, this ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1961, pp. 48–71) was favourable to the development of capitalism. E. Durkheim (1961), in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, described the functions of rituals in evoking emotions, and by this means inculcating shared norms in communities.6 Several of Simmel’s great sociological essays describe the formation of distinct configurations of emotion through types of social relationship. For example, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (Simmel, 1902/1950) describes the ‘blasé attitude’ – what we might nowadays call ‘coolness’ – as a response to the multiple fleeting exchanges of life in cities. The feeling of obligation – welcome or unwelcome – aroused in most people by the experience of receiving a gift, explained for Simmel (1902/1950) how gift-exchange contributed to the formation of enduring social ties. Although emotions were rarely discussed as such by these classical sociologists (probably because emotions were felt to be the attributes of individuals, and therefore to lie outside the field of sociology), their work was in fact developing a sociology of emotions by another name. Anthropologists had also taken note of the differences between the emotional climates of the societies they studied, and ‘modern’ societies. B. Malinowski’s perception of the lack of sexual inhibition of the Trobriand Islanders, compared with the (then) repressive sexual norms of the West, had a huge impact on his readers early in the last century (Malinowski, 1927/2001). But once again, emotions were neither Malinowski’s nor his contemporary anthropologists’ explicit topic of investigation. In anthropology, as in sociology, it needed a change in the understanding of the proper objects and methods of investigation before emotions could be allowed their full place as a topic for study. Clifford Geertz’s seminal book, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), which established his claim for the centrality of culture to anthropological study, also developed the argument that emotions were indeed variables and not constants in human societies,

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and were constructed and regulated by the cultures in which they were embedded. There had been some major exceptions to the general neglect of emotions in the social and historical sciences. Some sociologists and historians had sought to describe and theorise the emotional concomitants of largescale transitions between ‘pre-modern’ and modern forms of society. One such classic is Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924/1955) which described the exceptionally violent and turbulent emotional universe of late medieval society, with its extreme contrasts in the publicly enacted sentiments of cruelty and pity.7 A second case is Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, published in German in 1939 but in English only in 1978. Elias’s thesis was that a central aspect of the ‘civilising process’ was the inhibition of emotions that in earlier forms of society were more violently expressed. Part 2 of Elias’s book describes the ‘history of manners’, that is, the regulation of behaviours (eating, the natural functions, blowing one’s nose, spitting, behaviour in the bedroom, physical aggression), as a feudal warrior nobility with its relatively uninhibited customs found its power in France displaced by an absolutist court aristocracy, whose elaborated and repressive norms of etiquette then spread to bourgeois social strata. Elias’s book was in effect, as Zygmunt Bauman (1979) pointed out soon after its English publication, the development as a historical thesis of the psychoanalytical theory of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929) which had argued that civilisation depended for its social order on the regulation of desires by accepted moral rules, and on their ‘sublimation’ into the higher symbolic expressions of the arts and sciences. Elias drew for his account on a body of humanist writings of the period, about ‘how to behave’, which suggests the good use that might be made today by contemporary researchers of the many manuals in print and on television which advise people how they should conduct themselves. A third pioneering text which identified a major change in the historical construction of emotions was Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977). Hirschman, an economist of unusual social imagination, was interested in the transition to market societies that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. He noted that whereas the guiding principles, and dominant emotional temper, of pre-market societies were organised around the passions evoked by war and honour, market societies took a negative view of these emotions, advancing instead the cooler idea of rational ‘interests’ as the best principles for organising social life. These pioneering accounts of the historical structuring of emotions focused on the transition to a ‘modern’ society which sought to bring wild and unruly passions under the control of reason. The idea of ‘rationalisation’ – which included the emergence of norms regulating emotional expression and the emergence of an impersonal and law-governed social order – was a primary theme of sociological theory from its classical beginnings to

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the work of Talcott Parsons and the Functionalist School. One of the key contributions of the human sciences to the construction of modern society, in Foucault’s analysis of fields such as psychiatry (1967) and criminal justice (1991), is a consequence of their naming, regulating and policing the emotions of everyday life. In societies in which emotions were repressively subordinated to the rationalised purposes of economic accumulation, they were also largely disregarded as proper subjects for social science. Even when they were included in social scientific understanding in some form (e.g., as the wants presupposed by economists, or the inhibition of pleasures required by the sociological theory of the Protestant ethic) this tended to be only by implication. Economists, political scientists and psychologists all preferred to work with a rational-interest model of human nature, and sociologists feared that to discuss emotions would seem like a lapse into psychology, at a time when sociology’s academic identity was precarious. But now we find emotions are being ‘brought back in’ to the social sciences themselves, as a legitimate topic for study. A number of texts (Solomon, 1976/1993; Reddy, 2001; Barbalet, 2002; Walton, 2004; Turner and Stets, 2005; Smart, 2007) have criticised the splitting off of emotion from sociological and historical understanding. T. Dixon (2003) has drawn attention to the continuing interest in the emotions by religiously inspired writers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in contrast to the academic psychologists who had avoided the subject. Dixon’s discussion of the disparagement of the passions in the writings of St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas describes one of the key religious foundations of the split between reason and passion in Western culture. This new interest in emotions in the social sciences must be considered a psychosocial phenomenon in its own right. It is the concomitant of a major societal transition, just as was the inhibition and repression of feelings explored by Huizinga, Elias and Hirschman, in relation to an earlier period of change. The essence of the matter is that whereas the development of ‘industrial society’ required as one of its conditions of existence the inhibition and repression of emotion, the ‘consumer society’ of recent decades has had as one of its developmental mainsprings the release of inhibitions, and an efflorescence of emotionality. One social theorist who presciently grasped the significance of this transformation was Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse (1955) gave a historical framing to the account of social repression set out as a more general theory by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929), developing links between Freudian ideas and the later Marxist thought of the Frankfurt School. He made connections between instinctual repression and the social repression inherent in industrialisation, with its imposition of strict labour discipline and material sacrifice. Corroborative evidence for his thesis was put forward in Soviet Marxism (Marcuse, 1956) which described an unexpected similarity between the repressive ethos of the Soviet economy, still then in its phase of forced

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capital accumulation, intensive labour discipline and material scarcity, and an earlier pre-mass consumption phase of Western capitalism. We have more recently seen Russia, now embracing the market economy, shifting towards an extreme ethos of consumption and self-gratification, at least among those of its people who have incomes to spend. But whereas Marcuse in his earlier work saw the possibility of emergence of a non-repressive civilisation, dominated by Eros – love and the life instinct – he later (Marcuse, 1964) came to see the deregulation of previously repressed instinctual desires not as the prelude to a genuinely free and self-expressive society, but instead as the prerequisite of a shift to a capitalist economy dominated by expanded consumption. The deliberate stimulation of appetites of all kinds became the focus of new industries – most specifically, advertising, but more generically of mass media such as cinema and television, which displayed the multiple objects of desire which the new consumer industries made widely available. Although Marcuse became something of a prophet of a new sexual and cultural freedom in the 1960s and 1970s, he did not see the lifting of overt repressive constraints as a benign process. He coined the term ‘repressive desublimation’ to describe a situation in which desires had become released from restraint only to become attached to objects of consumer fantasy, rather than as the authentic life of human relationships and meaningful work that he had hoped for as a utopian Marxist. Changes in the dominant modes of social regulation and control are held to accompany this ‘disinhibition’ of emotional experience. Nikolas Rose’s influential Foucauldian critique of the construction and regulation of subjectivity (Rose, 1989) and Barry Richards’s theory of emotionalisation, and the accompanying development of a therapeutic culture, are two of several accounts which capture these changes (Richards, 2007). Reflection on psychosocial phenomena tends to be stimulated by significant changes and contrasts. It is when we see that emotions take different forms in different contexts that we become aware that emotions are indeed ‘socially constructed’. When there are strong disjunctions in our experience, between one ‘emotional regime’ and another, emotions cease to be part of the invisible and taken-for-granted background, and become objects for reflection and choice.8 It then becomes more possible to incorporate emotional experience into descriptions of social processes. The earlier split between the rich descriptive explorations of emotional states in imaginative works of art and the thin abstractions of social scientific discourse has thus been diminished. Novelists, dramatists or film-makers can be seen to provide understandings of the emotional dimensions of structured social relationships, in explorations which proceed from imagined particular instances, which complement the more theoretical and generalising accounts of social scientists.9 The development of biographical, autobiographical, ethnographic and narrative forms of inquiry in psychosocial studies are areas of convergence between the approaches of the humanities and the social sciences, which

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describe the textures of subjective and inter-subjective experience which one would formerly have looked for in imaginative fiction.

Three scales of investigation of the psychosocial reality of the emotions There are three distinct levels at which the social and historical construction of emotions can be explored, each of them providing a rich field for investigation. These levels are: ‘regimes of emotion’ at the level of a larger society, ‘regimes of emotion’ at the level of an organisation or institution and emotional configurations as these are visible in modes of interpersonal interaction. One can think of this as macro, meso and micro levels of study. Several examples of the first of these levels have already been given, in the writings of Huizinga, Elias, Hirschman and Marcuse. A more recent historical example is William Reddy’s (2001) research on French society before and after the French Revolution of 1789. Reddy has developed the invaluable concept of ‘regimes of emotion’, to describe the ways in which the expression of particular constellations of emotion are regulated. He describes the emotional cultures of ‘sentimentalism’, which he argues culminated in the French Revolution and its Jacobin Republic, which was built on an overriding belief in the importance of emotional authenticity, of which Rousseau was a persuasive advocate. Reddy contrasts the disillusioned response to this collectist state of mind after the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, when in reaction it was felt that emotions needed to be subordinated to the (more male-driven) demands of reason and honour. This study makes use of different kinds of historical documents, including records of court cases, to identify and contrast different discourses of emotion and the claims that were made for them, indicating the kinds of grounded research that can be done to illuminate the inherently elusive phenomena of feelings. In the investigation of emotional regimes at the level of the organisation or institution, one valuable source of insights has been the application of psychoanalytical ideas. (As will have been seen from the discussions of Elias’s and Marcuse’s work, psychoanalysis has been a crucial implicit presence in many of the most important investigations of the emotions. This developed from Freud’s interest in the unconscious projective processes which link individual psychic experience with group life.10 ) Some researchers have built into their concept of the organisation as a social system the dimension of ‘sentient culture’, making a link between the specific goals of institutions and the predominant emotions which they engender in their members.11 It has been suggested that institutions may have characteristically different ‘primary tasks’, which give rise to distinct kinds of ‘normal anxiety’.12 For example, military organisations have to manage and organise hostility and fear, and enable these to be deployed as motivations in ways which achieve effectiveness in dealing with enemies, while limiting the damage they can cause to

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their own side or to bystanders. In her classic paper about hospital nursing, Isabel Menzies Lyth (1959) drew attention to the presence of unconscious anxieties brought about by bodily intimacy and the proximity of disease and death, and the way in which the organisational routines of hospitals could be seen as defences against these. Recognition that different, but related, anxieties are evoked by the institutional care of infants and young children, because of their distress at separation from parents and primary care-givers, has led to parallel insights into the potentially dysfunctional defences which day nurseries may set up (Menzies Lyth, 1989). Custodial institutions such as prisons cope with different primary emotions, including the fear of the prisoners, and the punitive feelings towards offenders which society expects prison staff to implement on its behalf. The problem is how to contain these states of feeling in ways that enable prisons to remain safe environments in which rehabilitation remains an active goal. Because some social scientists have understood institutions as holistic systems in which sentient culture is a significant element, the social study of emotions has been usefully pursued at this organisational level. The concepts of a primary emotional field, or of primary anxieties, evoked by the distinctive task of an organisation provide a starting-point for research into many varieties of institution. The third level of investigation is the emotional dimensions of interpersonal interactions. The work of Arlie Russell Hochschild, and her seminal concept of emotional labour, is central to this. In The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) showed how works in two occupations, those of air stewardesses, and debt collectors, were structured in accordance with distinct emotional codes, in which the regulation and public projection of appropriate feelings (unfailing cheerfulness and compliance to customer wishes on the part of the cabin crew, suppression of undue sympathy for misfortune by the debt collectors) were defining features of these occupations. Hochschild’s insights, which drew on Marxist conceptions of an exploitative labour process, on a feminist sympathy for the emotional impositions placed on mainly female workers, and on a psychodynamic concept of repression, have been influential in defining emotional labour as a fruitful field of study (Smith, 1992). Thomas Scheff’s work (1997), in which the reciprocal experience of emotions of shame is a dynamic and often destructive element in social interactions, explores another field of emotion. (One of Scheff’s examples is drawn from the disastrous interactions which led to the outbreak of the First World War.) Just as one can characterise different kinds of institutions in terms of the dominant anxiety which they have to contain, and the ‘regime of emotion’ through which this is contained, so one can characterise different patterns of interaction (e.g., between policemen and suspected lawbreakers on the street, social security clerks and claimants, job interviewers and interviewees, auditioners and the auditioned) in terms of the particular emotional tasks which participants have routinely to negotiate.

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Although Erving Goffman described his work as the study of interaction rituals and strategies, rather than as the study of emotions, his work is one of the richest sources of insight into the regulation of emotions in different contexts. His early essay, ‘On Cooling the Mark Out’ (Goffman, 1952), describes a technique of emotional management incorporated into the perpetration of confidence tricks, which require that the victim, or ‘mark’, be duplicitously consoled into accepting his fate.13 One reason for describing the different levels at which the construction and regulation of emotions can be investigated is to indicate research agendas which students of psychosocial studies can themselves pursue, both through reading and reflection, and in field research, for example, as observers of social interactions or of organisational behaviour.

The emotional regulation and disturbance of social order A ‘regime of emotion’ is essentially a set of rules or conventions which lays down what feelings are allowed to be expressed, by whom, in what places and at what times. Emotions are deemed to be socially acceptable when they are expressed in approved forms (with regard to differences of rank, gender or age, for example), and to be unacceptable when they breach such boundaries. It is common for conformity with an emotional regime to be equated with the possession of reason, and non-conformity with a deficit of reason. ‘Emotions’ become invisible, when their expression is fully regulated by approved codes. ‘Emotionality’ may then appear as a deficit of reason or reasonableness. Thus in different times and places, women, children, members of ‘other’ ethnic groups or the ‘uneducated’ have been deemed to be dominated by their emotions, while the dominant group has perceived itself to be ruled by reason. The emotions which do suffuse the dominant group (which may for example include those of self-regard or contempt for others) may be invisible to it. ‘We think, they feel’, is how the situation of superiority may be defined. Resistance by a subordinate group to a hierarchy often involves disputes about what feelings are allowed expression, and what are not. Those in authority may exercise control by disparaging the untutored feelings of those who have not learned the established codes – who have not learned how to behave. Those who challenge a regime of emotion may assert the significance of previously unrecognised or despised modes of feeling. Romanticism and its idea of a human nature uncorrupted by decadent social forms and conventions was one such challenge to dominant norms of decorum in the late eighteenth century. The rejection of respectable bourgeois values by a bohemian sub-culture in the late nineteenth century is another example of such a challenge. In contemporary society, conflicts over gender, class, generation and ethnicity have all been fought, in part, as arguments about which kinds of

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emotional expression are accepted or disparaged. One major contribution to the ‘emotionalisation’ of contemporary culture has come from the influence of feminism, in reclaiming the significance of intimate emotional experience. The dominant insistence in public discourse on modes of rationality, impersonality and objectivity was redefined by feminist critics as an exercise of patriarchal power, whose effect was to marginalise or confine to the domestic sphere those different understandings which were rooted in relational capacities. These were held to be capacities particularly likely to be possessed by women because of their responsibilities for caring for others throughout the life-cycle. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982/1993) set out this view as a critique of a dominant rationalist discourse and method in the human sciences. The maxim ‘the personal is the political’ was a resonant assertion of the validity of a mode of thinking which was more inclusive of emotional experience. The emergence of an exuberant youth culture in the 1960s was similarly characterised by challenges to emotional (and sexual) codes. Previously, young people had been expected to move from a state of dependent childhood and apprenticeship to adult life, to responsible employment, marriage and parenthood, with a very small area of freedom in between. In the new definition of adolescence as a life-stage, a space for free self-expression was constructed, for individuals and groups, in interaction between young people and emerging commercial markets in fashion, music and entertainment. There were many sub-cultures within this enlarged life-space, but common to most of them were Dionysian celebrations of free emotional and sexual expression. Some of the parental generation responded initially with some hostility to this challenge to their own ‘regime of emotion’ which had demanded of them an inhibition of the senses and sacrifices of pleasure that were seemingly mocked by this new hedonism. The challenge to authority implied in these new kinds of expression, and the resistance it provoked, sometimes became a focus of emotional exchange between generations. At one point, in the turbulent events of 1968, this new emotional climate gave rise to an alternative hedonistic vision of society, though in the decades since then the spirit of consumer capitalism has been able largely to absorb these liberated desires for pleasure into its own cultural economy. Another sphere in which emotional codes are often set in conflict with one another is that of ethnicity and race. It is common for a dominant ethnic group to define its own ‘regime of emotion’, that is to say its own rules for regulating acceptable emotional expression, as the ‘civilised’ one, and to define subordinate groups as pervaded by unregulated and primitive feelings. Enslaved or subordinated groups may be defined as childlike or infantile in their emotionality, in contrast to the supposedly adult and rational character of their masters. These definitions then become legitimating of authority and subordination, since the members of the subordinate group are deemed to lack the power of reason which would justify their recognition as equals.

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The ‘civilising mission’ of empires has been legitimated by assumptions like this. Relationships of class can have a comparable emotional dynamic. The self-regulation and decorum of elite groups may be contrasted with the more spontaneous and ‘natural’ folkways of social inferiors. Members of lower social groups may be discomfited and shamed at their inability to demonstrate competence in dominant codes – in ways of speaking, manners and appropriate management of bodily posture – and made to feel socially incapable as a consequence. Hyper-adaptation to dominant codes and regimes of feeling is one possible response to this sense of shame (the depiction of the deferential structure of feeling of domestic servants in many novels and films about the British aristocracy has often represented such ritualised conformity). Resistance and rebellion is another response, sometimes strengthened by the explicit adoption of an alternative code of feelings (insistence on relations between equals, on avoidance of visible differences or on ‘plain’ emotional expression), such as have often emerged in revolutionary moments. Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 1990) developed the concept of ‘habitus’ to describe the shared rules of behaviour and implicit modes of thinking by which social groups were constituted without these norms necessarily being explicit or accessible to reflection. Absence of conscious awareness reinforces the power of a status order, since it is only when differences become objects for reflection that resistance and conflict become a possibility. We can enlarge Bourdieu’s concept of habitus by including in it a necessary dimension of sanctioned (and by contrast unsanctioned or prohibited) emotional expression. Another research agenda thus appears, as the possible investigation of the rules of emotion which are implicit in different forms of domination, and which become contested when social resistance occurs.

Conclusion I have sought to show in this chapter that the emotions, which formerly lay outside the sphere of social scientific investigation – where the domain of reason was deemed to end – have in recent decades been brought firmly back into its domain. Philosophers have shown that in so far as human beings are rational, they normally bring their feelings within the orbit of their thoughts. Neuroscientists have shown that emotions are central to the workings of brain and mind. Developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts have shown the changing nature and role of emotional interactions in the processes of early human development, and what can happen when these interactions go awry. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have shown that emotions are invariably organised in distinct social configurations, playing an essential part in shaping different ways of life for societies, institutions and individuals in patterned interactions with one another.

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The study of the emotions makes it possible to resolve long-standing splits between the individual and society, and between the social and psychological. The emotions are thus a constitutive topic of investigation for the discipline of psychosocial studies.

Notes 1. Post-modern theorists of this transition to modernity, such as Zigmunt Bauman (1987, 1989), have written highly critically of the claims and consequences of this emancipatory programme for the social sciences, in contrast to the more positive view taken by theorists more sympathetic to the benign effects of the scientific outlook, such as Ernest Gellner (1988). 2. Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1988) explains the emergence of a rationalist definition of modernity as a response to the social crisis of the seventeenth century, when Europe was torn apart by the Thirty Years War. He contrasts the emergent Cartesian regime of abstract Reason with the more pluralist and humane modernity of the preceding age of Shakespeare and Montaigne. 3. The term ‘emotive’ came to be used within this philosophical climate to refer rather disparagingly to utterances – such as ethical or aesthetic judgements – that were held to have no reference other than to the feelings of the author. 4. A succinct account of this model is given in Panksepp (2002). 5. Shilling (2002) discusses this tradition. 6. Perri 6 (2002, 2007) has shown that Durkheim’s theory of ritual, and its development by Mary Douglas, provides a powerful framework for the classification of types of emotion and their social function. 7. Huizinga’s description of the emotional temper of medieval society seems like the social embodiment of the paranoid-schizoid state of mind theorised by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, with its extreme and passionate splits between the evil and the idealised. 8. In this situation, self-reflection has become normative, part of the definition of modern identity, and of ‘modernity’ itself (Giddens, 1991). 9. One such work is Candida Yates’s (2007) exploration of changing representations of masculinity in contemporary cinema. 10. Freud (1921), and Bion (1961) after him, noted the specific emotional valencies of major social institutions such as the church and the army. 11. Flam (2002) has a good review of this literature. 12. Obholzer and Roberts (1994) discuss the specific anxieties evoked by different kinds of human service organisation. 13. See the film The Sting (1973) for a representation of the interaction process characterised in Goffman’s essay.

References Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ayer, A. J. (1936) Language Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz). Barbalet, J. (ed.) (2002) Emotions and Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell). Bauman, Z. (1979) ‘The phenomenon of Norbert Elias’, Sociology, 13(1), 117–125. Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

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Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bion, W.R. (1961) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Tavistock Publications). Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bowlby, J. (1969/1973/1980) Attachment, Separation and Loss, Vols. 1, 2, 3. (London: Pimlico edn, 1998). Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base (London: Routledge). Damasio, A. (2005) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Penguin Books). Darwin, C. (1872/1998) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Harper Collins). Dixon, T. (2003) From Passions to Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Durkheim, E. (1961) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Collier Books). Elias, N. (1939) The Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell). Flam, H. (2002) ‘Corporate emotions and emotions in corporations’, in Emotions and Sociology, ed. J. Barbalet, pp. 90–112 (Oxford: Blackwell). Foucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock Publications). Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press). Freud, S. (1929) Civilisation and Its Discontents (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press). Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Gellner, E. (1988) Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (London: Collins Harvill). Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why Love Matters; How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (London: Brunner-Routledge). Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gilligan, C. (1982/1993) In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Goffman, E. (1952) ‘On cooling the mark out: Some aspects of adaptation to failure’, Psychiatry: Journal of the Study of Interpersonal Relations, 15(4), 451–463. Goleman, D. (1996) Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury). Harré, R. (ed.) (1986) The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell). Hirschman, A. O. (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Hochschild, A. R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Huizinga, J. (1924/1955) The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). James, W. (1884) ‘What is an emotion?’, Mind, 9, 188–205. James, W. (1890/1981) The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Kenny, A. (1963) Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

34 A Psychosocial Approach to Emotion LeDoux, J. (1998) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Malinowski, B. (1927/2001) Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London: Routledge). Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and Civilisation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Marcuse, H. (1956) Soviet Marxism (New York: Columbia University Press). Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Menzies Lyth, I. (1955/1988) ‘The functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’, in Human Relations (1959), reprinted in I. Menzies Lyth, Containing Anxieties in Institutions: Selected Essays, pp. 46–50 (London: Free Association Books). Menzies Lyth, I. (1989) ‘Day care of children under five: An action research study’, The Dynamics of the Social: Selected Essays (London: Free Association Books). Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V. (eds) (1994) The Unconscious at Work (London: Routledge). Panksepp, J. (1998a) Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Panksepp, J. (1998b) ‘Attention deficit disorders, psychostimulants and intolerance of childhood playfulness: A tragedy in the making?’ Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, 7, 91–98. Panksepp, J. (2002) ‘On the animalian values of the human spirit: The foundational role of affect in psychotherapy and the evolution of consciousness’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 5(3), 225–246. Perri 6 (2002) ‘What is there to feel? A neo-Durkheimian theory of the emotions’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 5(3), 263–290. Perri 6 (2007) ‘Rituals elicit emotions to define and shape public life: A neoDurkheimian Theory’, in Public Emotions, ed. Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire and A. Treacher, pp. 37–61 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Reddy, W. M. (2001) The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Rorty, A. (1980) Explaining Emotions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Rose, N. (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books). Rustin, M. J. (2007) ‘Private solutions to public problems? Psychoanalysis and the emotions’ in Public Emotions, ed. Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire and A. Treacher, pp. 156–178 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Rustin, M. J. (2008) ‘What does psychoanalysis contribute to our understanding of failures of connectedness?’ in Attachment: Sociology and Social Worlds, ed. P. Redman, pp. 143–174 (Manchester: Manchester University Press/Open University). Scheff, T. J. (1997) Emotions, The Social Bond, and Human Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Searle, J. R. (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shilling, C. (2002) ‘Two traditions in the sociology of emotions’, in Emotions and Sociology, ed. J. Barbalet, pp. 10–32 (Oxford: Blackwell). Simmel, G. (1902/1950) ‘The metropolis and mental life’, reprinted in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K.H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press), pp. 409–426. Simmel, G. (1908/1950) ‘Faithfulness and gratitude’, reprinted in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K.H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press), pp. 379–395.

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Smart, C. (2007) Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press). Smith, P. (1992) The Emotional Labour of Nursing: How Nurses Care (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Solomon, R. (1976/1993) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett). Stern, D. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books). Toulmin, S. (1988) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Trevarthen, C. (1998) Children with Autism: Diagnosis and Intervention to Meet their Needs, 2nd edn (London: Jessica Kingsley). Turner, J. H. and Stets, J. E. (2005) The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Walton, S. (2004) A Natural History of Emotions (New York: Grove Press). Weber, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin). Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus). Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell). Yates, C. (2007) Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

3 Representation, Affect and the Theory of the Subject Anthony Elliott

Introduction In this chapter, I offer a psychosocial approach to emotion with a critical examination of Lacanian-inspired work. I see the complex configurations of both representation and affect as having been systematically downgraded which, in turn, has had major consequences for psychosocial theories of the relations between self and society in the social sciences. I discuss some recent attempts in European psychoanalysis to recover the notions of representation and affect, in particular the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Julia Kristeva, and argue the case for reconstructing a psychosocial account of the desiring subject in which both representation and affect are accorded due recognition. I argue that this post-Lacanian tradition of thought is vital to the further development of a psychosocial theory of the human subject. While desire has been much discussed by Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists in relation to the constitution of the human subject within the framework of structural linguistics, the relationship between representation, affect and subjectivity has received much less attention. The main exception is Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987) which located the psychical and social-historical fabrication of the subject in the representational flux and affective swirl of the primordial unconscious as uncovered by Freud. Paradoxically, when considering the dominance of Lacanianism within the academy, Freud had employed a variety of terms in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to describe the psyche as the productive core of representational processes relating to the self, others and wider world. Castoriadis sought to develop Freud’s radical insights, though for many years his work was neglected or negatively assessed in social theory, owing to the dominance of Lacan. In the last 10 or so years, however, Lacan’s own stockmarket fortunes in social theory have plummeted and the time seems ripe for a reconsideration of the topic. In this discussion, I want to consider the differentiation of the psychoanalytic notions of representation and affect in the constitution of the human 36

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subject. I begin, in the first half of the chapter, by examining Freud’s theory of the unconscious – paying special attention to his reflections on what he termed ‘considerations of representability’. In the second section of the chapter, after noting the theoretical dead-ends of Lacan’s linguistic reformulation of Freud, I turn to consider recent developments in European psychoanalysis on the themes of representation and affect in the drafting of subjectivity. I do so by briefly introducing and situating the psychoanalytic writings of Castoriadis and Kristeva.

On Freud: Unconscious representations, drives and affects The discovery of the mode of unconscious psychic processes lies at the centre of Freud’s most profound contribution to the analysis of human subjectivity. The mode of the unconscious, Freud wrote, is unaware of contradiction, time or closure. Indeed, it is blissfully and remorselessly untroubled by the demands of reality. ‘The unconscious,’ as Freud (1900: 600) remarks, ‘is unable to do anything but wish’. In his celebrated essay, ‘The Unconscious,’ written in 1915 (Freud, 1915), Freud begins an explanatory account of the unconscious by referring to those subjective or phenomenological experiences of psychic life that elude conscious intention and control. In outlining this ‘justification for the concept of the unconscious’, Freud points to the large number of gaps in the field of consciousness, to the way the mind often resonates with ideas and thoughts that come from a place unknown. Referring to those contents that are not present in immediate consciousness, this is Freud’s descriptive sense of the concept: the unconscious as adjective. The movement from a description of psychic acts that are only latent, or temporarily unconscious, to a systematic use of ‘the unconscious’ occurs when he considers clinical phenomena such as the symptoms of hysteria, neurotic disturbances and the transference – these being mental activities in which ‘strong unconscious ideas’ exert a determining influence. From these considerations, Freud divides his first topography of the psyche into the unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The preconscious realm, from a descriptive point of view, is actually unconscious; yet it is radically distinct from Freud’s conception of the unconscious since its contents are not repressed. Like the more common-sense understanding of something unconscious, the preconscious system is a kind of vast storehouse of memories, any of which may be recalled at will. By contrast, unconscious thoughts for Freud are distinguished since they are ‘cut off’ or are ‘buried’ from consciousness. The most important (though often neglected) feature of Freud’s topography, then, is that the unconscious is constructed not as ‘another’ consciousness but as a separate psychical system with its own distinct processes and mechanisms. That is to say, Freud’s account of the unconscious posits representations that are prevented access to consciousness by forces that block their reception. The unconscious, Freud remarks, cannot be known directly.

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It is only discernible through its effects – through the distortions it inflicts on consciousness. The unconscious, for Freud, thus produces a representation that, in turn, encounters the resistance of consciousness (the ego’s defence mechanisms) when our wishes are registered as being too painful or incompatible with the demands of external reality. Charged with the memory of unpleasurable feeling – the result of our ‘premature’ insertion into the symbolic order – the human subject seeks to bar such associations from entering consciousness. ‘The repressed,’ as Freud (1920: 15) remarks, ‘is the prototype of the unconscious’. Here he distinguishes between two types of repression. The first is ‘primal repression,’ which operates prior to any rejection of unacceptable thoughts or ideas. Secondly, this primary repressed material forms an unconscious nucleus which acts as a force of attraction to further connected associations and representations. This is what Freud terms ‘repression proper,’ or ‘after-pressure,’ in which new representations become linked with, and organised around, the originally repressed material. That is, materials currently available to consciousness will undergo repression because they trigger associations in the repressed unconscious. This second phase of repression is particularly important, as it suggests that the unconscious is not ‘static’ but is rather highly ‘dynamic’. As an elusive and unlocatable force, unconscious thoughts are said to develop at an acutely menacing pace, motivating behaviour and social activity in largely overdetermined ways. Repression, then, is the foundation of the theory of the unconscious. Yet while all repressed material is unconscious, unconscious processes are not coterminous with that which is repressed. The function of repression certainly consists in cutting off thoughts and feelings from consciousness, but it does not bar them from their psychical representatives. In this connection, the primary unconscious is of particular significance. As indicated above, primal repression in Freud’s theory is the constitutive bonding of a drive to a psychical representation, the point of fixation being established in the individual’s prehistory. The unconscious in this sense can be said to exist as a condition of subjectivity; it is the basis from which consciousness emerges. Let us look at these points concerning the primary unconscious in a little more detail. It is in phantasy and its related imaginary formations that Freud finds the essential ‘mechanisms’ which constitute the primary unconscious. The ‘royal road’ to observing these mechanisms is dreams, originally analysed by Freud in his magisterial book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Dreams have a privileged place in Freud’s corpus as they offer a particularly rich glimpse of the meaningful symbolic productions of the unconscious. According to Freud, one can discern in dreams the dynamics of desire since specific unconscious thoughts will search for a fulfillment they have been unable to attain in waking life. Attaching to some aspect of the silt of our daily experience and social activity, the unconscious will bring its own

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distinct modes of functioning to bear upon certain (pre)conscious thoughts, in order to achieve imaginary satisfaction. This imaginary fulfillment attained in dreams arises not from some chance play of psychical life, but from a specifically elaborated relation between unconscious drives and representation. The nature of this relation, Freud comments, is governed by a force that is ‘indestructible’ – the earliest wishes and fixations arising from our childhood. As Freud (1900: 160) formulates this expression of wishes realised in the unconscious: ‘A dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish’. This entwinement of force and meaning, to paraphrase Freud, necessitates a strategy of analysis that is free from the common-sense assumptions of day-to-day life. The essence of the unconscious consists in the ‘dream-work,’ which he notes (1900: 507), ‘is completely different [from waking thought] qualitatively and for that reason not immediately comparable with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form’. Freud designates this work of transformation as a distortion, a violence done to conscious meaning. What is peculiar to the unconscious as a psychical system is that it violently deforms, disfigures or disguises meaning into something unrecognisable. Distortion, then, is a key force through which the unconscious transforms and produces psychical representation. Crucial to this distorting force are four key unconscious mechanisms: condensation [Verdichtung], displacement [Verschiebung], considerations of representation [Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeit] and secondary revision [Sekundare Bearbeitung]. It is through these mechanisms that the fluid pressures of the primary processes search for the fulfillment of unconscious desire, sometimes with meaning being compressed or reduced into a single thought, and sometimes dislocated onto what appears to be an unimportant or trivial thought. These unconscious techniques of displacing and condensing, Freud argues, indicate the existence of an ‘overdetermination’ of some thoughts and feelings by others. The unconscious elements of our subjective life are thus inseparable from certain ‘compromise formations’ – a set of overdeterminations which licenses idiosyncratic ways of relating to the self, to others and to society. The production of these overdetermined forms, however, crucially depends upon what Freud describes as the ‘considerations of representation’. It is here that the profoundly imaginary dimensions of the unconscious are most emphasised by Freud. There is no doubt that for Freud the transformative work of the unconscious – distortion, condensation and displacement – can only take place through a delegation of the drive through representation [Vorstellungsreprasentanz des Triebes]. What this means, essentially, is that in order to attain psychical expression, the libidinal drives must pass through a representational process that lends itself to a forming of images as a hallucinatory fulfillment. We shall come back to this aspect of

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representation shortly. For our present purposes it is important to highlight that the work of representation produces a fulfillment of desire, regardless of whether this promotes certain amounts of conscious gratification on the one hand or suffering and punishment on the other. It is thus possible to show, through a careful reading of Freud’s theory of representation, that a whole set of contemporary ideological oppositions – between commerce and pleasure, masculine and feminine, the central and marginal, the practical and aesthetic – are potentially open to the dislocation of the unconscious. The nature of representation thus consists rather in an indeterminable imaging of the drives. Freud’s analysis of dreams demonstrates this well. As Freud (1900: 525, my emphasis) remarks, there is always a part of the dream: which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dreamthoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation have to, in an entirely universal manner, remain without any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium. There are few passages in Freud which more clearly underscore the creativity of the psyche. According to Freud, there is always a part of the unconscious which resists symbolisation, even though it strives to be articulated. It is from this ‘core’ of the unconscious that representational forms emerge in an undetermined manner – ‘without definite endings,’ they ‘branch out in every direction’ of the individual psyche. This description of psychical creation inevitably raises the question of the origins of representation, an issue which Freud himself never satisfactorily resolved. Fundamentally, Freud (1900: 37) sees the representational process as ‘the most general and the most striking’ characteristic of the unconscious, through which ‘a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified . . . is represented as a scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced’. Now Freud posits that drives become bound to certain representations in the course of the human infant’s earliest experiences, organised around the economic interplay of pleasure/pain. The drive can only be manifested in the psyche, remarks Freud, by means of a ‘delegation through representation’. For Freud, there is no such thing as a drive in its pure state. Libidinal drives are mediated through the forming of images, by representational forms. The exact means through which the drive achieves representation in the psyche, however, is only implicitly

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theorised in this passage. The experience of an affect, whether of pleasure or pain, cannot account for the emergence of representation. Moreover, Freud’s own attempts to derive phantasy from the memory traces of real events, or the collective prehistory of humankind, only displace the imaginary dimensions of the unconscious, dimensions which the bulk of his work uncovers.

From neglect to recovery or representation and affect: Re-reading Freud against Lacan French psychoanalysis, principally as elaborated by Lacan, has come to dominate work in the social sciences and humanities throughout the Englishspeaking world as regards the analysis of the unconscious. Once Freud had been respectably translated into French, the social sciences in general, and social theory in particular, turned to Lacan for an explanation of the irrational dimensions of human experience. But this ‘Lacanian turn’ in social theory came at a huge cost. For in Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, the concept of the unconscious is tied directly to organised signifiers; it is conceived as a language, but it relates the organisation of desire only to secondary repression as symbolic law (see Castoriadis, 1984; Macey, 1988; and Elliott, 1999 for critical discussions of Lacan’s linguistic reconceptualisation of Freudian psychoanalysis). There are many major criticisms of Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’, and I do not intend to rehearse them here. But in respect of my particular concerns with the notions of representation and affect, the complaint of key significance is that Lacan actually suppresses the subversive implications of Freudianism by structuralising the unconscious and reducing it to a chance play of signifiers. This criticism engages Lacan’s reading of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, specifically his claim that the unconscious is coterminous with language. Many critics – including Paul Ricoeur and Jean-François Lyotard – have argued the Freudian point against Lacan that the unconscious is resistant to ordered syntax. These critics, in focusing on different threads of Lacan’s work, rightly argue, in my view, that the unconscious precedes language. According to this account, the unconscious – as Freud emphasised throughout his writings – twins meaning and energy, representation and affect. The unconscious may thus intrude upon language, as in slips of the tongue or pen, and yet cannot simply be equated with it. Critical social theory now faces the challenging work of sifting through the core insights of these three psychoanalytic-cultural pioneers, both for resituating subjectivity in the wake of post-structuralism and postmodernism and for reassessing the culture it is critiquing. Through briefly introducing the contributions of Castoriadis and Kristeva, this chapter is intended as a contribution to that task.

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Cornelius Castoriadis: Radical and social imaginaries This is Castoriadis,1 who, in an interview in 1991, reflected on the ‘incessant flux’ of unconscious representation thus: The ‘presubjective’ world is a compact, blind, and dull mass; the blossoming forth of the imagination is a local explosion that digs into this mass a hole, that opens an interior space within it, a chamber that can swell enormously. And this chamber is not a room; it is a kind of cylinder, since it is, at the same time, a time. It therefore also has a fourth dimension; and that means that it constitutes, for itself, the inner linings of the cylinder, an organised world . . . there are olfactory objects, tactile objects that are, at the outset, much more important than visual objects. I am not fixated on the ‘scopic’; one of the gross inadequacies of Lacan’s conception of the imagination is his fixation of the scopic. For me, if one is speaking of stages that are worked out, the imagination par excellence is the imagination of the musical composer (which is what I wanted to be). Suddenly, figures surge forth which are not in the least visual. They are essentially auditory and kinetic – for there is also rhythm. . . . When Mozart says, I have the entire piece laid out in my head, it is not that he sees the score, it is that he hears the totality of the piece. . . . Nor is there anything ‘visual’ in the social imaginary. The social imaginary is not the creation of images in society; it is not the fact that one paints the walls of towns. A fundamental creation of the social imaginary, the gods or rules of behaviour are neither visible nor even audible but signifiable. (Castoriadis, 1997: 182–183) Castoriadis’s reflections on the imaginary principally concern, one might say, the ways in which a world (at once emotional and social) somehow or other comes to be ordered and organised from groundlessness or chaos; about the creation of imagination from ‘dull mass’; about creation and invention as a consequence of an ‘explosion that digs into this mass a hole’. The constitution of these imaginary determinations manifests the creativity that appertains to the psyche as such, and that ‘opens an interior space within it’. Castoriadis calls this ‘radical imagination’ (Castoriadis, 1987; Elliott, 2004). Clearly a great deal could be said about the links between imagination and the auditory and kinetic in Castoriadis’s reflections, with all this implies of an overvaluation of visual objects in psychoanalysis. The fetishisation of the scopic in Lacanian psychoanalysis may also have led to a neglect of the creativity of the psyche. Freud emphasised that visual memory is fundamental to the unconscious and its expressive processes of condensation, displacement and representation – especially in that aspect of his corpus where he conceived of fantasy in terms of his model of the dream. In some

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versions of Freud, dreams are the linchpin for an easy fit between representation and imagination. In Freud’s approach, however, the visual domain was not all. For sensory elements also figured in Freud’s construction of the dream-work and, by extension, the imagination. The Freudian subject may dream visually, and only be able to report the dream in words, yet the sharpness of the visual perception is an upshot of heterogeneous domains of representation (sensations, affects, verbal and non-verbal representations).

Julia Kristeva: The melancholic imagination In her sharp biography Melanie Klein, the European psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva2 also writes about what makes for creative imagination: The unconscious or preconscious fantasy is present in all psychic activities and behaviours, so much so that the fantasy is an ‘active presence of fantasy scenes’. Such a fantasy is, strictly speaking, bound up with motivity, taste and food aversions, the sharpness of the perception (particularly the visual perception) of the primal scene, the image of the body, voicesong-and-speech, sporting activities, concert-show-and-film attendance, educational and intellectual activities, neurotic symptoms, and, in the end, the entire organisation of the personality. Not only is the totality of psychic life impregnated with fantasies, but in the child whom Klein listened to and analysed, the fantasy – that is, the fantasy that preceded repression – is united with psychic life, because this fantasy and this life, ‘the representative of the earliest impulses of desire and aggressiveness, are expressed in and dealt with by mental processes far removed from words and conscious relational thinking’. (Kristeva, 2001: 140) Kristeva’s reflections are in one sense primarily concerned with the presence of fantasy and unconscious work, all to do with the imagination of sensational life. The psychic work of representation is a universal feature ‘present in all psychic activities and behaviours’, by no means restricted to the therapeutic relationship, nor to particular aspects of mental functioning, such as the standard psychoanalytic menu of day-dreaming or erotic imaginings. Rather, it is our ordinary experiences – from sporting activities to the practicalities of learning and education – that are saturated with this originary imagination. All psychic activity, says Kristeva, is ‘impregnated with fantasies’. What is clear in Kristeva’s account of fantasy is that this imaginary domain is inextricably interwoven with the motions of pleasure and unpleasure, the most primitive impulses of desire and aggressiveness which bring a world of subjectivity into being in the first place. Freud astutely captured the theatrical dynamics of sensational life in terms of the logics of dreaming; and it is

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these affective processes (the dream-work) which, for Kristeva, dominate the mental apparatus from start to finish. Yet what might Kristeva be gaining by drawing attention to the imaginary resilience – the creative representational refashioning of the senses – of everyday life? And what, we might ask, is gained by thinking of what happens to our wishes (inseparable from figure and fantasy) in categories that emphasise the pro-linguistic: fantasy life is ‘expressed in and dealt with by mental processes far removed from words and conscious relational thinking’. Would this not be the other side of language, which is the representational flux of the unconscious ego? Kristeva conceptualises what she refers to as the ‘proto-fantasy’ as a kind of oscillation of the imagination, with the human subject internally divided, split between infantile narcissism and the other’s lack. Strictly speaking, if representation is an ‘active presence of fantasy scenes’, this is because desire, for Kristeva as for Lacan, is the desire of the Other. To desire the Other is a kind of fashioning, an imagining of what the other dreams, an imitating and an identification with the other’s desire. Notwithstanding that it is the inescapability of imaginary misrecognition that leaves the human subject to impute an imaginary fullness to the other’s desire which, in fact, pertains only to the representation (i.e., the imaginary plenitude that the subject itself desires), the point is there would be no meaning, not to say anything of the possibility for self-knowledge, without these imaginative fashionings. Kristeva has written in great depth about the length people will go to in creating obstacles to pleasure; in doing so, she has reformulated Freud’s account of Oedipal desire as a general theory of the constitution of the subject and its baroque imaginings (see Kristeva, 2001; Elliott, 2004). In conclusion, however, I want to emphasise that her reflections on the unconscious or preconscious fantasy – in the above quotation – capture something important about the imaginary making and taking of pleasure in daily life – undertaken through the twin unconscious forces of representation and affect. In Kristeva’s reckoning, unconscious representation is about the human subject’s imaginings that inform, say, perceptions of the body, imaginings about how one sounds and speaks, imaginings about one’s sporting prowess, imaginings about pop stars and celebrities, imaginings about educational advancement and intellectual recognition and imaginings about where one is headed or what may be wrong with one’s life. More than any other psychoanalyst, perhaps more than Freud’s foundational insights, Kristeva captures the complex ways people use their imagination to make life meaningful. For Kristeva, individuals are captured by, in thrall to, their unconscious fantasies – these radically strange, foreign social dreams. Such representations, in addition to constituting intercourse between unconscious affect and practical life, are the very stuff of our imaginings of imagination.

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Notes 1. It might be helpful to provide a few brief biographical details. Castoriadis studied in Athens before moving to France in 1945. He worked for many years as a professional economist at the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He left his post at the OECD in 1970 and began training as a psychoanalyst. He undertook his training with the French-language psychoanalytic organisation known as the ‘Fourth Group’, a break-away association from the Lacanian ecole freudienne. For further details see Thompson, 1984; Elliott 2002, 2003. 2. Kristeva, now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris VII, did her psychoanalytic training with Lacan. Already in her earliest theoretical work, however, she indicated a determination to move beyond the conceptual terrain of Lacanianism narrowly defined. For example, her doctoral dissertation, which was subsequently published as her first book Revolution in Poetic Language, blends linguistics and psychoanalytical theory to advance a novel account of how pre-verbal experience – infantile, maternal and poetic – enters into, shapes, distorts and disrupts language through processes of art, literature and psychoanalysis. In her more recent work, which I trace throughout my book Social Theory Since Freud (2004), Kristeva has turned away from Lacan and back to classical Freudianism, and especially towards Kleinian psychoanalysis.

References Castoriadis, C. (1984) Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press). Castoriadis, C. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Castoriadis, C. (1997) World in Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Elliott, A. (1999) Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva. 2nd edn (London: Free Association Books). Elliott, A. (2002) Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. 2nd edn (Blackwell: Oxford). Elliott, A. (2003) Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory (New York: Rowman and Littlefield). Elliott, A. (2004) Social Theory Since Freud (London: Routledge). Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols. 4 and 5) (London: Hogarth Press). Freud, S. (1915) ‘The unconscious’ (SE 14) (London: Hogarth Press). Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE 18) (London: Hogarth Press). Kristeva, J. (1974) Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press). Kristeva, J. (2001) Melanie Klein. Trans. Ross Guberman. (New York: Columbia University Press). Macey, D. (1988) Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso). Thompson, J. B. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity Press).

4 Using Winnicott Juliet Mitchell

The psychoanalysis – both the theory and the practice – of Donald Winnicott exemplifies a quintessentially ‘psychosocial’ approach. Throughout his life and work, Winnicott was concerned with the conditions for subjectivity, and it was his unique insights into the mutually constitutive relations between the psyche and the social, the internal and the external worlds – particularly the ‘transitional phenomena’ – that allowed him to produce a truly psychosocial theory of the subject within the Object Relations tradition of psychoanalysis. His key starting point was the fact of human dependency. Where Klein produced theories based on hypotheses about the nature of human drives, Winnicott elaborated the key factor of human prematurity. The human infant, to a unique degree, is dependent on its caretaker. Dependency entails something on which to depend; this Winnicott labels ‘the environment’. Intra-uterinely, even in her desire for conception, as well as post-natally, the mother is the first environment. Notoriously, Winnicott claimed that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother; the baby cannot exist outside the environment on which it depends – prototypically, its mother. In this chapter, I explore the implications of Winnicott’s work for developing a psychosocial understanding of siblings and gender. The key question I address is what controls and socialises – what psychosocial phenomena underlie – what I call the necessary trauma of the advent, actual or ever-expected, of a sibling.

In the beginning Winnicott observed that at first, psychically, for the baby there can be no distinction between itself and its mother/environment. Reciprocally, the mother will be in a state of what he called ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ – she is identified with her baby in a necessary ‘madness’, an absence of boundaries. Through this identification the mother will recognise the different meanings of the baby’s cries and other communications. If this necessary 46

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delusion of ‘direct communication’ persists too long for either or both, there will be pathology. A period of unintegration, non-differentiation and mutual identification is, however, necessary if the baby is sufficiently to trust the environment on which it so utterly depends. Nor should this enmeshment stop suddenly and totally – we must move the delusion into illusion and onwards towards a recognition of reality. This is creation: first, allowing the baby to feel it made the world; next, to know that it both did and did not; that though it made it, the world was there to begin with, independent of the baby that created it. While the environment needs to be there as part of the baby, the baby also seeks its response, as the mother seeks the baby’s. The baby’s mind is thus, as it were, interlinked with the mother’s being-for-the-baby which is not identical with her own mind. Thus the mother may well be depressed some or a lot of the time. This does not of itself produce a depressed baby so long as the mother’s depression is not so great as to totally prevent her identification with her baby. For two reasons: first, in becoming her baby, the mother has identified with life. Second, there is also a part of the merged relationship which leads on to separation. This is in the area of each seeking out the other: here the baby will try to enliven the depressed mother just as the mother of a premature baby will try to elicit that baby’s life more actively than she will need to with a full-term baby. It would thus be too simple a model of identification to say that a depressed mother produces a depressed baby; a depressed mother may quite well be an adequate (a ‘good enough’) environment. However, if the baby is in the second stage of creativity when there is an emerging knowledge of the mother as not-me-the-baby, then the baby will be depressed by its failure to enliven the depressed mother. There are inevitable gaps in the mother’s ‘there-ness’ for the baby. This is not Bowlby’s 24-hour mother – yet in another way she is always there even when she is somewhere else; she can also be absent when she is present. This space of the mother’s emergence as the baby’s not-me is the ‘transitional space’; the mother moves from the state of the ‘subjective object’ into that of the ‘objective object’ – which is the object known for itself. A transitional object, the famous teddy bear or piece of cloth, is the means for negotiating this move from the world-as-me to the world-and-me. This object is a bridge between the baby’s emerging individual psyche and the external reality. The teddy bear is not, as is commonly thought, a symbol of the mother. It does not represent the mother in her absence. The rag or the teddy bear is used in its own right by the baby as something that is ‘not-me’. For it to be used in this way, there must have been sufficient internalisation, what could be called ‘interlining’ of the mother-as-environment for the baby to feel enough of itself to use a not-me object – something on which it depends but which it controls and which it can destroy, but only to the extent that this object survives its destruction.

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Like the mother herself, the transitional object stands for paradox. Paradox – which is a key concept for Winnicott – holding contrary things together in (playful) tension is the creative mental corollary of the ambivalence to which Freud and, following him, Klein paid so much attention. Through playing and, later, working, the child negotiates the transition from ‘subjective object’ to ‘objective object’, while preserving the ability to rest at either endpoint. Play with its lacunae, its gaps, the not-known but maybe knowable of the unknown, its free associations, is where paradox is negotiated. We should note that Winnicott does not believe a creative genius is necessarily someone who is good at living creatively: any number of psychic combinations can make for the production of a work of art or of science. This is not so with creative living. For this there must be sufficient time given to the establishment of the baby’s being. ‘Being’ is a condition which Winnicott (1965) describes as everyone’s ‘female element’ regretting while doing so that biological distinctions of sex confuse the issue. Creativity starts when ‘doing’ takes place on a ground plan of ‘being’. ‘Doing’ is everyone’s ‘male element’. The opposite of creativity for Winnicott is compliance. To become what the other demands or projects, too much otherness of the demanding/projecting other either through intrusion or deprivation of the motheras-environment, too little potential being-ness of the baby through the brain damage of birth, can lead to compliance instead of the necessary destructiveness when the male element of ‘doing’ should build on the strength of female ‘being’. Unlike Klein’s, Winnicott’s infant is determinedly bisexual. Psychic bisexuality is an outcome inherent in the human nature of the baby’s environment – the ‘environment-mother’ at times is bound either consciously or unconsciously to desire other than what she has, whether this can be played with creatively or endured compliantly or delusionally identified with, is the name of the game. When a human baby is conceived, and then when it is born, it instantly enters into the either/or binary of ‘it’s a boy/it’s a girl’, something we, ‘the environment’, decide more-or-less on the basis of its genitalia. This is not the same as either a phallus or no-phallus of ‘sexual difference’. It means that one small dimension of biology – the penis or labia indicating vagina – is used to establish an either/or which in and of itself is equilateral – it is about two presences not one presence and its absence. Winnicott was unconcerned that something inherently equal was rendered utterly aysymmetrical from the outset. I think this unconcern arose from his identification with the baby: if we imagine the baby’s point-of-view, it experiences itself not as girl or boy baby-in-the-world but only as baby. If the environment makes the baby either/or too soon, too quickly, or considers the penis a vagina, the vagina a penis, or names its penis a penis, or vagina a vagina, too forcefully then this will be traumatic. ‘Gender’ introduced normatively and gradually to the human infant will always contain

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what that infant was not – the ‘or’ of the ‘either’ – thus an element of gender bisexuality will be preserved. Even when they ‘know’ the baby’s sex, everyone in the neonate’s environment also has the other sex in mind. Winnicott introduced us to the realisation that using anatomy as its reference point, the environment sets up the gender distinction which it instantiates in utero and at birth and then enjoins more-or-less traumatically throughout infancy. It is always traumatic because what one is not is as important as what one is – it is playing that makes palatable or joyful the loss.

Procreativity, creativity, destruction and Winnicott’s ‘use of an object’ Some years ago, I asked the Kleinian analyst, Eric Brenman, if it was relevant that his case of male hysteria, Mr B, described in his important paper ‘Hysteria’ (Brenman, 1985), was married but childless. Almost excited, Dr Brenman confirmed that it was extremely significant. At that point, it was the particular case – material rather than a theory of hysteria – that alerted me to the importance of childless/childfreeness. Now, having written about what I consider to be the universal possibility of hysteria and about the importance of siblings (Mitchell, 2000) to which I was led by my study of hysteria, I want to propose two separate observations and use a theory of Winnicott’s to link them: 1. The hysteric (male or female) fantasises giving birth but is psychically childless; if there are actual children he does not know where they have come from and does not understand that they are ‘his’. They have arrived like ‘magic’. Being a parent is without meaning. 2. Sibling relations have their own autonomy which involves creative but not procreative fantasies and activities, except as parthenogenic births. It is Winnicott’s theory about the importance of destructiveness in the use an object which can help us make a link. I suggest that on the arrival (or the expectation of the arrival) of a new baby, the toddler experiences both an extension of its narcissistic love towards it (or at the prospect of it) and a traumatic displacement of itself. The small child’s emergent ego is thus knocked down at the very moment when it is narcissistically aggrandised. The hysteric likewise oscillates between feeling non-existent and grandiose. The ability to destroy the object and for the object of one’s destruction to survive also applies to the subject: he feels destroyed by the newcomer and must survive this experience. The child with the new-born sibling hunts between an identification with the new baby to whose condition he regresses and an identification with the parturient mother to whose status he aspires (Mitchell, 2003). The identifications are part of his struggle to survive. In his full-length portrait of a child patient, The Piggle (Winnicott, 1978: 13), Winnicott records how the

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mother described her toddler who had recently received a sister: ‘it was difficult to put into words what the matter was. But she was not herself. In fact she refused to be herself and said so: “I’m the mummy. I’m the baby”. She was not to be addressed as herself. She had developed a high-voiced chatter which was not hers.’ (my italics) Siblings, like hysterics, produce fantasies of babies galore. These babies are not predicated on a knowledge of binary sexual difference in which the meaning of one sex is that it is not the other. Siblings play across gender differences. The mother of girl/boy twins I have been observing, shortly before their third birthday, disconcerted me, but not them, by suggesting they went to a fancy-dress party as each other. The twins were thrilled and very interested; their dressing-up in each other’s clothes and swapping behaviours showed some sense of gender difference, but as play or ‘performance’. Much earlier, around 18 months, Harry had rubbed up against and excitedly fondled Mary’s bottom and Mary had with great joy repeatedly sat on Harry’s head, moving up and down on it; their pleasures were the same although the means to them were morphologically different. Little Hans (Freud, 1909), when his parents asked why he was laughing at his naked new-born sister, replied that he was looking at her ‘widdler’ which was so lovely. There is no absolute-ness to these attributes of gender distinction. The sexuality of gender not being reproductive can be indifferently same-sex or heterosexual. Something has to organise what is known as the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of infantile sexuality into a sexuality which is no less sexual and no more ‘perverse’ than procreative sexuality. This is the subject-differentiation of gender sexuality. What is the difference between the non-procreative sexuality of lateral relationships sibs, peers, affines and the binary procreative possibilities of sexual difference? It is, I shall argue, a difference between what Winnicott, adapting Freud, and in another context from the one I am addressing here, described as the difference between ‘ego-libido’ and ‘id-libido’. Gender and sibling relations, I suggest, deploy ego-libido (ecstasy, jouissance) and sexual difference with its vertical prohibitions and identifications and its resulting procreative orientation involve id-libidinous sexual drives. The term ‘gender’ began its current usage in the work emanating from the clinical and theoretical studies of transsexualism by Robert Stoller (Stoller, 1968; 1975a). Stoller, the Californian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is important both for his work on sex and gender and for his study of perversions (Stoller, 1975b). He introduced the importance of hatred into the construction and composition of perversions. Perversions are classically considered to be the other side of hysteria. However, hatred and the death drive are what I have argued (Mitchell, 2000) need reading into our account of hysteria which has otherwise been regarded only as the product of maladjusted sexual id-libido. Finally hatred, I contend, is an essential structural not just incidental element of sibling relations.

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The concept of ‘gender’ which Stoller used to indicate the psychosocial sexual assignment by the culture or the parent gradually became a more extensive concept, covering the social acquisition and also the biological base: it became a concept that comprised a relationship which involved some sexuality whether it was hetero – or homo – or narcissistic sexuality. Its deployment from the late 1960s coincided with a lurch in the prospective birth-rate and the advent of cohorts of young people, in anti-colonial struggles, then Blacks, students and women whose radicalism, like that of most revolutionaries, involved not vertical but lateral relationships. The term ‘gender’, then, came into play at a point when lateral relationships figured prominently, most notably in the sisterhood of the Women’s Movement which was the first organisation to adopt Stoller’s distinction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The use of gender also can be seen to reflect the massive dip in the birth-rate that was associated with effective contraception and the freeing of sexuality from reproduction on a huge scale which was important for women in particular. ‘Gender’ is a sibling or peer group, lateral relationship; sexuality without reproduction; it is Freud’s polymorphously perverse child of the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ grown up. However, and this I want to emphasise, it has other restrictions and prohibitions than those of the taboo on the Oedipus complex, controlling and socialising it. It is not just pre-Oedipal; it is a complex with desires and prohibition in its own right.

Siblings: A new beginning The crucial issue is to consider what controls and socialises the shock of the advent of a sibling. What changes the small child’s traumatic experience of ego-annihilation into a social relationship which, at any point, can break down again into the violence of the original experience – when playing in the nursery becomes war on the battlefield or hysteria in the bedroom? The traumatised child has experienced the annihilation of its emergent ego. It has awaited the advent of the new baby as a narcissistic repetition or extension of itself – the toddler has been ‘baby’ and now there will be ‘more baby’, an ecstatic experience extending its omnipotence and grandiosity, only to find the newcomer is not itself – but someone else. The child has to acquire the knowledge that the baby is the same category, sibling, child but different from itself – baby, toddler; girl, boy. How does it come to accept this baby is there anyway, yet is not itself? Winnicott argued that sibling relationships could become good if there was first sufficient access to acknowledged hatred. The toddler has to hate the other that has destroyed its narcissistic self-aggrandisement. Hatred has to be experienced and then, but only then, mitigated by love. When, and if, this is achieved there can be a curb set on aggrandisement, uniqueness and omnipotence. What replaces these is the possibility of being uniquely oneself but at the same time, only one among others – a goal also of psychoanalytical therapy.

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The sibling experience around the age of two to two and a half is, I shall argue, a repeat of an earlier state when the child as a baby discovered the external world in the way Winnicott has described. The baby did not make the world but was, instead, a particular part of it. The sibling experience is a necessary organising repetition of the previous condition of the deflation of this earlier babyhood omnipotence. Much as the Oedipus complex organises the fantasy of the primal scene (the parents’ sexual intercourse that creates the subject) into incestuous desires and their prohibition, so the sibling complex organises hatred and love into social acceptability and its obverse, asocial behaviour. I am going to turn back to Winnicott’s work on that earliest stage of babyhood in order to make my argument about this secondary organising stage of siblinghood. Winnicott describes a process between baby and mother that I think can be usefully extended to siblings. Furthermore, I argue that the organising stage of siblinghood marks the natal categorisation of ‘gender’ a psychological possibility, replete with its hate and love and its non-procreative sexuality. In a late paper, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’ (Winnicott, 1968), Winnicott advanced the thesis that the baby creates the external world as being external to itself, through its ability to destroy it. The environment in which the new-born baby lives can only be perceived as something external to itself if the baby can destroy it and yet the environment can survive this destruction. The mother is the first environment – the ‘environment-mother’. The mother (and later her replica in the transference situation, the psychoanalyst) wants to be eaten by the baby and still be there. The baby eats the mother before it has any capacity for concern about the mother as an object. Next the baby must be able to be ruthless. It destroys the object (in Winnicott’s terms, still a ‘subjective’ object) willynilly so that the object comes into being as an ‘objective’ object, external and different from what is emerging at the same time as the baby’s ‘ego’ – its subjecthood. It stands to sense that as the world is truly there, outside the baby’s creation – it will survive; what Winnicott’s observation adds (without spelling it out) is that this necessitates the coming on stage of the subject who has discovered the ever-presence of the world. This is the object’s ‘use’. Winnicott writes: This sequence can be observed: (1) Subject relates to object. (2) Object is in process of being found instead of placed by the subject in the world. (3) Subject destroys object. (4) Object survives destruction. (5) Subject can use object. (Winnicott, 1968: 711) My argument is that the advent of the sibling repeats this ‘use of an object’ at a later psychic level. Whereas in the pre-psychic first stage the object that

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becomes an object by being destroyed was already existent, it would seem that the sibling is only always existent as a potentiality. However, my understanding is that, like the world, the sibling is always there – the youngest or ‘only’ child has to understand where the expected baby has gone. The toddler at first, in its narcissistic extension of itself, regards the expected baby much as though it were part of the environment, there for its needs. Much as the removal of the breast (the ‘environment mother’) correlates with the baby’s need to destroy it, so the sibling that is not itself, correlates with the toddler’s need to attack it. Without the destruction, without the attack and survival, the external world and the other child (baby) would stay as part of the undifferentiated environment, objects only useful for projection. To become external, the environment must be ruthlessly destroyed, so too the sibling. The difference between the first stage of essential destruction and the second is that the second is social and a different prohibition operates. You first eat your mother; you need then to destroy the environment in order to create it as external; you want to kill your sibling but – on the whole – you must not. Your sibling rage and hatred needs to be kept as fantasy, the ruthless destruction must be mitigated by love. There can be no doubt: the ‘external’ sibling exists with or without your contribution, without your ‘say-so’, however much you destroy it, it has come to stay. But what is this first sibling love that will mitigate the hatred? It is, I believe, not the id-love of sexual difference, not the so-called male libidinal drive of the oral, anal and phallic girl and boy, but the ego-love of the child who masters its helplessness. It is not a drive turned into desire through the loss of the object, but the jouissance, the ecstasy of survival by the child who can thereafter (if all goes well) enjoy the capacity to be alone in the company of others, knowing it is itself but that there are also others in the world. There is loss – of the child’s former, omnipotent self; thereafter its self-love becomes self-esteem, seeing there are others from its own perspective entails that others can see it from theirs. Jacques Lacan argued that women had a jouissance, an orgasmic ecstasy that was not complementary to male desire, but supplementary. Contra Lacan, I believe this female jouissance is no more confined to women than male libido is confined to men. It is the jouissance of what Winnicott calls ‘being’ as opposed to the id-libidinous drive of ‘doing’. Freud introduced the concept of ego-libido to answer the observation of extreme narcissistic investment in cases of psychosis. In re-vitalising it, Winnicott gives it a different orientation: ego-libido is the state of the baby when it feels alone in the presence of the mother. F. R. Rodman (Rodman, 2003: 242–243), Winnicott’s biographer, quotes him as follows: The individual who has developed the capacity to be alone is constantly able to rediscover the personal impulse and the personal impulse is not wasted because the state of being alone is something which (though

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paradoxically) always implies that someone else is there. If there is such a thing as ego orgasm, those who are inhibited in instinctual experience will tend to specialise in such orgasms, so that there would be a pathology of the tendency to ego orgasm . . . There can be value in thinking of ecstasy as an ego orgasm . . . the climax that may occur in satisfactory ego-relatedness. This ego-ecstasy is, I contend, Lacan’s feminine jouissance. It is first experienced in the ‘being’ with the environment-mother which gives it its female valence and then organised through the sibling who is discovered to be the same as oneself yet different. I further want to argue that it is hate and not love that initially institutes this jouissance. This would mean that it underlies the well-recorded ecstasy of killing. The destruction of the environment-mother becomes the hatred of the ‘environment-sibling’, the sibling who (like the mother) is also related to lovingly because it is experienced narcissistically as the same as the self. In so far as ego-libidinous jouissance is female, it would be found also in the mother’s experience of giving birth, what Hélène Déutsch so offended feminists by claiming as a masochistic orgasm. The colloquial saying that it is ‘the pain that makes the baby precious’ would translate into Winnicott’s statement that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates her. The mother has to survive and to lose her old, pre-maternal self. What the mother may regress to (or just express) in the violence of childbirth (however it is medicated or cared for), the man regresses to (or expresses) in the violence of war: two different modalities of ecstatic hatred in the face of possible death. But hatred is necessary; it can be resolved not enacted – resolved in the love of the baby and of one’s fellow human beings. The opportunity for a social resolution based on the ego-relatedness comes with siblings. If the subject is able to destroy the sister or brother through its hatred of it and yet it survives then it becomes an external object – an external other, another to be loved, loathed and used usefully in the external world. The environment, human culture, makes the first mark of human-ness a gender division: the cry of the midwife –‘it’s a girl/it’s a boy’. The interpellation gives no choice. Yet this no choice, the either/or-ness, is not I suggest, grasped by the infant until around the age of two to two and a half. Two to two and a half years old typically marks what Winnicott classifies as ‘separation-trauma’. ‘Separation trauma’ indicates the toddler’s separation from the mother. What I would emphasise is the reason for the traumatic nature of the separation from the mother from the point of view not of psychological development but from that of the environmental trauma, is the birth or expected birth of a sibling. Winnicott’s ‘separation trauma’ I shall re-label ‘the sibling trauma’. There is no doubt from his case-histories and from hearsay that Winnicott was well aware of the significance of the

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birth of a new baby. He was once asked what was a good age for the older child to have a sister or brother, and replied ‘no age’. Winnicott considered trauma to be something which came to the infant from outside its sphere of omnipotence. This loss of the subject (or, as it is seen clinically, the ‘disappearance’ of the subject) is the final blow to omnipotence. This loss of the subject is exemplary within the sibling situation. To establish what I have called ‘subject differentiation’, the subject itself first must be lost. But it is with the sibling that the social ascription ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ to the biological female or male begins to make sense to the recipient – it too will join in the chorus that categorises the new born. The narcissistic infant who expects that the new baby will be more of its own baby-self naturally assumes it will be the same gender. The prescribed gender is only realised when it either is or isn’t. The infant has started to make this categorisation: Tom aged two and a half looked at me as I was changing for a party – I asked him: shall I wear a dress or trousers? ‘Trousers’, came the assured reply. Slightly put out, I asked why. ‘Because you’re a girl’ he declared with a huge grin, proud of his classification skills. After the advent of the sibling and the disappearance of the subject, that subject knows there is meaningful gender difference even if he gets it wrong at first. I have called the sibling trauma a ‘necessary trauma’, and the infant’s move from assuming her replication to her accepting seriality ‘a rite of passage’ in which she is the baby no longer but instead a gendered child – one might or does come after her, as there might be or is, one before her. Sexual difference is marked by prohibition and repression – the pushing into unconscious of forbidden desires; the sibling trauma which puts gender diversity into effect is also a matter of a prohibition but this time from the side of the mother and from the in-between of lateral relationships: you are not unique, you must love your brother not because he is yourself, but as you love yourself. It is the right termination of every analysis when the patient finds that he matters enough in the world to be relieved to be ordinary, one among alike but different others. However, there can be no sibling trauma without the implication of gender: one’s sibling is either a sister or a brother. So gender is a part-and-parcel of the unconscious processes activated by the annihilation or disappearance of the subject. In the move from all-the-world is me to the-world-is-otherthan-me, the subject vanishes; on its return, it will not only constitute the world/the sibling as other but it will itself be other to itself – the place of its disappearance will be the other scene of the subject’s unconscious.

References Brenman, E. (1985) ‘Hysteria’, International Journal of Psychoanlaysis 66: 423–432. Freud, S. (1909) ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (‘Little Hans’) Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, Vol. X, pp. 5–149.

56 A Psychosocial Approach to Emotion Mitchell, J. (2000) Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition. Allen Lane/The Penguin Press: Harmondsworth. Mitchell, J. (2003) Siblings, Sex and Violence. Polity Press: Cambridge. Rodman, F. R. (2003) Winnicott: Life and Work. Perseus Publishing: Cambridge, MA. Stoller, R. (1968) Sex and Gender. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: London. Stoller, R. (1975a) The Transsexual Experiment. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: London. Stoller, R. (1975b) Perversion: The Erotic form of Hatred. Pantheon Books: New York. Winnicott, D. W. (1965) ‘The Split off – Male and Female Elements to be found in Men and Women’ section in ‘Creativity and its Origins’ in 1971 Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications: London. Winnicott, D. W. (1968) ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50: 711. Also in Playing and Reality 1971. Winnicott, D. W. (1978) The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: London.

Part II Emotions in the Public Sphere

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5 Explosive Humiliation and News Media Barry Richards

Introduction In 1965 the American satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer famously sang about a German rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun, who had contributed to the Nazi war effort but was recruited to US weapons development after the war. ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun. Can a similar attitude be detected among journalists and other media professionals, in relation to the emotional effects of media content on audiences? This is a question about the emotional public sphere1 which we all inhabit, a constant accompaniment to the traditional public sphere of debate and contestation, often overlooked though it may be of decisive importance in determining political events. The emotional public sphere is one of several distinct starting points for the psychosocial study of emotion, all represented in this book. Some approaches proceed from clinical observations made in the consulting room or observational setting, some from the problematics of social theory and some from the narratives of biographical research. Here it is the nature and distribution of emotion in the mediatised public sphere which is the empirical terrain, and the target of any practical measures which may flow from the analysis. While any kind of theoretical framework could in principle be used in this approach, this chapter works within a predominantly psychoanalytic one. The leading shapers of the emotional public sphere are those with institutional power as politicians or as representatives of public authority, and also those with strong political or social influence, among whom journalists and other media professionals are pre-eminent. They have particular responsibilities for the predominant patterns of public feeling, and so should give 59

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thought to the possible emotional consequences of the words and images they use, to where these rockets come down. I have suggested the term ‘emotional governance’ to refer to this task of public emotion management (Richards, 2007), a term intended to make explicit the responsibilities of those in authority to attend to the emotional consequences of what they say. Ideally emotional governance is a deliberate, sustained and strategic attention to the emotional dynamics of the public by those in positions of power and influence, with a view to the containment of toxic emotions and the enhancement of more mature and prosocial feeling-states, and of capacities in the public mind for reflection and for emotional self-management. Knowingly or not, the work of politicians, journalists and others is a kind of ‘emotional labour’, which can and should be directed towards those ends. Yet to suggest that there could or should be any kind of management of public emotions would be for some people a horrifyingly totalitarian proposition, or at best a hopelessly naïve one. And indeed there are deep and complex questions about the moral and political implications of this suggestion, and obvious difficulties in how to operationalise ‘containment’ or to assess ‘toxicity’. Admittedly, what are already difficult judgements about when freedom of speech ceases to be a right, or when to use a language of pathology in describing certain trends or attitudes, can be made more complex by invoking this principle of the emotional responsibilities of leadership. Moreover, a libertarian spirit now holds sway over large areas of what used to be called both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and is increasingly critical of the existing (and arguably comparatively modest) writ of today’s British state. So to defend the extension of social and political authority proposed here would, if done fully, require a major essay in which a general model of leadership as strategic emotional containment was reconciled with the liberal–democratic ideal of the autonomous individual. Here, however, a preliminary case will be made through discussion of one particular area of emotional experience, one which in an increasingly mediatised world is becoming more important. Humiliation is a particularly profound and explosive example of an emotion which needs careful management in the public sphere if it is not to issue in some destructive outburst, whether by a deranged individual with a weapon or by a terrorist movement. It does this all too often, because there is very little careful management of emotion in the public domain, whether on the national or international stage. The focus of this chapter could therefore be seen as more psychological than that of the others in this section, at least in the sense that it contains a discussion about one area of individual emotional experience, and about the motivation of terrorists and other mass murderers. Evans, Powell and Yates take somewhat different approaches, but all offer psychologically informed commentaries on aspects of contemporary society rather than on individuals’ motives. This allows them to analyse, respectively, the place of celebrities in the public mind, the emotionalisation of marketing and an unrecognised

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libidinal dimension of political communication.2 This chapter links its psychological focus to the social not through an examination of the historical and political sources of humiliation, though that is also a central part of the whole picture, but by placing its psychological topic in the context of media representations of the humiliation of Muslims. It thus offers a model of psychosocial analysis as linkage rather than as integrated discourse.

What is humiliation? Humiliation and humility We will begin with some etymological and psychoanalytic examination of the term. To ‘humiliate’ is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Brown, 1993, p. 1277), to injure the dignity or self-respect of someone. The word ‘humiliation’ carries both the active and passive meanings: it is the act of humiliating, and the condition of being humiliated. And there is also a fundamental ambiguity around the etymology of the word. The meaning of ‘humiliate’ as an attack on dignity arose in the eighteenth century. Prior to that it had a somewhat different meaning, based on that of the closely related word ‘humble’ – it meant to make humble. ‘Humble’ could and still does carry possible connotations of abasement or inferiority, but also has more positive meanings which are probably its predominant ones: meanings of modesty, meekness and civility (as in ‘Your humble servant’). Indeed the word ‘humility’, which has generally positive connotations, means ‘the quality of being humble’ rather than the state of being humiliated. So our language has some difficulty in cleanly separating the good from the bad here, with the same root (the Latin word for ‘low’, humilis – derived from ‘humus’, ground or earth, though possibly also related to ‘homo’, man) being used for the desirable quality of humility and the undesirable act or state of humiliation. In psychoanalytic terms this ambiguity could be explained by the difficulty of giving up our infantile belief that we are the centre of the universe. Overcoming this infantile narcissism is in effect the task of acquiring a basic humility or humbleness. For the individual who cannot relinquish narcissism, having to accept reality and be one frail human among others is a humiliation. So the fundamental task of psychic development, as seen by psychoanalysis, could perhaps be described as the acquisition of humility. The emergence from infantile omnipotence requires us to acknowledge, at some unconscious level, our dependency as individuals and our vulnerability. There are of course powerful compensations for this: the person who has shed the defence of omnipotent phantasy acquires a reality sense, and a grounded or humble way of being in the world. But the narcissistic wound is always a deep one, and, for many, may never heal sufficiently. Whence, perhaps, the blurring in language between humility and humiliation: we can see our language as expressing the narcissistic inability to

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distinguish between the two. Where omnipotence has not been adequately relinquished, and the wound has not therefore healed, there is much greater scope for the everyday capacity for humility to slip into something quite different: the experience of humiliation. The well-humbled person will have a resilient self-respect based in the knowledge that he or she has grown up and has been able to move on, to an extent, from the narcissistic wound. The humble person will feel the rebuffs and put-downs of everyday life, but in a proportionate way. However, the person whose inner capacity for humility has not securely developed may respond to the same provocations with a more catastrophic experience of humiliation, a reprise of the loss of infantile omnipotence which was never sufficiently worked through. Humiliation and shame Humiliation can be distinguished from shame, though not infrequently the terms are used more or less interchangeably by many writers, including those in the psychoanalytic tradition.3 Mollon (2002), for example, sees shame, or humiliation, as a core experience arising from a failure of maternal responsiveness to the infant’s communications. Following Winnicott, Mollon proposes that if the mother’s gaze does not convey recognition and acceptance of the baby’s being and of its self-experience, then feelings of unreality and of shame will be visited upon the infant. ‘Shame arises . . . from exposure of the self when this is not met with the expected or hoped for empathy.’ Developmentally, then, ‘the cure for states of shame and humiliation is empathy’ (Mollon, op. cit., p. 20). Let us compare this with the suggestion outlined above as to the origins of humiliation. This was that the most fundamental origin of the experience of humiliation is in the essential intolerability of the world of others per se. The very existence of reality, of otherness, is unconsciously experienced as humiliating. This understanding of humiliation converges with Mollon’s account of shame.4 The OED definition of shame (a word with Northern European rather than Latin roots) also suggests considerable overlap with humiliation: shame is ‘the feeling of humiliation or distress arising from consciousness of something dishonourable or ridiculous in one’s own or another’s behaviour . . .’ (Brown, op. cit., p. 2810). So shame involves a belief or awareness that you (or someone you are linked with) have done something wrong. As with humiliation, there is a loss of dignity. However, this dictionary definition points to a difference between shame and humiliation, or at least in common usage of the terms. The difference is twofold. 1. In the case of shame, the loss of dignity need not be seen as inflicted from without by an injurious or abusive attack. Instead it is, or can be, self-inflicted. Indeed, the OED indicates that it is brought about by some

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foolish or wrongful behaviour on the part of the shamed one. Shame typically involves a strong moral dimension; when you are ‘ashamed’ of yourself, or of someone you are linked with, you are invoking a moral standard. So shame is intertwined with guilt. The humiliated person, in contrast, may be – or feel themselves to be – completely innocent and guilt-free. Indeed the condition of humiliation is often associated with an innocent victimhood. 2. You can be ashamed in your relationship to yourself; you don’t need an audience to feel shame. Humiliation, in contrast, requires you to imagine yourself in the minds of others; it is the experience of an intolerable lowering in the world of others. So there is a case for using the terms humiliation and shame differentially, and I will use the term humiliation to refer specifically to situations where the humiliated person feels himself or herself to be unjustly treated and to be demeaned in the eyes of others.

Consequences of chronic humiliation Psychological consequences An inner sense of constant humiliation may be so strong that the person may feel himself or herself to have been humiliated by someone when to other observers there has been no injury or attack from anyone else. But whether its root is in reality or fantasy, the experience of humiliation will be real in its consequences for that individual, and probably for others too. When extreme, it may be that no cure for it can be found in reality, no commutation into humility. It is experienced as absolute, as too overwhelming for there to be any mitigation of it in the real life that has to be lived. In cases of intolerable and immutable humiliation one possible consequence is an attempt by the individual to obliterate the experience. Whether in thought only or in deed also, this is likely to involve some revenge attack on whoever is regarded as responsible for the humiliation. This could be achieved in two ways. Both will involve some form of fundamentalism, some totalising, absolute and ultimately omnipotent and merciless view of the world. While there are many paths into fundamentalism, humiliation is arguably an increasingly important one. Firstly, the individual could turn to a fundamentalist creed which promised triumph over those persons experienced as the humiliator, who might in the rhetoric of the creed be morally condemned or whose political or military subjugation might be planned (the boss class is evil, the ruling class will be overthrown, the occupiers will be vanquished). For some people this kind of imaginary triumph might be enough, if it is delivered by a fundamentalism which brooked no doubts.

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Secondly, for others a revenge fantasy may need to be acted out, either as an application of a fundamentalist ideology or, for the individual who has not found a place in an ideologically defined struggle, as an alternative to the kind of relief which active membership of an ideologically defined group can bring. In the first instance we are referring mainly to terrorists, and in the second to non-ideological multiple murderers. Social and political consequences This brings us to the reason why humiliation is of growing importance: the dramatic real-world consequences of inner humiliation, and in particular the increasing risk of humiliation-driven tragedies in the form of terrorist attacks and other multiple killings. Accounts of some of the mass killers of recent years seem to provide evidence for the role of humiliation in their murderous paroxysms. Michael Ryan (14 dead, Hungerford, 1987) slaughtered people after a sexual advance he had made to a woman was rejected. Thomas Hamilton (17 dead, Dunblane, 1996) was enraged at having his access to young boys restricted. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (13 dead, Columbine, 1999) set on the path to their massacre after being arrested and reprimanded. Robert Steinhaeuser (17 dead, Erfurt, 2002) killed at his school on the day of an exam he had been prevented from taking for faking excuse notes. Cho Seung-Hui (32 dead, Virginia Tech, 2007) was ‘forced’ to kill fellow students by whom he felt continually belittled. Pekka-Eric Auvinen (8 dead, Tuusula, 2007) was another excluded loner, as was his acquaintance and imitator Matti Saari (10 dead, Kauhajoki, 2008). Of course these are all complicated cases not reducible to a single factor, but the prima facie case seems strong for a sustained analysis of the importance of humiliation in many such tragedies, as underlying problem and sometimes also as trigger. The same can be said for many recent examples of terrorist attacks. The psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has made frequent use of the theme of humiliation in theorising the nature of nationalist, ethnic and religious tensions. He stresses the importance of large-group identities in sustaining conflicts, and the construction of these identities around actual or mythical events in the history of the group (Volkan, 2004). Sometimes these are ‘chosen glories’, military or political triumphs which can be the nucleus for aggrandised or omnipotent self-experience among the group. But often they are ‘chosen traumas’, shared humiliations or rather fantasies of shared humiliations since they may have occurred long before the births of contemporary group members, and/or have no relation to their own lives. These are transmitted across the generations not as memories but as injured self-images (ibid., p. 48). Large-group identities, argues Volkan, are – unlike many other social identities we acquire – intimately connected to core personal identities, and so feelings associated with them are experienced as of absolute importance to the individual (ibid., p. 33). A shared trauma can thus generate a sense of

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personal humiliation. The individual experiencing this may never have been personally, directly humiliated; what is needed is for there to be an identification with the humiliated group (or with the group as it is imagined to be, i.e., with a fantasy image of it). For the first cohorts of Palestinian suicide bombers, experiences of humiliation were often direct, but the 9/11, 7/7 and 21/7 bombers, and others convicted of terrorism offences in the UK (e.g., Saajid Badaat, Dhiran Barot and Richard Reid) have not been individuals with direct experience of oppressive regimes or occupations. Nonetheless, the conviction of humiliation is a recurrent theme in the self-valedictory videos left by the bombers and the other limited materials which provide some evidence about their states of mind. The Web sites and DVDs which are known to play an important part in the recruitment and development of jihadi terrorists are replete with images and narratives of the humiliation of Muslims. The impact of the group identity is not only in confirming and foregrounding the nature of a problem which is anyway already troubling the mind of the individual, for whatever reason. It can also be the solution to that problem, for example, if it promises, via continuing struggle of some sort, a negation of the humiliation. The potential Islamist terrorist is promised the reversal of the gnawing inner humiliation into a publicly proclaimed glory, via the status of martyr, and into effortless sexual conquest in paradise. The psychology of terrorism This kind of analysis of the motivations of terrorists of course raises the much-debated question of whether a language of pathology is appropriate for talking about terrorists or whether they should be seen as ‘normal’. A number of psychologists have taken the latter view, which I have criticised elsewhere (Richards, 2004). However we can agree one thing with the proponents of this idea (see, e.g., Crenshaw, 2000; Horgan, 2005; Kennedy, 2006; Silke, 2003) which is that there is no single type of terrorist personality or pathology. The forms of terrorism are too diverse for that to be possible. And further, we can agree with Silke that: ‘Ultimately it is the combined impact of a number of factors that pushes and pulls someone into becoming a terrorist, and these factors will vary . . .’ (2003, p. 34). However Silke would not agree with the further proposition that one of these factors must always be some psychological predisposition to or capacity for murderous destructiveness. Yet his own discussion of ‘becoming a terrorist’ gives considerable prominence to the psychology of vengeance. He focuses on direct experiences of attacks on self or family leading to revenge motives, but notes that all that is necessary is for the proto-terrorist to identify with some victims of a perceived oppressor or enemy. Truth and reality may have no place at all in this identificatory process, and in the mental logic by which the terrorist-to-be draws up the

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charge-sheet against that enemy. But what is necessary is a burning sense of victimhood, that is, of being a member of a broad class of people (e.g., the Palestinians, the Tamils, the Catholics of Northern Ireland or Muslims the world over) who are victims of political and military oppression. This in itself though is not enough to create a terrorist; there must also be a desire for vengeance, for retributive violence. While there are many people who feel themselves to be victims, most do not develop terrorist ambitions. This is where the element of humiliation comes in, as a factor pushing the individual towards revenge. This is a point at which we can see the intrinsic role of psychological factors stemming from the individual’s history, not from current circumstances. Even the most intense, direct experiences of oppression do not necessarily lead to desires for vengeance which, moreover, are acted upon. There has to be some added ingredient, some personal take on life, which converts anger at a perceived situation in the world, and at an oppressor, into a plan to exact retribution. If the person has a tendency to feel crushingly humiliated, born of early experiences within a family, this can be grafted on to the sense of identification with an alleged victim group, and lead the person to work up a capacity to engage in retributive attack. While there may be an instrumental rationale for this, it has the symbolic value to the individual concerned of being able to purge his or her self, in a triumphant blaze of glory, of the crippling sense of being a humiliated victim. The experience of humiliation is deeply embedded not only in the mindset of militant Islamism but, according to Telhami (2004), in public attitudes in the Arab and Muslim worlds, which include ‘a sense of deep despair and humiliation’ connected by people with US foreign policy. The Israeli presence in Palestine is usually taken as the major real contemporary occasion for this, to which the presence of occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can be added, all being set by both al-Qaeda and the US against the backdrop of the historical humiliation of the Crusades (Fontan, 2006). For bin Laden, his own account is that the American presence in Saudi Arabia was a major factor in his own developing sense of the humiliation of Islam. Volkan (2004) has a different suggestion, albeit somewhat speculative, that bin Laden’s basic humiliation is far more personal, stemming partly from the fact that his mother was a Syrian who was not accepted by bin Laden senior’s other wives, all Saudis, and was humiliatingly sent away to the north of the country, where Osama followed after his father’s death. Whatever the importance of that as a pathogenic factor for Osama bin Laden, there is evidence that a deep feeling of humiliation and a desire for vengeance are important factors in determining their choice of the terrorist vocation. These may be the product of early relationships and upbringing rather than any geopolitical reality, but are then transferred onto perceptions of Western attacks on Islam and on Muslims. So overall there is for various

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reasons (historical, political and psychological) a deep investment in the selfexperience of victimisation and humiliation. This is continually stimulated and mobilised by people who Lindner (2006) calls ‘humiliation entrepreneurs’, the global networks of activists who catalyse, support and monitor the development of terrorist volunteers. However the parameters within which global terrorism operates mean that the organisational structure of al-Qaeda must be very fluid, with the amplification and harnessing of humiliation being conducted substantially through the Web and through DVDs as much as through direct contact with radical preachers and plotters (Awan, 2007; Knorr Cetina, 2005; Richards, 2007). This leads us to examine the importance of the media generally in the vicissitudes of feelings of humiliation. Humiliation and the media Jihadi DVDs are one way in which contemporary screenings of humiliation are highly consequential. But inevitably, images of humiliation also appear in the Western media. The media are at the centre of our emotional public sphere, and the content of our national news media is something which in principle at least we have some influence over. There are several obvious examples of images of humiliation which have had major consequences, whether they have been of actual humiliations being inflicted or whether their content has been felt by some audiences to humiliate them. They all concern Islam, as it is in the relations between Islam and the West that the dynamics of humiliation seem to have their clearest expression at present on the global stage. Firstly, the making by the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh of a film critical of Islamic culture led to his murder and to social tensions in the Netherlands. Secondly, the ‘Danish cartoons’ lampooning Islam, though many national media self-censored themselves and did not publish them, led to international tensions and many deaths at demonstrations. This controversy was, for many of those Muslims who were roused to anger by the cartoons, basically about the humiliation of the prophet, of Islam and all Muslims by the arrogant non-Islamic world. And thirdly the Abu Ghraib images have arguably fed terrorism globally and restricted the possible outcomes of the conflict in Iraq. Gow (2007) is one of a number of scholars, in security studies and international relations as well as in media studies, who argue that media images are now the decisive weapon in mediatised conflicts. Gow’s prime example was the images of Abu Ghraib, which, he says, have made it impossible for America to win in Iraq. It is widely believed that these images undermine any claim for the legitimacy of the American presence in Iraq, thus turning global opinion against it.5

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The rationale for the use of the Abu Ghraib images by Western media is not of course to add to the humiliation of Muslims, but to expose the wrongdoings of the occupying military. So keen have sections of the Western media been to do this that they have published and broadcast faked images and stories of abuses which never occurred.6 Yet while the motive for publishing these images may be self-critique by the West, their appearance has a similar meaning in one major respect to that of images of service personnel paraded triumphantly by their captors. When Iran has broadcast images of Western captives we have protested at their humiliation. Fired by antiwar sentiments, our media appear to have overlooked the possible impact of the Abu Ghraib images on audiences who might identify with the Arab or Muslim bodies being abused. And it is not only liberal Western journalists wishing to attack their own governments who are interested in seeing these images out there; the jihadi recruiters or ‘humiliation entrepreneurs’ also benefit from them being widely published. This is one place where the rockets come down. Consumers of these images see an idiotic and brutal American military and an impersonal mass of degraded flesh. For many non-Islamic people in the West the most meaningful image may be of the callous inanity of the military personnel, who shamefully represent us in the photographs and signify the worst of the West. For Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims, however, it is the naked and dominated bodies which can most directly be identified with and which give the photographs the primary meaning of a humiliation which the viewer of the images vicariously shares. Every time one of these images is presented in the media, there is a risk that the cultural presence of this particular humiliation is intensified, and that for some people their investment in a Muslim or Arab self-experience as humiliated victim is topped up a little. This will serve to maintain general anger levels, and also possibly add to the potential for another terrorist to emerge. The globalisation of the news media, and especially the power given by the Web to take content from anywhere and present it instantly to anyone, means that the vicarious experience of humiliation offered by these images is readily available almost everywhere. There are of course many other images, apart from those from Abu Ghraib, which are available for this, in that they dramatise the subjugation of Muslims to the occupying forces. These include the examination of Saddam Hussain by an American medic (the broadcast of which was a striking example of poor public diplomacy or emotional governance), the toppling of the Saddam statue and the rout of the Iraqi National Guard. Of course Saddam and his regime are not well regarded by most Muslims, but these images might nonetheless be conscripted into the narrative of the West as humiliator. Specifically, the anonymity of the Abu Ghraib victims and their naked humanity make them readily usable as figures to identify with, and to represent an innocent Muslim or Arab identity violated by American brutality.

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The availability of these images on the Web does not render insignificant their appearance in edited national news media. While the Web is bringing major changes to the consumption of news, it has not displaced the role of the leading broadcast and print media as key definers of the public sphere. The journalistic and editorial practices of these media are therefore of great importance for the emotional regulation of the public as a whole, and thereby of component groups within it, including those groups who may invigorate terrorism by condoning, supporting or contributing to it. Better practice by Western media would probably involve no use of visual images such as Abu Ghraib. The story needed to be told, but the visuals are superfluous to the facts. Yet they are powerful inputs to the emotional public sphere, and every repetition of one of these images as a gratuitous accompaniment to a news item could add a little to the pressures towards radicalisation. So from an emotional governance point of view, more restraint in the screening of actual humiliation by Western media might often be a good thing. Whether such restraint should also apply to images which are felt by some to be humiliating because they are blasphemous involves additional and different considerations. But in any case the influence of more restraint, while probably worth it, is going to be limited, since at least in liberal democracies there is no controlling the circulation of digital images. We need to think much more broadly, about the capacity our culture has for dealing with experiences of humiliation, and how our media might enhance that capacity. More places in mediaspace where experiences of humiliation of all kinds can be represented, discussed and explored could help strengthen countervailing discourses to that of revenge. Different media frames for processing the experience of humiliation could be offered across a number of genres, and help contain the more destructive forces inevitably linked with it. However in one respect the very development of the media militates against this. Humiliation occurs in the eyes of others; the humiliated person feels demeaned by others. Revenge must therefore also be seen by others. And the existence of the Web means that a vast global audience is potentially available to any individual who seeks it, in a way that simply wasn’t there a decade or less ago. The self-valedictory videos of Mohammed Siddique Khan (the London 7/7 bomber) and of Cho Seung-Hui (Virginia Tech) are very similar in a number of respects, one of which is that they demonstrate the possibility for a humiliated person to command public attention with a triumphant assertion of their transcendence of humiliation, in their exercise of the power of death over life. So glorious or infamous revenge as a response to humiliation has now easy technological realisation. Against this, there is another key development in the contemporary world which can help modulate the experience of humiliation, and reduce the chances of it eventuating in explosive destruction. This is the growth of

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therapeutic culture, which (unlike critics of it such as Furedi, 2003) I define positively as an increase in a society’s emotional capital, in its resources for understanding and managing emotional life. The idea of ‘emotional governance’ is an attempt to theorise and to extend one dimension of this development. A therapeutic culture insists on trying to understand and contain even the most destructive of emotions, to give them a place in an inclusive democracy of feelings. A therapeutic approach to humiliation seeks to neutralise it with some assurance of continued inclusion in the human community.7 Representing that is a more complex task than reproducing images of humiliation itself, but hopefully not an impossible one, and the media have as great a potential part to play in that as they have done in staging dramatisations of revenge.

Notes 1. See Richards (2009) for a fuller discussion of this concept. 2. This distinction between an individual–psychological focus and a psychological analysis of sociological phenomena is not of course an absolute one. Yates’s analysis, for example, has implications for the motives of the individual actors involved in political communications of the sort she discusses. 3. Humiliation and shame are core concerns in psychoanalysis, but are not a central concept for most writers (Mollon notwithstanding, see also Erikson, 1965/1950; Klein, 1991; Morrison, 1989; Pines, 1995; Rathbone, 2001). It is not uncommon to find no indexing of any of these terms in psychoanalytic texts, yet descriptions of the key psychic processes and developmental stages often make frequent reference to them. 4. There remains though a difference of perspective. Mollon sees shame as a reaction to the fundamental injury to the self in a lack of maternal recognition. I am suggesting that we see humiliation as based in the unwillingness or incapacity of the individual to be humbled. This is a difference between a Winnicottian and a more Kleinian perspective; in the former, the mother’s unresponsiveness is held to be ultimately responsible. In the latter, the individual’s omnipotence is the problem. We can be agnostic about the origins of that omnipotence, so need not pose a Kleinian instinctivist view against Mollon’s Winnicottian environmentalism. But the emphasis on the responsibility of the individual, coupled with an agnosticism about ultimate cause, is a more helpful language to use when we venture to apply a psychoanalytic approach to political issues. 5. Nonetheless, at the time of writing, as security continues to improve in Iraq, the overall outcome of the invasion is still to be determined. 6. As in the case of the 2004 Daily Mirror photos of a British solider apparently urinating on an Iraqi prisoner. One of the best known ‘Abu Ghraib’ images is also of doubtful provenance, and there was also a false story from Afghanistan about the Koran being flushed down a toilet. 7. There is already a substantial body of psychosocial theory which links humiliation to different modes of exclusion from human community, for example, Scheff (1994) on social ties; Taylor (1993) and Honneth (1996) on recognition; Margalit (1996) on decency; and Lindner (2006) on dignity. Combined with the psychoanalytic understanding of humiliation in early development this work may help to identify

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socio-cultural conditions in which explosive humiliation can be more effectively contained.

References Awan, A. N. (2007) ‘Virtual jihadist media: Function, legitimacy, and radicalising efficacy’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10: 389–408. Brown, L. (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 4th edn. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2 vols. Crenshaw, M. (2000) ‘The psychology of terrorism: An agenda for the 21st century’. Political Psychology, 21: 405–420. Erikson, E. (1965[1950]) Childhood and Society. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Fontan, V. (2006) ‘Hubris, history and humiliation: Quest for utopia in post-Saddam Iraq’. Social Alternatives, 25: 56–60. Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London, Routledge. Gow, J. (2007) ESRC Shifting Securities Seminar. London, Frontline Club, December. Honneth, A. (1996) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Horgan, J. (2005) The Psychology of Terrorism. London, Routledge. Kennedy, D. B. (2006) ‘A précis of suicide terrorism’. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 3(4). http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol3/iss4/2 Klein, D. (1991) ‘The humiliation dynamic’. Journal of Primary Prevention, 12: 93–121. Knorr Cetina, K. (2005) ‘Complex global microstructures: The new terrorist societies’. Theory, Culture and Society, 22: 213–234. Lindner, E. (2006) Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, CT, Greenwood. Margalit, A. (1996) The Decent Society. Harvard, Harvard University Press. Mollon, P. (2002) Shame and Jealousy: The Hidden Turmoils. London, Karnac. Morrison, A. (1989) Shame: The Underside of Narcissism. Hillsdale, NJ, Analytic Press. Pines, M. (1995) ‘The universality of shame: A psychoanalytic approach’. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 11: 346–357. Rathbone, J. (2001) Anatomy of Masochism. New York, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Richards, B. (2004) ‘What is psychoanalysis for?’. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 9: 149–158. Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, B. (2009) ‘News and the emotional public sphere’, in S. Allan, (ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. London, Routledge. Scheff, T. (1994) Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism and War. Boulder, CO, Westview Press. Silke, A. (ed.) (2003) Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and Its Consequences. Chichester, Wiley. Taylor, C. (1993) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Telhami, S. (2004) ‘Of power and compassion’. Metaphilosophy, 35: 303–312. Volkan, V. (2004) Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror. Charlottesville, VA, Pitchstone.

6 ‘As if ’ Intimacy? Mediated Persona, Politics and Gender Jessica Evans

Introduction This chapter investigates the fantasies of intimacy underlying the identity and evaluation of modern politicians in the context of a mediated public sphere. It does so from within a psychosocial framework that takes seriously how the technical devices through which political personae are mediated and brought to the attention of an audience form the preconditions for particular forms of emotional ‘affect’. This is supported by reference to the historical emergence of the idea of ‘personality’ and the display of ‘self’ in public life. What then follows is an exploration of the personae of political ‘woman’, which delineates how conceptions of the political female in public life is often a puzzle or even paradoxical. The argument here is based on the postulation that politicians function for the public ‘as if’ they were celebrities and that this is a function of intense media scrutiny and the institutionalisation of public relations within political journalism, political parties and government (Corner and Pels, 2003; Marshall, 1997, p. 19). It has been necessary to bracket the historical question of whether today’s ‘celebrity culture’ is substantially different from that of previous historical moments (Evans, 2005, pp. 37–55). Nonetheless, it is relevant to refer to the persuasive argument that the boundaries within the social system between different institutional and social spheres of interest and value (e.g., between news and entertainment, between public and private) are less demarcated than ever before (Lash, 1990). In an important sense, George Bush and Tony Blair, unlike Louis XIV or Elizabeth I, do not wield personal power of the charismatic type to which sociologist Max Weber referred, because in representative democracies physical person and role are demarcated such that what they can and cannot do is constrained by various legislative and judicial procedures and institutions (Weber, 1991).1 However, as we will see, politics has become infused by the values and interests of media organisations themselves, and this is because the power to represent politics and government affairs has shifted 72

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from political leaders to the media (Corner and Pels, 2003). Accordingly, in this personalisation of politics powerful sets of values that are historically bound up with celebrity, such as intimacy, confession and revelation of personal lives, are ‘leaked’ into political life more generally (see Evans, 2005; Pels, 2003). This is manifested in the emphasis upon identity politics in the recent US elections, which forms the case study. As it indicates, female agents in the public sphere have a particular pact to make with personalisation.

‘As if’ – the mediated persona A well-known quotation attributed to Cary Grant runs thus: ‘Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. I want to be Cary Grant’ (in McCann, 1996, p. 6). Grant is bemused about a paradox: that his image has become a matter of public ownership and, moreover, is an artificial invention, but nonetheless one supposedly derived from his private self. This leads him to doubt his own aspirations to achieving an identity for himself of ‘Cary Grant’, since ‘his’ public character is stitched together from a number of colourful representations that circulate quite independently of the real, living person that is supposedly the authentic locus of this person. To the extent that this is true, Grant feels alienated from his public image. This is a good example of the concept of ‘mediated persona’ (‘persona’ in Latin meaning a ‘mask’ worn by an actor), meaning the distinctive image of a person built from the sum of their mediated appearances. It is not just actors such as Grant who have trouble finding themselves in among their representations, for fans are caught up in this too, writing to stars as if they really are the characters they play. However, this rather literal (con)fusion between persona and actor distracts us from some of the routine and less pathological meanings of mediated persona in everyday life. These pose a rather different set of questions about identification with personae that can best be understood as part of a structure of ‘disavowal’. In a Freudian sense, ‘disavowal’ refers to the mental act of rejecting the reality of a perception (1984[1940]). The ‘as if’ mentality functions as disavowal’, constituted by a splitting between knowledge and belief: one simultaneously ‘knows’ something and denies it, in an active not-knowing of something that on another level one knows very well. This state of mind could be said to underlie a central aspect of celebrity representation in many a celebrity magazine: the oscillation of investment between person/actor and character (for celebrities), person and role (for politicians) that expresses the impossible belief that one has been able to glimpse behind the mask of their performance to something more private and authentic beyond.

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Bringing persona closer The concept of mediated persona (Evans, 2005, pp. 17–19) is useful as a description of today’s media personalities because it directs us to the mutually constitutive relationship between celebrity persona and the media. Here, it is worth noting the nuances of Manuel Castells’s argument, on the peculiar features of modern mediated communications: ‘It is not that the media “controls” politics as such, rather that they have come to create and constitute the space in which politics now chiefly happens for most people in so-called “advanced” societies’ (in Blumler and Gurevitch, 2000, p. 166). Castells instructs us to look closely at the characteristics of the media to assess how it is likely to alter the terms and conditions on which politics is conducted. First, media mediate by providing an extension to ordinary perception and thus exceed the limitations of our natural capacities (Benjamin, 1968). The telephoto lens enables us to see a politician’s nervous sweat close up, for example. Second, the defining characteristic of mass communications is that it is a structured and mediated situation in which individuals are linked together through a flow of information that is largely one-way and diffuse, aimed at a limitless range of potential recipients. Hence quasi-interactive, in the words of John Thompson (1995). In an important and much-cited article published in 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1993) introduced the concept of ‘para-social interaction’ to describe the relationships that are formed between people who experience each other only through the mass media. What is specific to the new audio-visual mass media is that they offer the illusion of face-to-face interaction with the performer, whether these are fictional characters, political figures or ‘personalities’ and performers. In fact, there is a whole category of media personnel who are encountered as if they are your personal friends. The news presenter says, direct to camera, that she or he will ‘see you tomorrow’. This peculiar function of television and radio personnel to maintain an intimate, familiar relationship with the audience by direct address to camera – as if speaking personally to you at home – creates a sense that there is reciprocity between the home viewer/listener and the media personnel. This as if quality hides the fact that there is no actual reciprocity, and the interaction is entirely controlled by the medium. Although we term it mass communication, it is individually received by people in their own domestic contexts and therefore has a highly individualised mode of reception, which is underpinned by the personalised and often informal styles used by those presenters, politicians or journalists who address their viewers and listeners as if they are in a one-to-one relationship with them. Following Horton and Wohl, Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) argues that the intense staging of the political as para-social intimacy in conditions of the 24 hour flow of information has essentially undermined the high status of politicians, which was in the past derived from their unreachability and distance as well as from the power they had to control media access. This

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has led to a simulated closeness for citizen-viewers in which the onus is on the routine monitoring of the everyday ‘responsiveness’ of politicians to ‘our’ demands, that is, politicians who must be seen to be speaking ‘directly’ to the viewer-electorate (note that the ‘our’ is an unexamined convergence between media viewers and media organisations who act as their apparent representatives).

Celebrity and the psychosocial While from a sociological perspective we may agree that society consists of institutions of various sorts, which are more or less powerful and exist as collective entities over the heads of any one individual, these are, from a psychosocial viewpoint, mediated much of the time by distinctive personal presences. And, because of the identificatory power of para-social devices, these personae routinely and regularly fit into the rhythm of everyday life. They are presented to us as if we know them personally; indeed they may become as or more familiar to us than work colleagues, relatives or neighbours, to the extent that we may feel we ‘know’ intimate facts about their relationships and aspirations. To the extent that this ‘as if’ quality is true of how viewers and readers experience celebrity persona as mediated but nonetheless having a presence in their everyday lives, then one can say that celebrities possess or embody the public sphere, and thus ‘represent’ society or ‘the social’ to its collection of members. In important ways, celebrities as dramatis personae are central to the psychological management of a population. They can be absolutely crucial to the containment of destructive social attitudes and feelings (Richards, 2007), but more broadly they may betray a political subtext, be a ‘veiled way of putting into public circulation certain things which do not easily admit of public acknowledgement’ (Rose, 1999, p. 10). For example, the public debate following the death of Princess Diana threw into sharp relief the question of how the British State embodied by the Government and the Monarchy should respond to public grief. The Queen’s dispassionate and formal response announced from Balmoral would have been appropriate in a pre-electronic age but was seen as lacking in feeling and decorum. With the help of press advisor Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair, whose style in high office was notably informal, coined the sound-bite ‘the people’s Princess’, which exactly resonated with the mood of the public. Blair’s ‘human’ reaction, in contrast to the Queen’s detachment, echoed Diana’s many distinctive and informal expressions of compassion during her lifetime. Diana had converted a form of femininity, maternal love, into a public virtue and now Blair could capitalise on the reaction to Diana’s death. In identifying her feminine virtues with his ideas of a compassionate Britain, he could imply that the ‘new labour’ administration would represent a more personalised relationship with the State in contrast to the formal and impersonal qualities of official life under the old welfare state bureaucracies.

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New Labour’s populist politics managed to create the illusion that the barriers between the public and those that govern them could be broken by means of a cosy identification. Now, we could take a moral or ideological-critique stance to public persona and celebrification, which is arguably the predominant tone of cultural studies literature on celebrity. Here, the critic seeks to uncover the machinery of how celebrities get produced and, it is hoped, in this process of unmasking the charismatic power of celebrities will wither away or, at the very least, celebrities will be exposed for their part in distorting the integrity of public life. One of the first writers to do this was Daniel Boorstin, in his The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961). The widespread reproduction of images in photography, film and television in the twentieth century, he argues, has meant that appearance has become more important than substance, and that today’s celebrities are pure fabrications, without innate talent, completely reliant on the publicity machine and responsible for trivialising culture. However, this approach, even if were historically accurate (Burke, 1992), does not account for the deeper psychological levels of attachment and identification that actually stitch together social life, as can be seen in the example of Diana. From a psychosocial perspective then, persons and personalities may not be peripheral, a diversion from the study of more substantial institutions and social infrastructures. For it is a fact of political life that personality becomes cathected by the public or by audiences, a reference to the Freudian use of cathexis in which the subject invests emotional energy and meaning into people or objects and away from self. Examples might include religious believers, art lovers and committed members of political parties. In politics unconscious responses may be mobilised towards personal qualities of politicians rather than their policies. A psychoanalytic approach to subjectivity is sensitive to the ways in which collective fantasies are put into operation, transmitted back and forth between individual internal worlds and the ‘social matrix’, which all comprise ‘society’ as a collective imaginative effort (Figlio and Richards, 2005). If we take this view seriously, it means acknowledging that persona in politics is not something that can be dismissed as epiphenomena, nor, from a sociological viewpoint, discounted. The source of celebrity power lies in part with audiences, for viewers and readers and listeners lend meaning to celebrities and in so doing supply something of themselves, as individuals and as members of a class, ethnic group or gender.

Public and private selves If, as set out earlier, the idea of intimacy is central to modern para-social communication, then it is definitive in celebrity. In The Fall of Public Man

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(1977) Richard Sennett argued that since the nineteenth century social relationships of all kinds have become more real to people, more believable and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person (p. 259). Previously, in the eighteenth century, public life was constituted through the metaphor of acting in which interpretations of people’s actions did not require one to penetrate through to a notion of their private person. Artificial conventions in dress codes, for example, were a clear marker of social position rather than of inner ‘personality’ and ascertaining the meaning and sincerity of utterances and gestures took place without reference to the person’s inner life. But, with the emergence in the nineteenth century of the modern notion of ‘personality’, appearances were seen as revealing and expressing the real self: masks became faces (Sennett, 1977, p. 152). This, he argues, has led to a narcissistic emphasis on motivation, leading directly to the secular charisma of the modern political persona: ‘one must surmount the disability of appearing to have a merely political will’ (p. 270). A politician must be ‘believed in’ and in order for this to be so, she/he must demonstrate visible qualities of integrity and sound sentiment. Consequently, politicians continually risk de-legitimation because failings in one sphere of their lives such as the part of their lives that are conducted as private persons are taken as a sign that the whole person is no good (p. 286). Moreover, publics became spectators rather than witnesses, and regarded as an audience that must be mollified or pleased (Sennett, 1977, pp. 260–261; Whillock, 1999, p. 7). Telescoping to a far more recent time scale, sociologist Cas Wouters (1999, p. 424) has shown how, from the 1950s onwards, a more ego-driven sense of self has gradually predominated, so that in the process of ranking or social stratification the importance of personality capital has become more decisive for personal success. Public figures have become more outer-directed (Reisman et al., 1950): they need assurance that they are emotionally in tune with others. This reflexive personality is manifested in the ‘identity politics’ that predominates in some political arenas today. Thus in what has been termed ‘ontic’ politics (Elshtain, 1997, p. 175) persons are judged more by what they are, so how they perform that identity becomes crucial.

Political woman in a mediated public sphere So far we have explained how the technical devices of the communication media is structured to deliver quasi-intimate relationships between viewer and viewed, and set out a socio-historical summary of the emergence of a modern idea of personality. A psychosocial approach would take interest in the fact that this ‘as if’ structure of relating, this intimacy-at-a-distance at the root of mediated persona, is a split attitude. But it involves no more by way of an illusion than the way that children turn their toys into imaginary or real persons, since from a psychoanalytical perspective all mental activity is

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conceived as an internalised relationship between personified objects. Relations, affects and conflicts can with fluidity be transferred to new objects. Perhaps this takes us a bit nearer to an explanation of the very real feeling of connection that people can have to those they do not know. Useful psychoanalytic concepts here are that of projection and identification, where the feeling of connection comes about because something of the ego is perceived in someone else. The subject imagines that the other embodies qualities or defects that belong to him or herself. Identification occurs when there is a confusion between self and other – hence the psychoanalytic term ‘projective identification’, where the person is depleted by a dogged clinging to the object in which the parts of the self have been located. In what ways is political woman caught up in certain of these processes of identification? One of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century was that women ostensibly represented the irrational aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space, which was associated with reason (as opposed to passion). Even a cursory examination of mediated persona provides enough evidence to show that women still contend with double standards. In presenting themselves as public persons, they must make finely tuned decisions about the nuances of gendered meanings. In public office they may struggle to find a persona that the press and the public will accept as ‘authentic’. The following short case study2 takes the recent US elections as its subject and is based on observations of the nuances in the personae of two candidates, Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin, who played or were perceived by the media to play (the difference is irrelevant from a psychosocial perspective) different versions of public woman. A black presidential candidate (Obama) and a female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female Vice Presidential nomination on the Republican side, undercut what appeared to be the universalism of the old days of US politics. Given the vicissitudes of identity politics, there was a danger that for non-white and non-male candidates a perception would arise whereby the capacity of candidates to represent something beyond their own interests or personal identity was radically in doubt. After all, the precept of identity politics is that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’. The exception to this, it turned out, was Barack Obama, whose campaign overcame the reduction of his persona to the politics of identity in being able to resist a perception that he could only represent a non-white demographic. For Obama’s burden of representation was whether he could, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-white, not just the middle classes. Clinton’s burden was whether she could overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative. Could she attract more than just the feminist vote? Hilary Clinton’s campaign to be nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate suffered all along from a perception that she was calculated,

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contrived and overly macho. We will never know if the tearful episode on the eve of the New Hampshire primary election of January 2008 (where she beat rival Obama) was or was not calculated, a question hotly debated in the media. With a catch in her throat, Clinton said, ‘You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political, it’s not just public’ (Clinton, 2008). This presents us with a modern conundrum inflected by gender. We demand these days that politicians must act in such a way that is ‘true’ to their self, so here we have tears that signified spontaneity and personal expressiveness. But, those same tears risked being regarded as contrived, fake and merely tactical because Clinton’s use of her femininity was seen as inauthentic – she was masquerading as a man in the public eye. Here then is the double bind: if Clinton conducted herself in a male style, she risked disappointing those for whom having a woman candidate and president makes a difference. Of course she did not project the right kind of womanliness to attract Republican voters to the Democrat cause, having declared when Bill Clinton became president that she wouldn’t be the type of First Woman to bake. Would a man married to a female president even feel compelled to make a public statement about their role? Neither did she publicly share her pain about the Lewinsky episode, which some commentators attributed to her lack of appeal. If a woman is a strong leader she is at fault for not being a homemaker, but if she is a homemaker she is at fault for not having leadership qualities. The quality she needed to be a president – to hack it with the big boys – is the same quality that went against her. If women talk loudly they are shrill; if they talk softly they are overly feminine and weak. And Clinton as a woman was described in ways that could not, without uproar, be overtly used to describe Obama as a non-white; when a member of the audience at a John McCain campaign event asked the Senator ‘How do we beat the bitch?’ McCain’s smiling reply was ‘Excellent question’ (Wonkette Web site, 2008). It seems that Clinton’s Achilles’ heel was not about whether people thought she was capable, knowledgeable or rational; she was widely thought to be all these things, and these would be valued in a man. But these capacities were undermined by what was clearly a different and unconscious wish that she show some kind of deeper, truer feminine self. A perception grew that while Obama looked unforced and his speeches were born of deep conviction, we had a woman in Clinton whose political ambitions and ambitiousness were seen to question her very (feminine) humanity. These problems appear whenever women enter the public sphere, and not just in the domain of politics. For example, Kate McCann (whose daughter Madeleine was abducted in Portugal in summer 2007) complained that if she looked and acted more ‘maternally’ (Brown, 2007), she would have had more sympathetic media coverage. She was indeed judged incessantly by her demeanour, which was considered too much the ice queen; it was felt there should be a necessary link between outward appearance and conduct and inner life. Her inner turmoil, then, should have been visible, her

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feelings closer to the surface – via dishevelled clothes, lack of care for the self and tearful inarticulacy. But it was not, and because she exerted some control over her public self, she was regarded as quite possibly an irresponsible mother as well as a realistic suspect in her daughter’s abduction. It is pertinent that there was no similar doubt about the integrity of her husband: Gerry McCann was not the butt of endless innuendo even though he had remained equally emotionless and poker-faced in public appearances. There seems, then, to continue a very strong wish to question the motives and even ethical capacity of (middle-class, professional) women once they step into the public, for which read that in doing so they relinquish the maternal, the instinctive and the emotional – typically regarded as qualities belonging to private life. As was pointed out earlier, the 2008 American election was characterised by political parties who sought to use ‘identity politics’ (Elshtain, 1997, p. 175) concomitant with media organisations bent on the personalisation of politics. The Republican party selected Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska, because of her gender. This was the key factor in conveying a folksy political illiteracy to the Republican base. Identity-exploiting candidates such as Sarah Palin used whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters’ sense of cultural familiarity and to create solidarity on the basis of a common external enemy. Republican political machinery was active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited . . . The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president’(JWH, 2008). Palin’s identity-based advantages went beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son’ (JWH, 2008) but what is of course significant for Palin’s campaign is the extensive use of the personal as the rationale for political office. Of course she had traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, antigun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. These are of course the default positions of many a Republican candidate. Yet only a woman could have been billed a ‘guntoting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. Palin’s image was turned into an action doll range wearing a school girl uniform with a red bra and a gun holster. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner. Republican strategists were open in the hope that Palin would attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believed that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It is extraordinary to think that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite

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the fact she wears Republican clothes. Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all’ (Palin, 2008). In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans had so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary campaign. However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist, the main theme of her speeches were her own personal story, spliced with Hello!-style sentiments as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys . . . I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’ (Palin, 2008). Palin’s temporary reinvigoration of the Republican party base was due to the way her folksy persona could be seen to reflect a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her experience as a former town mayor and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all added up to the impression of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage. At the televised debate between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and girly coquettishness, at several points actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, un-ironically, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’ (Todd et al., 2008). Indeed, it is relevant to note that she had para-social screen expertise in her former career as a news presenter. As is pointed out in Chapter 7, the strategy of flirtatiousness typically coded as feminine is now acceptably incorporated into reflexive modern masculinity. But, whether it has the same status for females is debatable. Ignorance and shallowness does not have to be a woman but only a woman pace Palin could build her political credibility on the appeal of childlike or immature ignorance. Palin’s persona in particular brings to mind psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s (1929) concept of the masquerade. She was interested in how ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’ (1986, p. X). Womanliness and masquerade are indistinguishable for Riviere, as there is no natural, ontologically feminine woman lurking underneath this mask.

Concluding thoughts: Female public persona as a psychosocial problem This chapter has sought to relate the idea of ‘mediated intimacy’ or ‘as if’ forms of relating to the identity politics that underlie the selection, performance and evaluation of modern politicians. It has been argued that

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the management of female political personhood poses especial problems of (dis)belief, judgement and fantasy in the public mind, where contradictory demands are placed on women, who cannot possibly live up to them – indeed there is a powerful wish for women to fail at being in public and to perform the failure in public. One significant aspect of celebrity spectatorship, the perpetual shifting between private person and role (between mother and VP candidate in Palin, for example) is exacerbated in female political persona, where disavowal has a strong unconscious foothold. In contrast, male political candidates are regarded as having a more settled and integrated persona that transcends this ambivalence. Perhaps some light is shed on this if we consider how powerful governing concepts that organise the social world are always already filled with emotional connotations. In part, the contrast between public and private derives from the Latin origins of ‘public’ in pubes, the age of maturity when signs of puberty begin to appear. Only then does the child become qualified for public things, which also conveys the meaning ‘of or pertaining to the whole, done or made on behalf of the community as a whole’ (Elshtain, 1997, p. 167). A lingering problem remains for public-political woman: that her relative immaturity and association with the private (meaning ‘matters not wholly revealed’) all too often leads to a perceived regression to immaturity, to being childlike. Or, as in the case of Clinton, the perception of mimicking masculinity and being denigrated for discarding an authentically feminine ontic self. A further and more deeply psychoanalytical investigation, beyond the scope of this rather perfunctory introduction to the subject, might show that there are unconscious and powerful expectations of the feminine that vie in rather primitive ways with ideas of the ‘public’, and moreover that these persist even in times that we like to refer to as ‘modern’.

Notes 1. The sociologist Max Weber set out the dangers of charismatic individuals performing political functions over a century ago. He wanted to account for the ways in which the social order is legitimated, other than by sheer force. Charisma is one source of authority that involves devotion to the exceptional character of an individual. Specifically charismatic power exists independently of institutional and economic forms of legitimation. The opposite is the case too – Weber’s central point is that modern bureaucracies function well precisely because their authority does not rely on personalisation, so that procedures are objective, predictable and rationally deployed (Weber, 1991, pp. 246–248). 2. These observations derive from a series of social science blogs written for Open2.net, the online learning portal from the BBC and The Open University. I have retained the contemporary tone of the originals. See http://www.open2.net/ blogs/society/index.php?blog=10&author=62. Since charisma is so bound up with the living person who carries this authority, the power base they represent is precarious, vulnerable to any kind of harm occurring to that person, such as corruption or scandal.

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References Benjamin, W. (1968[1936]) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Arendt, H. (ed.) Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books). Blumler, J.G. and Gurevitch, M. (2000) ‘Rethinking the Study of Political Communication’, in Curran, J. and Gurevitch, M. (eds) Mass Media and Society, 3rd edition (London: Arnold). Boorstin, D. (1961) The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (London: Penguin). Brown, D. (2007) The Times Online, 17 October http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/article2671041.ece. Burke, P. (1992) The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Clinton, H. (2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl-W3IXRTHU&NR=1. Corner, J. and Pels, D. (eds) (2003) Media and the Restyling of Politics (London: Sage). Elshtain, J. (1997) ‘The Displacement of Politics’, in Weintraub, J. and Kumar, K. (eds) Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Evans, J. (2005) ‘Celebrity, Media, and History’, in Evans, J. and Hesmondhalgh, D. (eds) Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Buckingham: Open University Press). Figlio, K. and Richards, B. (2005) ‘The Containing Matrix of the Social’, American Imago, 60, 4, 407–428. Freud, S. (1940) ‘The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense’, in Richards, A. (ed.) On Metaphychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library, vol.11 (trans. Strachey, J.). Horton, D. and Wohl, R.R. (1993[1956]) ‘Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction’, extracted in Corner, J. and Hawthorne, J. (eds) Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader (London: Edward Arnold). JWH (2008) http://westbiop.blogspot.com/2008/08/deconstructing-palin-choice. html. Lash, S. (1990) Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge). Marshall, P.D. (1997) Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Society (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press). McCann, G. (1996) Cary Grant: A Class Apart (New York: Columbia University Press). Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Palin, S. (2008) ‘Nomination Acceptance Speech’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ americas/7597238.stm. Pels, D. (2003) ‘Aesthetic Representation and Political Style’, in Corner, J. and Pels, D. (eds) Media and the Restyling of Politics (Thousand Oaks: Sage). Reisman, D., Glazer, N. and Denney, R. (1961[1950]) The Lonely Crowd (Yale: Yale University Press). Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Riviere, J. (1986[1929]) ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in Burgin, V. et al. (eds) Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen). Rose, J. (1999) ‘The Cult of Celebrity’, New Formations, 36, 9–20. Sennett, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber and Faber). Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Todd, C., Murray, M., Montanaro, D. and Dann, C. (2008) ‘First Thoughts: Don’t Believe the Hype’. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/03/ 1487362.aspx.

84 Emotions in the Public Sphere Weber, M. (1991[1922]) ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, in Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge). Whillock, R.K. (1999) ‘Giant Sucking Sounds: Politics as Illusion’, in Slayden, D. and Whillock, R.K. (eds) Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World (London: Sage). Wonkette (2008) http://wonkette.com/politics/annals-of-the-obvious/mccain-hillaryisnt-your-problem-322341.php. Wouters, C. (1999) ‘Changing Patterns of Social Controls and Self-Controls’, British Journal of Criminology, 39, 3, Summer, 416–432.

7 Masculinity, Flirtation and Political Communication in the UK Candida Yates

Introduction: A psychosocial approach to flirtation, masculinity and political culture This chapter takes a psychosocial approach by using aspects psychoanalytic, social and cultural theory to explore the relationship between masculinity and flirtation within the context of party politics and public relations. For some, the study of flirtation might seem out of place in a volume that takes the study of emotion as its focus. Despite its pleasurable, playful connotations as a mode of communication, flirtation also signifies insincerity, connoting a lack of ‘true’ feeling and emotional depth. As Phillips (1994) argues, flirtation is associated with coquetry, dalliance and play, connoting a lack of seriousness or intention, as in the refusal to commit romantically, or, as in intellectual flirtation, the desire to move between different opinions and ideas. However, despite the negative, superficial connotations of flirtatious activity, flirtation also involves the play of emotion and thus deserves some attention in that context. For instance, flirting may be used as a strategy to manage difficult emotions evoked by desire for the other, and the pleasures aroused by it may also invoke an intense emotional response. As Miller (2003, p. 285) argues: ‘The psychic rewards of being seduced are many and deep’. These ‘rewards’ can include feelings of excitement, anticipation and desire. Yet flirtation may also induce feelings of confusion, annoyance and betrayal. As this chapter explores, there are clear analogies here with the current distrust of the UK electorate about the trustworthy-ness of MPs.1 Against a Western backdrop of masculinity in crisis (Bainbridge and Yates, 2005), the study of flirtation as a mode of communication, with its connotations of ambiguity and frustrated desire, provides a fascinating case study to explore the uncertainties of contemporary masculinities. Flirtation has a number of gendered meanings, often associated with femininity, and historically flirtatious women have exercised a power of sorts. While flirtatious heroines have received attention in film and media studies (see Kaye, 85

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2002), the role of the male flirt as anything other than caddish, cruel or vain remains less explored. Yet interrogating the image of the masculine flirt is interesting when applied to representations of male politicians in the UK where the lightweight, feminised connotations of the term ‘flirt’ sit uneasily with the electorate’s desire for the fantasy of authentic masculinity. This chapter applies these ideas to a discussion of UK political leaders Gordon Brown and David Cameron and other male politicians, where the desire for the ‘real thing’ as signified through images of masculinity has become a symbolic battleground in Western politics, a struggle that is largely played out in print and digital media.

A psychosocial understanding of flirtation, gender and cultural change The term ‘flirt’ can be traced back to the French term coquette, and from the eighteenth century, the nouns ‘coquette’ and ‘flirt’ tend to be associated in Britain with French aristocratic women (Kaye, 2002, p. 21). The feminine associations of the term ‘flirt’ also have nineteenth-century Darwinian roots, linked to the notion of women as ‘choosers’, who must do all they can to attract a mate. As a consequence, flirtatious men have often been pathologised and feminised as effeminate and hysterical (Kaye, 2002, p. 27). Throughout the nineteenth century, the links between sexual flirtation and the disreputable behaviour of the aristocracy versus that of the moral middle classes remain. However, Simmel (1909) argues that by the twentieth century, flirting is established as a classless phenomenon.2 Simmel links the growth of flirtatious behaviour in the twentieth century to the new social structures of modernity and the metropolitan life of the cities, where new opportunities for sociability and interaction emerge for brief, flirtatious encounters. Simmel’s description of the new flirtatious character type ‘who does not take anything seriously’ (1909, p. 147) evokes Baudelaire’s (1965) description of the contingency of modernity and city life and also Benjamin’s (1986) discussion of the flâneur, whose voyeuristic gaze allows him to live his life one step removed from the stresses of emotional engagement in a transitory context where the culture of contingency and the flirtatious attitude ‘what if?’ is developed, perhaps, as a defence against the losses and insecurities of modern life.3 Today, flirtation has increasingly become a metaphor for all aspects of life in the postmodern cultural context. For instance, some researchers in psychosocial studies link what they perceive to be an inability to sustain emotional commitment and cope with the disappointments of attachment and loss, with the prevailing emphasis of market values and consumer culture, together with the break down of traditional social structures such as the family (Craib, 1995; Lasch, 1979). Lasch (1979) argues that the latter has given rise to a narcissistic personality type that is unable to experience

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emotions in a way that feels authentic. The implication appears to be that we are all flirts now, darting from sensation to sensation, addicted to the image and the narcissistic pleasures of short-lived encounters. This image of the contemporary flirtatious sensibility is echoed by those who emphasise, if in less pessimistic tones, the mercurial quality of contemporary interaction and postmodern experience (Elliot, 1996). The current emphasis on superficial sensation and consumer pleasure has been aligned with the ‘feminisation’ of culture and society and the so-called ‘crisis’ of masculinity (Yates, 2007). The ‘feminisation’ of culture is a contested term and has a number of meanings. I am using it here to refer to the ways in which the cultural traits formally associated with femininity have now become increasingly widespread and influential and aligned with new modes of reflexive, feeling-ful masculinities. Whether the masculine turn to affect constitutes something meaningful, or whether it is merely empty rhetoric and a strategy to shore up hegemonic structures of patriarchal masculinity, is open to debate (Bainbridge and Yates, 2005). However, today, it is generally agreed that the language of emotion and therapy is all pervading (Richards, 2007). Yet despite the ubiquity of therapeutic discourse, some argue that both men and women seem to have lost the ability to actually feel in a meaningful way, or live with the more difficult feelings such as jealousy that may cause shame and disappointment (Craib, 1995).4 Of course one way to avoid disappointment is to commit to nothing in particular, a flirtatious trick that is a recurring theme of the contemporary party political scene in both the UK and the US. Interestingly, Simmel applies the theme of flirtation as a mode of communication to politics and the pleasures and annoyances of identifying with different ‘political positions’ (1909, p. 151). Today, the flirtation with different political positions applies equally to politicians and voters within the contemporary promotional context of party politics. As I discuss below, political candidates use their campaigns to flirt with ‘floating voters’ who, often characterised by their fickle lack of commitment,5 resemble the Benjaminian figure of the flâneur, window shopping for political promises and enjoying the spectacle of the political market place (Benjamin, 1986). Psychoanalytic theory is useful to explore the fantasies that inform the flirtatious language and performance of politicians and the response by voters and the media. The cultural distrust of flirtation as a mode of relating is also reflected in psychoanalytic discourse where flirtation becomes a signifier of lightweight, superficial human relations and aligned with the image of the coquette as the seductive, if shallow, feminine other. In 1915, such misgivings were also inflected with national concerns as Freud used his discussion of flirtation to signify his distrust of America and its difference to Europe and the seriousness of ‘continental’ romantic relations. In that essay, Freud likens the emptiness of flirtation to the experience of mourning when life becomes meaningless and ‘impoverished’:

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It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a continental love affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. (Freud, 1915, p. 79) Freud links flirtation to regressive love and an inability to cope with mourning and separation. As Phillips (1994) argues, flirtation has a childish, playful quality to it and has its roots in early Oedipal flirtations, where the imaginary possibilities for love are not yet closed down by the strictures of Oedipal law and the customs of monogamy. There is no place for flirtation in this Oedipal developmental psychoanalytic narrative, where mature love is linked to mourning and the acceptance of loss. Whereas contemporary writers such as Phillips see potential in the playfulness of flirtation, likening it to the creative processes of ‘transitional space’,6 others see flirtation in a more negative light (e.g. Davies, 1998; Shengold, 1982). For instance, Davies (1998, p. 808) argues that the ambiguous, circular nature of flirtation may be used as a defence mechanism against the losses and disappointments that come with intimacy and the complexity of object relations and ‘mature’ object love.7 Davies sees a link between flirtation and hidden primary sadistic aggression and likens flirtation to a ‘malignant form of seductiveness’ where the flirtatious subject projects unwanted feelings into the other. Flirtation is defined here as a form of projective identification involving sadistic pleasure as the flirtatious subject makes the other suffer from a pleasure he or she can’t. From this psychoanalytic perspective, flirtation is not just about ambiguous meaning, as say, in a poem; it is also a process and a form of communication characterised by the ‘blurring of interpersonal boundaries’ (Davies, 1998).

Flirtation, hegemonic masculinity and political imagery The blurring of psychical boundaries that may occur in flirtatious encounters evokes contemporary descriptions of subjectivity and communication in the postmodern cultural context, where the slippery cultural divide between the public and the private has become blurred and unclear (Wernick, 1991). Concerns about the loss of identity within the shifting and transitory context of contemporary culture have a particular resonance when applied to the Western crisis of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995). As has been much documented, the old fictions of masculinity are no longer convincing, yet they continue to be re-worked, as different models compete for hegemonic dominance within the contemporary popular imagination (Bainbridge and Yates, 2005). The alleged ‘crisis of masculinity’ is partly about coming to terms with the loss of mastery and a more flawed, less idealised vision of itself as a construction, and this cultural shift has implications for

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both men and masculinity as it is lived and imagined (Yates, 2007). Emotion has become a key signifier in the construction of new masculinities and one such arena of hegemonic contestation can be found in the field of state and party politics where the masculine image of political leaders plays a key role in selling messages to voters. Images of masculinity in the political realm often exemplify the current tensions of hegemonic masculinity that on the one hand adopt a ‘metrosexual’, feminised style of masculinity to appeal to voters, and on the other, a more traditional mode of masculinity defined as ‘retrosexual’.8 Such images of metrosexual and retrosexual masculinity offer different solutions to the riddle of masculinity as a shifting construction and they also reflect the tensions contained in the different types of masculine flirtation discussed above. Dilemmas about the ambiguous nature of flirtation as a tantalising performance resonate with current popular misgivings about the seductive nature of contemporary political spin and the desire of politicians to woo audiences by flirting to the camera. A number of leaders on the political world stage have provided examples of how images of flirtatious masculinity have been put to work. Here, one can cite the (in)famous charm of ex-US President Bill Clinton or the ex-UK Prime minister Tony Blair pictured on his last day in office in a metrosexual mood, blowing kisses to his constituents (Murphy, 2007, p. 1), or the French President Nicholas Sarkozy, pictured in a retrosexual masculine guise, seated on a horse like a macho cowboy , or playing the amorous lover while flirting with his glamorous soon-to-be second wife as part of his presidential campaign (Duval Smith, 2008, p. 45). Images of the rugged, retro-masculinity of the Russian President Putin represents another example of flirting to camera, when in a bid to remind the world stage of his virility and power, he was pictured in newspapers, naked to the waist, ‘flexing his muscles’ on a (presumably) freezing cold fishing trip in Siberia and pop songs have been penned by adoring Russian female fans on his retrosexual dependability and male sex appeal (Anon., 2007). The significance of such images also lies in the kind of fantasies and emotional responses they provoke in newspapers and opinion polls. For example, feelings of jealousy and betrayal were clearly articulated in the US press coverage at the time of Clinton’s downfall following his affair with Monica Lewinsky (Schine, 1999). The shift in public opinion about Tony Blair and the growing disillusionment about his foreign policy have also been well documented. Like Clinton, Blair is a consummate political performer and charmed the British public with a friendliness and familiarity that evoked the more positive playful model of flirtation. However, as time went on, the public grew distrustful and as with Clinton, commentators again used the language of jealousy and betrayal about his ‘flirtation’ with the US, and some voiced disbelief that they could have fallen for him and been so ‘taken in’ (Parris, 2007, p. 15). Interestingly, the response of the French public followed a similar pattern with Sarkozy, whose brand of masculinity began to

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look tarnished and ‘less dignified’ than it once was, following his publicised love affair with Carla Brunai (Duval Smith, 2008, p. 45).

Flirtation, masculinity and the culture of political spin The public response to flirtatious politicians is linked to the processes of public relations and spin. The latter refers to the techniques of persuasion used by political parties and their press officers to lead the news agenda and present their policies and politicians in the best possible light (Barnett and Gaber, 2001). There are two aspects of the relationship between flirtation and political public relations and these include both the medium and the message. On the one hand, ‘the message’ refers to the kind of images discussed above, where the theme of flirtation content is fairly explicit. Yet as we have seen, in relation to the ‘medium’, flirtation also refers to the processes of communication whereby depending on the mode of flirtatious communication discussed above, new spaces for meaningful dialogue may be opened up or closed down. Wernick’s (1991) work on promotional culture is useful here and is still often cited in texts on the development of spin and public relations in the postmodern context of political communication. He uses the term ‘promotion’ to refer to ‘advertising and its practices taken in the widest and most generic sense’, and argues that (like flirtation) promotion is now a ‘verb’ and ‘a rhetorical form diffused throughout our culture. As such, it has come to shape not only culture’s symbolic and ideological contents, but also its ethos, texture and constitution as a whole’ (Wernick, 1991, p. vii). The ‘ethos’ of promotion now mediates all aspects of communication in the personal and public spheres of life and politics has not escaped this process (p. 132). As in the US, the practice of Public Relations has now become central to British politics as politicians employ teams of PR ‘special advisors’ to help get their message across to the media and also directly to the public through various media platforms such as the Internet. A key aim of PR teams is to win over a sizable minority of floating voters in marginal seats, who need to be courted if their political parties are to gain or stay in power (Prior, 2007). Yet how meaningful is this mode of flirtation with floating voters? And is it analogous to Freud’s American model of flirtation which leads nowhere, or does it constitute something more meaningful as in his second ‘continental’ model which leads to something substantial by way of a political dialogue with voters and say, real policy change? Today, the notion of ‘spin’ has become ‘devalued’ in the mind of the public as a dubious and even a manipulative practice, where voters are seduced and tricked into believing stories that are only half true by politicians and journalists (Barnett and Gaber, 2001, p. 96). As with advertising and branding more generally (see Powell, in this volume), emotions have become an important component in the branding of both male and female politicians

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in Europe and the US. For instance, just as Hilary Clinton was encouraged to cry and show her vulnerability in public during the presidential campaign (Garber, 2008), UK politicians Blair, Brown and Cameron have also been keen to repeatedly emphasise their ‘feminised’ sensitive sides as husbands and fathers (Yates, 2007). This emotional turn in politics also applies to the voters themselves, whose response may not be the one anticipated, as instead, ‘negative’ feelings such as jealousy and betrayal predominate. Such antipathy may be related to the kind of disillusionment discussed above in relation to politicians such as Blair or Sarkozy, whose special advisors devote inordinate amounts of time and money trying to present these men in a positive way (Gould, 1998). Yet what they say and how they say it may not connect with what they actually do. However, voters do not always show an intrinsic distrust of politicians’ use of spin and public relations. Voters may actually engage with the flirtation of political messages at quite a sophisticated level and be able to discern the differences between substance and spin as a presentational tool, and as Wernick (1991, p. 140) argues, for many voters, the promotional skills of news management may even indicate a certain competency necessary to political leadership. The shifting poll ratings of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown provide a good example of how voters view such competencies. Initially, Brown’s own brand of authentic ‘un-spun’ masculinity made him the ‘anti-flirt’ antidote to the flirtatious charm of Tony Blair, whom he replaced in June 2007. However, it is well documented that Brown does not reject the methods of spin and public relations as a way of setting the agenda and disseminating ideas to the public. As the New Labour communications strategist Philip Gould (1998, p. 260) argues: Gordon Brown is constantly looking to anticipate the news and use it. He thinks that modern campaigning is news driven or it’s nothing; but the political landscape is constantly changing, always fluid – what is down now would be up soon. He thinks that you need prior momentum. There is no end point; you don’t arrive, you’re sailing constantly in a changing sea. The PR model presented here is analogous to the model of flirtatious communication as an ongoing process that accommodates and adapts to its audience, while achieving victories – or to continue the analogy – ‘conquests’ along the way. Yet for all Brown’s savvy-ness regarding the flirtatious process of news management, his awkwardness in front of the camera, coupled with his publicised mismanagement regarding the uncertainty of whether to call the election in the autumn of 2007, is widely seen as the moment when his poll ratings began to fall (Cockerell, 2007). There are links to be made here regarding the analysis of such disillusionment with the

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work of Richards in this volume, which analyses the links between broadcast news and the audience’s need for emotional containment. From that perspective, Brown’s so-called dithering stance over the election that never was (Cockerell, 2007) brought home his ineffectiveness as a communicator and undermined the retrosexual fantasy of Brown paternal authority, thus disappointing voters looking for reassurance and containment. The current UK Conservative political leader David Cameron also provides an interesting case study to explore the issues discussed so far. Representations of Cameron as the metrosexual politician whose career journey from spin-doctor to media-friendly political leader exemplifies the flirtatious turn in British politics. Like Brown, Cameron was keen to distance himself from the former leaders of his party such as Michael Howard and Ian Duncan Smith who were perceived as being reactionary, unfeeling and unskilled in communicating with voters (Cockerell, 2007). Labelled as the ‘nasty party’, it is reported that Cameron’s goal was to ‘de-contaminate’ ‘the brand’ of the conservative party in order to make it electable once more (Cockerell, 2007). As a former PR man himself for Carlton TV, Cameron wanted to follow the ‘Blair/Mandelson/Campbell blue print’ that worked so successfully for New Labour in the 1990s and hired the PR strategist Steve Hilton to mastermind his campaign. As with Blair, Cameron became the brand for his party and he asked others to join him on what he defined in his first (allegedly unscripted) 2005 conference speech as ‘his incredible journey’ of political discovery and change (Cockerell, 2007). Images of his young fashionable wife played a key role in the re-branding process, and Cameron adopted a feminised, feelingful language to emphasise the need for ‘hugging’, ‘yoga’ and ‘happiness’. Addressing issues known to be of concern to floating female voters, such as health, education and the environment, he regularly attended events where women reportedly gushed about his charm and integrity as a politician (Baker, 2008, pp. 109–112). To reinforce his modern metrosexual familyfriendly credentials, Cameron set up his own Web site ‘Web Cameron’ with blogs and videos, where viewers can watch him at his kitchen sink, washing dishes while minding the kids.9 His flirtation with the ‘soft’ issues has even extended to discussions about ‘social exclusion’ with the left of centre journalist Polly Toynbee who appeared to enjoy swatting his unwelcome attentions, and likening him to a ‘gadfly’ said he lacked ‘substance’ and ‘policy’ (Robinson, 2008). The attempt to woo voters and politicians from different political camps is also a strategy adopted by Gordon Brown who has flirted with politicians and advisers from across the political spectrum in his attempt to form a ‘government of all the talents’ (with the unfortunate acronym of ‘GOAT’). However, Brown’s powers of persuasion were found wanting in this respect, as certain high-profile figures such as Liberal Democrat Paddy Ashdown refused his invitations and revealed all to the press instead (Lamb, 2007, p. 8).

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The competition between Brown and Cameron’s capacity to flirt with the opposition took a new turn however, when in a bid to attract a particular group of conservative-leaning female floating voters, Brown successfully ‘wooed’ the old labour enemy Margaret Thatcher to No. 10 Downing Street for tea (Newbury, 2007). Until then, Cameron had avoided being associated with Thatcher, because of her links with their ‘nasty’ past. However, Brown’s ‘courtship’ of Thatcher had the unintended effect of de-toxifying her of those past associations, which meant she was ready to be courted by Cameron’s conservatives once more. Not long after her liaison with Brown, Thatcher was, with much fanfare, escorted by Cameron in 2008 to a ‘Great Britons’ event, where Cameron handed her a ‘lifetime achievement award’. Ironically, for a politician who thrives on playing the slippery game of political flirtation, Cameron apparently looked ‘star struck’ as he spoke of how much he admired her ‘enormous courage’ and of ‘sticking with her convictions’ (Fleming, 2008).

The psychosocial significance of masculinity and flirtation in political culture This chapter has argued that given the fluid and transitory nature of contemporary cultural life, flirtation can be seen as the postmodern mode of communication par excellence and has almost become the default position for those seeking to manage or avoid the emotional disappointments of commitment and rejection in various contexts. Party politics provides one such context and I identified three aspects of political flirtation: firstly the flirtatious masculine message (or flirting to camera), secondly, the flirtatious processes of spin and thirdly, the flirtation between different political positions. For some, flirtation constitutes a form of ‘loitering without intent’ (Kaye, 2002) and is a sign that one lacks emotional sincerity and purpose. Following on from that definition, one could argue pessimistically that flirtation has become a metaphor for a postmodern psychosocial sensibility that no longer knows how to manage or process the more difficult emotions that may arise in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world. Yet in a post-9/11 context where the tendency to split and adopt concrete political positions is a recurring theme of geopolitics, the fluidity of flirtatious politics might not seem such a bad thing. As Miller (2003) argues, while flirtation may connote a lack of purpose, we should also be wary of idealising its opposite as in the guise of conviction politicians, whose sincere belief in the rightness of their political positions can be seen as highly problematic – and here one can cite Thatcher, and more recently the sectarian stances of Putin or Bush as examples of a renewed sectarian against a backdrop of Cold War style rhetoric. Flirtation also has a number of gendered connotations and in the past male flirtation has been pathologised as a feminised condition. Yet images of

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flirtatious masculinity have also been used to shore up traditional fantasies of hegemonic masculinity, involving the deployment of retrosexual imagery of male politicians where as with Putin, fantasies of the strong father are conveyed. Yet flirtation does hold out the potential for a less rigid way of relating and communicating that can be called ‘feminised’ in its fluidity and in the refusal to remain faithful to one position, which in psychoanalytic terms can also be equated with the refusal of patriarchal law and the Oedipal father. Psychoanalytic explanations of masculinity and flirtation suggest two models of flirtatious masculinity: on the one hand (following Phillips, 1994), flirtatious masculinity can be viewed positively as a playful mode of communication in which the traditional structures of patriarchal authority are subverted. Here, creative new spaces are opened up for engagement with the other, where flirtation is used to create space between the desire of the subject and its object where something new is allowed to happen. Alternatively (following Davies, 1998), at the other end of the spectrum, masculine flirtation may be used defensively as a form of manipulation to close down the space for creative engagement with the other, creating a narcissistic flirtatious dialogue based on projection and denial. Using these models one can argue that flirtation in political culture often operates using different psychosocial registers of spin in quite contradictory ways. As we have seen, Tony Blair’s flirtatious, metrosexual style and playful flirtation to camera contradicts his stance as a conviction politician regarding the Iraq war. Yet what remains constant are the flirtatious processes of spin and PR adopted by all the politicians discussed here, despite the different styles of the masculinity on show. In this sense, the second defensive model of flirtatious masculinity appears dominant within party politics and for the time being, set to stay.

Notes 1. For example, see BBC News 24, 11 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_ politics/7342653.stm, accessed 11 April 2008. 2. Yet in Britain, flirtation still remains a cultural signifier of class and masculinity. One can cite Hugh Grant’s upper-class character in the Bridget Jones films (2001, 2004) as a good example of the upper-class flirtatious libertine in action. 3. For further discussion see Kaye (2002, p. 8). 4. See Richards (2007), who argues in a more positive vein about the merits of a ‘therapeutic’ society. 5. See Prior (2007). 6. Thereby applying the language of Winnicott and his theory of transitional phenomena (Winnicott, 1953). 7. Thereby evoking the psycho-morality of the Melanie Klein’s model of subjectivity that equates mature love with the capacity to mourn in the depressive position (1940). 8. These different constructions have been discussed at length in the press and in Internet blogs where it is generally agreed that the footballer David Beckham

Candida Yates 95 provides the image of the ‘metrosexual’, whereas the retrosexual embodies a more rugged masculine stereotype that invokes more traditional ideals of ‘manliness’ (Harris, 2006; Mansfield, 2006). 9. See: http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=webcameron.index.page, accessed 10 April 2008.

References Anon. (2007) ‘Vladimir Putin Strips for Fishing Trip with Prince Albert’, http:// www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293341,00.html, accessed 2 April 2008. Bainbridge, C. and Yates, C. (2005) ‘Cinematic Symptoms of Masculinity in Transition: Memory, History and Mythology in Contemporary Film’. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 10, 299–328. Baker, S. (2008) ‘Couldn’t Do What My Wife Does’. Red, March, 109–112. Barnett, S. and Gaber, I. (2001) Westminster Tales: The Twenty-First Century Crisis in Political Journalism. London, Continuum. Baudelaire, C. (1965) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Oxford, Phaidon. Benjamin, W. (1986) Reflections, Dametx, P. (ed.). NewYork, Schocken Books. Cockerell, M. (2007) ‘David Cameron’s Incredible Journey’, BBC News Channel, 20th December, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7153406.stm, accessed: 4 May 2008. Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge, Polity Press. Craib, I. (1995) The Importance of Disappointment. London, Routledge. Davies, M. J. (1998) ‘Thoughts on the Nature of Desires: The Ambiguous, The Transitional and The Poetic: Reply to Commentaries’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8(6), 805–824. Duval Smith, A. (2008) ‘France Begins to Grow Weary with the Sarkozy Soap Opera’. The Observer, 13 January, p. 45. Elliot, A. (1996) Subject to Ourselves, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity. Cambridge, Polity Press. Fleming, A. (2008) ‘When David Met Margaret’. BBC.co.uk, 31 January, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7221324.stm, accessed 1 April 2008. Freud, S. (1915) ‘Thoughts on War and Death, 11. Our Attitude Towards Death’, in Freud, S. (1985) Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and other Works. Translated by Strachey, J., Edited by Dickonson, A., Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, Penguin Freud Library 12. Garber, M. (2008) ‘Play Misty for Me’, Tuesday, 8 January, http://www.cjr.org/ campaign_desk/play_misty_for_me_1.php. Gould, P. (1998) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party. London, Little Brown. Harris, P. (2006) ‘Menaissance’. The Observer, Sunday, 9 July. http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/09/paulharris.theobserver, accessed 1 April, 2008. Kaye, R. A. (2002) The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia. Klein, M. (1940) ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Klein, M. (1988) Love, Guilt and Reparation and other Works, 1921–1945. London, Virago, pp. 344–370. Lamb, C. (2007) ‘I Didn’t Want his Gordon’. The Sunday Times, 24 June, pp. 8–9. Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism. New York, Norton Paperbacks. Mansfield, H. C. (2006) Manliness. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

96 Emotions in the Public Sphere Miller, D. (2003) ‘To Seduce or to Flirt, That Is the Question’. Time & Society, 12, 281–291. Murphy, J. (2007) ‘I Am Sorry; Blair Fights Tears as He Names the Day’. Evening Standard, 10 May, pp. 1–6. Newbury, R. (2007) ‘Brown Woos Worcester Woman’. LA STAMPA.it, 25 September, http://www.lastampa.it/_web/CMSTP/tmplrubriche/giornalisti/grubrica.asp?ID_ blog=145&ID_articolo=71&ID_sezione=308&sezione=, accessed 2 April 2008. Parris, M. (2007) ‘A Nation Asks: “How Were We Taken In?”’ The Times, 11 August, p. 15. Phillips, A. (1994) On Flirtation. London & Boston, Faber and Faber. Prior, M. (2007) Post Broadcast Democracy: How media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York. Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics and the Media. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, N. (2008) ‘Nick Robinson’s Newslog: Cameron and Déjà vu’, 14 February, 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2008/02/cameron_and_dej.html, accessed 12 May 2009. Schine, C. (1999) ‘Betrayal, Friendship and Nuance’. The New York Times, 13 February http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02EEDD143AF930A25751C0A9 6F958260, accessed 8 April 2008. Shengold, L. (1982) ‘The Symbol of Telephoning’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 30, 461–471. Simmel, G. (1909) ‘Flirtation’, in Simmel, G. (1984) On Women, Sexuality and Love. Translated by Oakes, G. New Haven, Yale University Press, pp. 133–153. Wernick, A. (1991) Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London, Sage. Winnicott, D. W. (1953) ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon’, in Winnicott, D. W. (1975) Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. London, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 229–242. Yates, C. (2007) Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography Bridget Jones Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001, Working Title Films, UK/France). Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Beeban Kidson, 2004, Working Title Films, UK/France/Germany/Ireland/USA).

8 ‘Count the Beats of Your Heart not the Fingers on Your Hand’: The Emotionalisation of Promotional Culture Helen Powell

Introduction The rise of the service sector in post-industrial Britain has brought with it a new requisite skill, namely, ‘emotional labour’ defined as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value’ (Hochschild, 2003, p. 7). In this context, the financial service industries deal with our insecurities and anxieties; the travel industry our fantasies and dreams; the entertainment industries our routes of escapism. Service provision becomes foregrounded in advertising campaigns, store interactions and after-sales customer care, all of which concentrate on the management of the consumer’s emotions. This approach relies initially upon finding a point of access to the consumer’s heart and then building upon this connection through the increased personalisation of service provision. Managed successfully, it has an important value within the marketplace, namely, the generation of loyalty and trust. However, with every market sector proliferated by choice and intense competition, more brands are seeking to harness consumer constancy through access to and mobilisation of our emotions. That is to say, exploiting the capacity of the brand to make a particular emotional impact on the consumer through various points of interaction. Therefore, I would argue, a particular affective turn is now more widely recognisable within consumer culture and that the adoption of a psychosocial approach to promotional strategies will allow the examination of why some are more effective than others. In particular, such a theoretical stance is also more adept at focusing in not only on the degree to which marketers take into consideration a product’s contribution to emotional life in general, but more specifically, how promotional work might acknowledge the processes of the inner world and the irrational forces of the unconscious and 97

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apply such concepts to the pleasures of consuming and our relationships to the world of goods. Just as Yates (Chapter 7) taps into tactics employed in the promotional dynamics of party politics, so this chapter examines two promotional strategies that seek to form connections, not with voters and the way in which emotions inform our voting patterns, but rather with consumers and the identificatory practices that mobilise marketplace selection. Hence the floating voter here becomes the floating agent of choice. The first strategy examined is the more recent development of emotional branding which concerns forging relationships between consumers and objects and relies on the symbolic communication of the brand’s emotional qualities. The second approach has a longer history and involves the mediation of another human being, a celebrity, as an informant of choice. As documented by Evans (Chapter 6), within contemporary culture the media engender a range of identificatory processes through which audience members become attached to celebrities. However, studying the promotional capacity of celebrity through a psychosocial lens allows us to explore not only how they mediate between the individual and society, an inner world and an external reality, but also, adapting Evans’s argument, how selling via mass communication forms becomes more personalised through the establishment of ‘celebrity as intimacy’ via the creation of an illusion of direct address.

Consumer motivation and the role of the unconscious Of particular interest to this chapter is how we come to incorporate the mass produced into the construction of an individual self, and the promotional strategies considered here are chosen on the basis that they seemingly allow for this individuation to take place. While the first centres on personalisation through branding, the second addresses how advertising can create points of identification through communicating the meanings of goods that ultimately lie outside the product itself. In this way it is what the product symbolises rather than how it functions that becomes the core of communication and identification. The potential of the symbolic to tap into unconscious desires in the context of promotion was first identified by Ernest Dichter and his post-Second World War development of motivational research (MR). An Austrian psychologist interested in the workings of the unconscious, Dichter placed projective techniques at the heart of advertising research (Stern, 2002), tapping into the unconscious to explore the more hidden motivations behind consumer choice. His work for Ivory Soap, for example, showed how washing is not simply assimilated to cleanliness (rational) but also how it functions as a means of dealing with anxieties (irrational). The focus group was established allowing not only for the

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consumers’ voices to be heard but also probed in depth, standing in contrast to the questionnaire. This shift towards a more qualitative approach to consumer research not only provided a critical means by which people’s emotional responses to the use of products could potentially be unlocked but also it informed the creative process, providing insights into how our inner world impacts our external choices. Such knowledge allowed for the development of what might be termed a more emotive form of persuasion, relying heavily on symbolism over textual description. The importance of this breakthrough in advertising research methodology was noted in an early history of advertising (Mayer, 1958). Mayer recognised the originality of Dichter’s approach and its potential arguing that ‘use values and product features are secondary to the purchaser; his “real reason” for buying is the satisfaction of deep drives which he does not consciously understand’ (ibid., p. 229). Of importance to this chapter is how through motivational research, Dichter also introduced the idea that brands have personalities due to the way in which people project themselves into products (Bennett, 2005). The term ‘projection’ was first used by Freud (1920/1986, p. 237) to refer to the process of externalising feelings, of ‘dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure’. However, Klein later uses ‘projection’ (and her meaning is applied here) to refer to the communication with objects. Klein argued that this process is underpinned by phantasy and the interplay between internal subjective experience and the external world; ‘a process whereby states of feeling and unconscious wishes are expelled from the self and attributed to another person or thing’ (Wright, 1998, p. 72). An object relations approach to consumption establishes a more interactional relationship between the consumer and the market and in particular focuses on how choice is informed less on rational decisionmaking and more by the potential of the object to function in relation to self-development. That is to say ‘our relations with objects comprise what we are’ (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 68). This, I would argue, is a more optimistic reading of the role of consumption than that provided by the appropriation of a Lacanian perspective whereby ‘commodities make promises to consumers, appealing to some kind of “lack” that the consumers may perceive in themselves, either consciously or unconsciously’ (Lupton, 1998, p. 139). Therefore, through the use of the focus group such projections are tapped into, made manifest and then incorporated into advertising communication (Richards, 1994, p. 94). The consumer is asked by the advertising agency ‘what they feel about a product or service [and] builds the communication around those feelings’ (Lury, 1994, p. 94), placing the consumer at the heart of the creative process. Hence a ‘looping activity’ takes place whereby their relationship to the external world is communicated back to them through promotional slogans and signs (Lury, 2004, p. 157).

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Emotional branding Branding developed as a means of managing and communicating subtle variations where there is little differentiation in terms of overall functional benefits. Brands allow for every market sector to be divided up based on consumers’ perceptions that operate in a relational schema that is both abstract and concrete. Such categorisations subsequently inform individual choice as we ‘idealize those goods with which we identify and denigrate others’ (Minsky, 1998, p. 198). It can be argued that contemporary branding builds on Dichter’s work whereby a principal driver of choice emanates from our attachment to particular objects and the way they have the potential to make us feel that others do not. It is suggested therefore (Gobé, 2001; Edwards and Day, 2005) that a brand’s success depends on how it forms and incubates relationships rather than through rational appeals to the consumer, such as through price, for example. Recognising the value of intangible assets in the new economy, goods are marketed in terms of the emotional fulfilment they can provide. Those brands that are able to achieve this most effectively have been termed by one advertising agency (Saatchi & Saatchi) as ‘Lovemarks’ (Roberts, 2004). ‘Lovemarks’ can be identified by the love and loyalty they generate commensurate with any meaningful human relationship and by extension ‘are not owned by the manufacturers, the producers, the businesses. They are owned by the people who love them’ (ibid., p. 74). However, the connections and relationships which brands seek to form with consumers operate in a context underpinned by the juxtaposition of the mass object and the individual consumer. Brand promotion needs to consider how on a personal level the recognition to own can be made effective. Bowlby (1993, p. 101) argues such individuation can be identified in ‘forms of marketing address which are making an emotional appeal [and] can be divided between these two modes: the warning (look what you lack) and the promise (look what you can have or what you can be)’. From a psychoanalytic perspective, emotional branding recognises how we come to terms with this sense of lack through the relationships we build in the material world and the way in which we identify with what we consume for its symbolic capacity to realise an ideal self (Richards, 1994). Communication through the symbolic allows consciously or unconsciously for an individual sense of ‘lack’ to be addressed. The object therefore takes on a highly personalised role assuaging any sense of insecurity or anxiety that the self, or wider collective unconscious, might have. Creatively this can be realised through the technique of transference. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1991) Freud explained how in the dream, to avoid censorship, repressed wishes are transferred and ‘the wish-fulfilment’s power of bringing about representation is diffused over a certain sphere surrounding it’ (ibid., p. 75), namely, the events of the previous day which themselves have yet to form

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any associations. Applied to brand communication, it might be argued that transference functions through the role of symbolisation, the disguise mechanism of the dream-world, in that it allows us to transfer our unconscious wishes (and fears) onto something more concrete in the external world thus injecting such objects with an emotional significance. Transference, applied to the world of goods, can be seen as the attachment of unconscious wishes to external objects. The act of consumption then provides us with pleasure knowing that we are not just purchasing an object but also the potential to feel differently about the self (Campbell, 2005). Ultimately, branding can be positioned as the protection of competitive advantage through the passion someone feels for a brand (such as the Apple iPod dominating the MP3 market). It recognises not only the difficulties of replicating such emotive qualities by a competitor but also the potential such attachments create in the context of brand loyalty. Finally, as the iPod demonstrates, emotional branding taps into the social conditions of late modernity, to the way in which identity is increasingly characterised as a highly individualised, selfreflexive project (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992). Within this context brands also demonstrate an inherent capacity to bring individuals together, opening up access to communities of users based on ‘shared knowledges and pleasures’ (Partington, 1991, p. 54).

Celebrities in advertising The second promotional strategy focuses on the use of the celebrity in advertising and takes the role of the image as its starting point. Today we live in a culture where to look is to judge, and where such an examination always involves the categorisation of the self in relation to the other. This heightened sense of concern with our own appearance is increasingly attributable to new media technologies (web cams) and platforms (‘Facebook’, ‘You Tube’) where the screen acts as mirror and generates an increasing sense of looked-at-ness for all online. Virtual worlds such as ‘Second Life’ take this further allowing the gaze to fall on a created self, an avatar, that we have constructed out of our desires to be someone else. This emphasis on self-creation, I would argue, has been informed, especially in the youth market, by an exponential interest in and generation of media celebrities. Celebrities are a manifestation of how identity work is no longer primarily located in the arena of production but rather through sites of consumption; spaces where increasingly we spend our leisure time and money. Not only does the celebrity construct a self through their relationship to the consumer world, in turn they themselves become a vehicle of commodity promotion, guiding choices by association. They represent what Ewen has called a ‘commodity self’ (1988, p. 79). The increased use of celebrities in advertising can be attributed to a number of factors. The celebrity is readily identifiable. Advertising creates meaning by drawing on popular

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culture, of which celebrities form an integral part, and through their own fame subsequently allow for a critical mass of awareness to be generated around the product or brand endorsed. In this way ‘celebrities humanize the process of commodity consumption’ (Rojek, 2001, p. 14). They bring with them a pre-existing image and personality and above all recognition: whether affiliated to a particular skill (sport, acting, music) or for more simply being well known. Advertising functions as a communication channel, mobilising and divesting meaning away from the specificity of the world of celebrity culture and into the world of the brand and the targeted consumer. Furthermore, the emotional investment already made by the audience into a particular celebrity has ‘added value’ when that same person is used as part of a brand promotion. Within the context of marketing, a celebrity, therefore, can be defined as ‘anyone who is familiar enough to the people a brand wishes to communicate with to add values to that communication by association with their image and reputation’ (Pringle, 2004, p. xxiv). How we are influenced by and develop a relationship with those we see on screen has both ‘specific’ and ‘diffuse’ consequences (Dyer, 1998, p. 18). The degrees of identification practiced are varied and operate along a scale from simply copying to adaptation, where adaptation is embedded within the context of performance, play and experimentation and demonstrates a more active engagement with celebrity culture (Partington, 1991; Stacey, 1994; Lury, 1996). Such playfulness is evident in terms of how celebrity lifestyle is promoted on Web sites such as asos.com (As Seen on Screen) and women’s magazines. Features such as ‘Spree vs. Steal’ (Marie Claire) recognise the economic limitations in the interplay of fantasy and reality while concomitantly allowing negotiation between the world of the ‘ordinary’ (consumer) and ‘extraordinary’ (celebrity) through access to consumer goods. Their lifestyles function as aspirational cultural resources that the market exploits so that we might plunder (In Style, 2008). Within the discourse of advertising it is not just the individual celebrity image that attracts attention, but extra-diegetic associations add depth to the meaning making process. This extra-discursive world outside of the advertisement relating to the celebrity’s known public/private lifestyle allows the product to have multiple associations beyond that which can be denoted in the limited space or time of print or screen. While the promotional propensity of celebrities is largely generated through their image as a point of identification rather than in relation to any specific merits, this does not in any way lessen their value which is fundamentally an exchange value as opposed to a use value (Marshall, 1997; Cowen, 2000; Rojek, 2001). Identification through media images commenced with the close-up shot of the Hollywood movie star and the added injection of emotional connection this device could bring. Such cinematographic techniques were

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exploited as the ‘movie-screen seemed most appropriate for the marketing of a certain feminine self-image’ (Doane, 1989, p. 26) and where a new feminine subject, the ‘spectator-consumer’ (ibid., p. 27), was realised. The promotional possibilities derived from the connection between screen and star were mined by both parties up until the 1950s. Using the star as the primary marketing vehicle for interest in their films, the studios became aware of a growing public interest in their private worlds off screen, commodified initially through the studio’s own publicity materials. The star increasingly became located within a material context as their lifestyles became aspired to and associated products allowed for vicarious access to this world. The emergence of television and television advertising extended such promotional possibilities further and the body soon came to be broken down in advertising discourse as a site of multiple possibilities for improvement. Television also allowed for the increased production of different types of personalities, celebrities, which themselves became subjects of image emulation with specific appeal to different target audiences. Currently, celebrities populate all media forms and offer themselves up as a designated occupation: in 2006 a UK Government poll revealed that 11 per cent of teenagers surveyed would drop out of education to be on TV and 16 per cent believed that they too would be famous as fame for fame’s sake becomes the currency of youth (YouGov, 2006). Therefore as the number of celebrities proliferates so the choice of celebrity for any campaign must be carefully considered: their values and personality must form a synergy with those intended for the brand. However, returning to the work of Melanie Klein, it is in relation to her concept of ‘projective identification’ and its relationship to ‘phantasy’ that I wish to examine the long-standing role of the celebrity in advertising campaigns. Gilbert (2003, p. 91) draws attention to the way in which the ‘standard psychoanalytic account of the psychic relationship between celebrities and their public’ derives from the Lacanian concept of ‘misrecognition’ whereby ‘celebrities in the public domain . . . function as fantasy objects, images of impossible perfection which hold out the lure of a fully achieved selfhood to subjects constituted by their perpetual search for just such impossible/absent “fullness” ’ (ibid.). Furthermore, Elliott argues (1996, p. 23), our position as victims to the forces of lack is significantly informed by the way in which ‘personal meanings, which individuals need to experience as real and authentic, are felt to be non-existent. In an age of globalized media images, it seems as if everything is a copy of something else’. Therefore, can the media offer us anything positive in relation to identificatory practices? I argue that by studying the promotional work of Kate Moss the realisation of an authentic self is possible and that celebrities can facilitate its construction through functioning as a conduit between the individual psyche and the external world.

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Case Study – Kate Moss: Image as process Several factors contribute to making Kate Moss worthy of consideration in the context of this chapter. Primarily, as a super model and fashion icon her image and fame are one. Her celebrity status is generated by her ‘look’, allowing her to become the face of brands across several different market sectors (fashion, cosmetics, mobile phones). This produces an interesting challenge for the brands involved; how, despite multiple associations, do consumers have the potential to identify with her when normally the number of products a celebrity endorses negatively influences a consumer’s perspective of endorser credibility (Souza and Quintanilha, 2006). Kate Moss reverses this trend, I would argue, as she represents a revised approach to celebrity endorsement: one that does not point to consumption as solution but rather positions consumption as process. Her appropriateness across advertising campaigns comes not from her presentation of self as perfection, but rather through a sense of authenticity derived in part through the way in which she positively positions herself within the arena of consumption, using goods creatively and playfully and concomitantly generating an immediate point of identification with her and her various brand associations. Such identificatory practices can be explored psychoanalytically through the process of ‘projective identification’. A Kleinian perspective positions the subject as relating and connecting to the external world through object-related unconscious phantasies and the difficulties often experienced in distinguishing between the two (Mitchell, 1986, p. 23). Initially perceived as a defence mechanism pertaining to fears around the fragmentation of identity, ‘projective identification’, I would argue, can also be applied through its more communicative facets to explain the appeal of celebrity as part of an ongoing process of unconscious identity construction. It involves, through ‘phantasy’, the controlling of an object in the external world via the projection of the ego or parts of the ego into it (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 79). This external world is subsequently introjected or assimilated as part of the ego. ‘Thus both the ego and its objects are constructed from varying degrees of mixture and integration of the self and the external world’ (Ibid., p. 182). Our interest in, and in some cases dependence upon, celebrities can be explained through ‘projective identification’; namely, we actually have parts of our egos invested in them. Barthes’s essay, ‘The Face of Garbo’ (1972), provides an insight into the promotional appeal of Moss. Here he positions Garbo as the apogee of the Hollywood star, a classic beauty intensified through the medium of the closeup shot. Such influence was later to be surpassed, Barthes argues, by stars such as Audrey Hepburn who resonated a more idiosyncratic and holistic sense of beauty. It is possible that Kate Moss’s appeal to advertisers comes from her positioning as a possible fusion of the above: as the archetypal British beauty but with her own sense of style. Moss further challenges

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the possibility of the advertising image as metaphorical mirror of perfection through her relationship with her audience, or rather how we come to ‘know’ her. There are many representations of Kate Moss that all contribute to the creation of possible points of identification: from the covers of fashion magazines to tabloid front pages. In one publication alone (Vogue, 2006), for example, 11 different points of contact could be made with her (the cover; seven advertisements for different brands; two features; and one photo shoot, as Vogue’s model of the month). Therefore, the possibilities for the consumer to identify with and be influenced by Moss across a range of brand endorsements can be explained through the way in which a subject’s identifications do not form a coherent system; we plunder different aspects of culture and the market in the formation of an ego-ideal. In this way Moss does not function as the essence of feminine beauty but rather through the transparency of her own identity construction a particular process is made manifest. She epitomises a turn in advertising communication where her appeal, derived from both her public image and private life, demonstrates the difficulties in achieving such a whole. Rather what is underlined is selfidentity as process, made transparent through the different aspects of her image and personality projected through the different brands she endorses. Object relations speaks the language of intersubjectivity whereby the self is always a product of our relationship with others and with culture. In times when we know more about the lives of celebrities than we do about the people who live next door, it is little surprise as to their centrality in the identificatory practices of many.

Evaluation Therefore it can established that one of the contributions a psychosocial approach brings to the study of promotion and advertising is to challenge its impact as unidirectional, as manipulation, for, as Richards argues (1994, p. 93), ‘we cannot hold others entirely responsible for our own projections’. While the emotive turn within promotional culture recognises and speaks to a troubled self, the possibilities it offers for resolution are somewhat mixed. Emotional branding hinges on our ability to form relationships with inanimate objects, in the belief that we might love them as we do another human being. While several brands seem to have made significant inroads in embedding themselves within people’s lives and simultaneously contributing to the generation of a community of users, one wonders if this has more to do with the power of fashion than any true emotional attachment. Above all, emotional branding fails to recognise the ways in which consumers relate to brands at the level of the unconscious and this might be due to the lack of an appropriate methodology through which to understand affect: the focus group, which has underpinned advertising planning since Dichter, now requires revision (Zambardino and Goodfellow, 2007). This involves

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a more holistic approach to research, argues Roberts (2004, p. 155), to understand from the consumer ‘what has meaning and significance for them, not just what they buy and use’. This is supported by Zambardino and Goodfellow (2007, p. 30) who challenge the persistence within advertising agencies in employing ‘a cognitive discourse in order to uncover emotional phenomena’ placing ease of data communication to the client at the heart of its perpetuation, a problem noted by Dichter in the late 1950s. In contrast they propose ‘non-direct methods’ such as non-verbal self-reporting instruments ‘often based in the use of visual images of emotional states’ (ibid., p. 33). In considering the role of celebrity within advertising, it must be recognised that while the production of celebrity as a democratic process is highly questionable, functioning as an aspirational consumer resource, it fares much better. Their location within the world of consumption provides ready appeal for advertisers, being utilised in approximately one fifth of British advertisements (Pringle, 2004, p. 10). Their application to promotional communication, however, is not without its challenges. On the one hand, the appeal of celebrity is derived from their roots in the world of the ‘ordinary’ but as mediated individuals they have crossed over into a different world, that of the ‘extraordinary’ and this impacts specifically on their relationship to consumption: they themselves have become commodified. Secondly, our access to their image is always second-hand, communicated across multiple platforms all asking us to look ‘Closer’, to look ‘Now’. Ironically, the appeal of the celebrity gossip magazines is one of recognising instability and inconsistency, a ‘what have they done now’ approach which runs kilter to either the concept of celebrity as ego-ideal or their potential as champion of an holistic brand image. The objectification of celebrities consistently makes problematic their own sense of self for ‘it is difficult to be a disembodied image’ (Ewen, 1988, p. 101). Indeed this can lead to celebrities being ‘among the most insecure people in our midst’ (Rojek, 2001, p. 95). Thus, if we adopt a Lacanian approach and consume on the basis of celebrity as mirror, then this is seriously flawed as they too struggle to come to terms with their own sense of lack, often at a very public level (Britney Spears exemplifies this). Working on the basis of this reading therefore we might conclude that celebrity endorsement doesn’t facilitate the problems of identity construction; it exacerbates them and until contemporary social values become underpinned by something other than the primacy of the image, consumption will remain a persistent ‘cycle of desire-acquisition-use-disillusionment-renewed-desire’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 90). However, a more optimistic and indeed positive reading of the function of celebrity endorsement might be rendered if we turn our attention away from the goal and think more about the process, considering celebrities as points of connection rather than templates for replication. In this way, the object relations approach implies a more active model of consumption and affect than previous Lacanian models based on the impossibility of desire imply.

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Celebrity is always an ambiguous sign. In this way, consumption becomes a site for the active negotiation between the self and our ideals, a site for experimentation rather than a quest for a perfection that simply does not exist. The celebrities themselves know this and ultimately derive their power in the twenty-first century from the realisation that what they represent is ‘the active construction of identity in the social world’ (Marshall, 1997, p. xi).

References Barthes, R. (1972/2000) ‘The Face of Garbo’, Mythologies. London: Vintage. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bennett, D. (2005) ‘Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, Advertising, Barbie Dolls and the Invention of the Consumer Unconscious’, Public Culture, 17(1), 1–25. Bowlby, R. (1993) Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge. Campbell, C. (2005) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Third edition). Great Britain: Alcuin Academics. Cowen, T. (2000) What Price Fame? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doane, M. A. (1989) ‘The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11, 23–33. Dyer, R. (1998) Stars (Revised edition). London: BFI. Edwards, H. and Day, D. (2005) Creating Passion Brands: Getting to the Heart of Branding. London: Kogan Page. Elliott, A. (1996) Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ewen, S. (1988) All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1900/1991) The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Penguin. Freud, S. (1920/1986) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Essentials of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilbert, J. (2003) ‘Small Faces: The Tyranny of Celebrity in Post-Oedipal Culture’, Mediactive: Celebrity, Issue 2. London: Barefoot Publications. Gobé, M. (2001) Emotional Branding: The Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People. New York: Allworth Press. Hinshelwood, R. D. (1991) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books. Hochschild, A. R. (2003) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Second edition). Berkeley: University of California Press. In Style (Supplement) (2008) ‘100 Celebrity Looks and How to Create Them’. March. IPC Media. Lupton, D. (1998) The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration. London: Sage. Lury, A. (1994) ‘Advertising: Moving Beyond the Stereotypes’, in R. Keat, N. Whiteley and N. Abercrombie (eds) The Authority of the Consumer. London: Routledge. Lury, C. (1996) Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lury, C. (2004) Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge. Marshall, P. D. (1997) Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mayer, M. (1958) Madison Avenue, U.S.A. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Minsky, R. (1998) Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary States of Mind. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mitchell, J. (ed.) (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein. London: Penguin. Partington, A. (1991) ‘Melodrama’s Gendered Audience’, in S. Franklin, C. Lury and J. Stacey (eds) Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. London: Harper Collins. Pringle, H. (2004) Celebrity Sells. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons/IPA. Richards, B. (1994) Disciplines of Delight: The Psychoanalysis of Popular Culture. London: Free Association Books. Roberts, K. (2004) Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands. New York: Powerhouse Books. Rojek, C. (2001) Celebrity. London: Reaktion. Souza, M. and Quintanilha, S. (2006) ‘Does Fame Always Lead to Fortune? Using Celebrities in Advertising’. ESOMAR: Latin American Conference, Rio de Janeiro, October (accessed at www.warc.com). Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Stern, B. (2002) ‘The Importance of Being Ernest: A Tribute to Dichter’, Journal of Advertising Research, 42(4), July–August, 19–22. Vogue (2006) September. Conde Nast Publications. Wright, E. (1998) Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (Second edition). Cambridge: Polity Press. YouGov (2006) ‘Kids Seeking Reality TV Fame Instead of Exam Passes’ (Press Release), www.lsc.gov.uk, January 13. Zambardino, A. and Goodfellow, J. (2007) ‘Being “Affective” in Branding?’, Journal of Marketing Management, 23(1–2), 27–37.

Part III Emotions in the ‘Private’ Sphere

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9 Thinking Psychosocially About Difference: Ethnicity, Community and Emotion Simon Clarke

Introduction In this chapter I address the complex interrelationship between identity, ethnicity and the huge role that emotion plays in this by focusing on an empirical example of the study of community cohesion which forms part of the larger ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme. It is not my intention to explore this area in depth. Rather I will give the reader an overview of a range of psychosocial approaches to the construction of otherness and then focus on the notion of community and what it means to ordinary people in Britain. There are also a range of different psychosocial approaches to the subject: some have more of a psychoanalytic influence, some are relationally psychodynamic and others are more socially rooted. My own understanding of the psychosocial I recently outlined in the journal Sociology (Clarke, 2006). I feel that the main problematic in this area of study is how we actually ‘do it’ and argue that this is an emerging discipline based in sociological and psychoanalytic ideas that bridges this gap and points to a way forward in qualitative data analysis, that is, psychosocial studies. A psychoanalytic sociology is a synthesis of both worlds, rather than an opportunity to stake a position and stick to it in an inflexible way. We all know that there is a social construction of our realities as much as we know that we are emotional people who construct our ‘selves’ in imagination and affect. Neither sociology nor psychoanalysis, or psychology for that matter, provides a better explanation of the world than the other, but together they provide a deeper understanding of the social world. The main themes that stand out therefore in psychosocial research are the reflexivity of the researcher; the ability of research to give voice to the research subject rather than a dominant theoretical paradigm; the role of the unconscious in transmitting our ethnic, gendered and class identities (to name but a few) into the research environment; and finally, again a recognition of the role of the imagination 111

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in the research encounter and the way it is used to construct identity and make meaning in people’s lives. In sum, the psychosocial for me is a theory, method and practice, but I feel the method and practice are the most important aspects, the psychosocial is in short a position whereby the researcher is aware of the unconscious and emotional dynamics that fuel the social construction of realities. So, if we think about the relationship between identity formation and emotion, it is difficult to talk of ethnicity without talking about culture, it is difficult to talk about culture without talking about identity. Identity is emotional, imagined and concrete, marked by ethnicity, gender and class, but the real focus of these factors is ‘difference’. The question of difference is emotive; we start to hear ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’, friend and foe, belonging and not belonging, in-groups and out-groups, which define ‘us’ in relation to other, or the Other. From this we get ideas about communities, even imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) and ethno-national boundaries. But is this really the case? Is the notion of identity far closer to home than a sense of national belonging? A psychosocial perspective on the construction of identities can shed a very different light on the psychodynamic processes underlying social processes. I have previously argued (Clarke, 2003a) that if we are to understand racism then a one-perspective approach is wanting in explanation. Sociological explanations of racism concentrate on the structures of modern life that facilitate discriminatory practices and hierarchies of inequality. As such, sociology fails to address some of the central issues surrounding racism: first, the ubiquity of forms of discrimination and the emotional component of hatred; second, the sheer rapidity, the explosive, almost eruptive quality of ethnic hatred, and the way in which communities which used to co-exist together, as in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, come to hate and destroy each other. Third, sociology fails to address the visceral and embodied nature of racism and the content of discrimination. Finally, the psychological structuring of discrimination is ignored in this emphasis on social structure; thus, we are unable to look at the psychological mechanisms that provide the impetus for people to hate each other. In other words, sociologists are very good at explaining how discrimination arises, but not why, affect, emotion is left in the sociological cupboard. I believe that there is a complex interrelationship between socio-structural and psychological factors. Both need to be addressed in parallel if we want to understand the ubiquity and visceral elements of racism.

Understanding Otherness psychosocially One of the psychosocial models of Otherness I have used is based in Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1994) Dialectic of Enlightenment and in particular the chapter titled ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’. Horkheimer and Adorno

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interweave Freudian drive theory with Marxism and the Weberian notion of rationalisation to explain the pathological nature of anti-Semitism. After Freud (1969), Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilisation, the modern world, has slowly and methodically prohibited instinctual behaviour. Horkheimer and Adorno concentrate on the instinctual mechanism of mimesis, the way in which we mimic nature in order to survive, for example, freezing when we sense danger. This, they argue, has become perverted in modern times. In the modern world mimesis has been consigned to oblivion. For Horkheimer and Adorno, those blinded by civilisation experience their own repressed and tabooed mimetic characteristics in others. Gestures, nuances, touching and feeling are experienced as embarrassing remnants from our pre-history that have survived in the rationalised environment of the modern world. Horkheimer and Adorno draw our attention to Freud’s (1919) paper ‘The Uncanny’ [Das Unheimlich] – ‘what seems repellently alien is in fact all too familiar’. We start to see what Horkheimer and Adorno suggest when they talk about mimesis and false projection as Freud argues that the uncanny fulfils the condition of ‘touching’ the residues of our animistic mental activity and bringing them to expression. Anti-Semitism is based in what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as false projection which is related to a repressed form of mimesis. In mimesis proper, we see an imitation of the natural environment – a mechanism of defence which enables camouflage and protection; we make ourselves like nature in order that we may become one with nature. False projection, conversely, tries to make the environment like us – we try to control and rationalise nature projecting our own experiences and categories onto natural things and making that which not natural – natural, through a reification of scientific categories and constructions. Inner and outer worlds are confused and perceived as hostile. Central to this argument is projection. The product of false projection is the stereotype, the transference of socially unpalatable thoughts from subject to object. Moving on to an account of colonial othering, in Black Skin White Masks (1968) Fanon argues that the black person is both objectified and denigrated at a bodily level, and psychologically blinded, or alienated from his or her black consciousness and cultural identity by the effects of colonialisation and racist culture. In Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (2003a) I have argued that this is the premise of much of Fanon’s writing and argumentation. The black person becomes a phobogenic object, in other words, a stimulus that causes anxiety. In a psychoanalytic interpretation of phobias, Fanon notes that there is a secret attraction to the object that arouses dread in the individual. Fanon argues that it matters little whether this image of the black man is real; the point is, it is cognate. In the same way that the Jew was perceived as a danger through the projection of a stereotype, the black person has suffered the same form of projection with an emphasis placed on sexual phenomena.

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The main feature of Fanon’s understanding of the psychology of oppression is that inferiority is the outcome of a double process, both socio-historic and psychological: ‘If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily economic; subsequently, the internalisation, or better, the epidermalization of this inferiority’ (Fanon, 1968, p. 13). There is therefore a link between the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of racism and these processes are violent and exclusionary. Fanon illustrates this internalisation of projection: ‘My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winterday. The negro is an animal, the negro is bad, the negro is ugly’ (p. 113). If we understand the reference to the breaking up bodies, to being sprawled out and distorted in terms of more than mere metaphor, and from a Kleinian perspective then these processes which have consequences on the sociogenic level are the outcome of processes of projective identification (Klein, 1946). The white person makes the black person in the image of their projections, literally forcing identity into another, as Fanon notes: . . . the white man has woven me out of a thousand details . . . I was battered down with tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships. (1968, p. 112). The black person lives these projections, trapped in an imaginary that white people have constructed; trapped both by economic processes and by powerful projective mechanisms which both create and control the Other. This, of course, highlights the paradoxical nature of projective identification. White people’s phantasies about black sexuality, about bodies and biology in general are fears that centre on otherness, otherness that they themselves have created and brought into being. This is what Fanon means when he says that I was ‘battered down’, ‘woven out of a thousand details’ – identity is a stereotype of the black person constructed in the mind of the white person, and then forced back into the black person as the black historical subject (see Dalal, 2002; Macey, 2000). But this indeed is a false consciousness. These kinds of projections can be seen in Slavoj Zizek’s (1993) analysis of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the way in which identities are very much tied in with difference. Zizek introduces us to the idea of the Theft of Enjoyment. Zizek argues that the bond which holds a given community together is a shared relationship to a Thing – ‘to our enjoyment incarnate’. The relationship we have to our Thing is structured by fantasy and is what people talk of when they refer to a threat to ‘our’ way of life. This notion Thing is not a clear set of values from which we can refer, but a set of contradictory properties that appears as ‘our’ Thing. This Thing is only accessible to us, but tirelessly sought after by the Other. Zizek argues that Others cannot grasp it, but it is constantly menaced by ‘them’. So, this Thing is present, or is in some way to do with what we

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refer to as our ‘way of life’; the way we organise our rituals, ceremonies and feasts, ‘in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organises its enjoyment’ (Zizek, 1993, p. 201). Zizek cautions, however, this Thing is more than simply a set of features that comprise a way of life; there is something present in them, people believe in them, or more importantly ‘I believe that other members of the community believe in this thing’. The Thing exists because people believe in it; it is an effect of belief itself: We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organises his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude to work. (Zizek, 1993, p. 203) Thus, Zizek notes the paradoxical nature of this Thing; on the one hand the Other is a workaholic who steals our jobs and labour, on the other it is an idler, a lazy person relying on the state for benefits. Our Thing is therefore something that cannot be accessed by the Other but is constantly threatened by ‘otherness’. What Zizek’s work highlights is the role of myth and phantasy in the construction of cultural and national identity, and more importantly the way in which this identity is imagined rather than grounded in some reality. As Zizek notes, what we cover up by accusing the Other of the theft of our enjoyment is the ‘traumatic fact’ that we never possessed what we perceive has been stolen in the first place. It is a fear of the theft of enjoyment, a fear of the theft of imagination, of phantasy or of myth. What I think we can take from the work of both Fanon and Zizek is that identities are both socially and psychosocially constructed. They are filled with passion and emotion and are multiple. As we construct the identity of Others, others construct our identity. Imagination and passion are an integral part of our perception of self and others.

White identities The idea of community has always been central to the construction of group and individual identity and this too is charged with emotion. We have seen moral panics about the disintegration of traditional community, values and selfhood and very real concerns around racism and segregation (see Phillips, 2005). In an ESRC-funded project I have set out to explore how people today construct their identities and whether traditional forms of identity construction, such as class and ethnicity, still hold. As most people are sociable and emotional beings, there is a tendency for identity construction to

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take place against the background of the communities that people live in. I have therefore looked at what people mean when they talk of a ‘community’ and investigated the deep emotional bonds that create or break down the community cohesion between groups. To do this, I simply asked people to tell me about their lives and about how they felt about notions of identity, home and community in their local areas (see Clarke, Garner and Gilmour, 2007). My research has focused on two major cities in the South West, Bristol and Plymouth. Both cities have strong seafaring traditions and a long history of immigration, transition and trading (See Clarke and Garner, 2005). A difference, however, is that Bristol has a history of multiculturalism and a relatively high population of minority ethnic groups, while Plymouth is very much ‘white’. I have used a psychosocial perspective to inform both the methodology and analysis; that is a perspective that takes into account the emotional dynamics of social life and in which the researcher is seen as a co-constructor of the research environment (see Hollway and Jefferson, 2000 and in this volume, Clarke, 2002; Lucey, Melody and Walkerdine, 2003). The interviews were biographical, unstructured and allowed the respondent to tell me what they thought was important about their life and history. I did have three very broad questions that I asked all the respondents: what their views were on the notions of identity, community and home, and what it meant to them. In terms of both identity and community there was a strong focus on the smaller scale and there was a strong feeling expressed on the part of many respondents to have their English-ness rather than their British-ness recognised, to be recognised themselves. There was also resentment that the other nations within the United Kingdom could and did celebrate their past and their individuality, but that somehow England could not and did not; it is as if something long and old familiar had been taken away from people: Q: ‘How do you feel about being British?’ A: ‘Quite happy about being British, but more so English. It’s just on of those things. The Scots are patriotic about being Scots, the Welsh are patriotic about being Welsh, the Irish are patriotic about being Irish, and if you’re patriotic about being English, there’s something wrong with you. This is the sort of attitude I feel that in this country we don’t stand up for it, for who we are, the distinction of being English as opposed to being British as the Scots or whatever would say they’re Scots and British second, so that’s where I stand on that one.’ People said that they wanted to write English as their nationality or ethnic origin on forms and were annoyed that more often than not they did not have this opportunity. Several identified being English as important in the

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sporting arena, while others saw it as connected with their historical roots, while British-ness was more about global and political issues, for example, a designation used in other countries and on passports: British has come to mean something to do with being part of Europe, being part of a wider almost global society, and English is something you might find in country villages if we had any country villages anymore. And to do with people who are humble and rooted in this country, actually rooted in the soil, in the place. It was the case for many people that their faith and confidence in a larger, national identity, if indeed they felt it existed at all, seemed threatened. People seem far happier with a notion of a local identity and its emotional roots which are situated in the notion of community. Indeed this local community which is so important in the construction of emotional identity is constantly threatened by others while at the same time there is a longing to return, or reconstruct a lost identity. This is reminiscent of both Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Zizek’s psychosocial work. One reconstruction of lost identity is visible in the increase of tribal or territorial tensions, within both areas which have lost their secondary schools in Bristol and Plymouth. One person in Bristol described how obvious this tension was at a local youth club attended by teenagers from two nearby residential areas in the city. One group complained when the other group arrived from the area which had lost its secondary school and tried to provoke them by calling them names connected with their residential area. The person commented that going to a new school in the other area was really difficult for that group because of the rivalry between the groups: They went to their sworn enemies if you like. It was the same when we were at school, there was fighting amongst the schools. Parents in Plymouth coped in a different way by avoiding conflict. When the children who would have gone to the local school were given places in a college in a neighbouring area, one with which the area had traditionally hostile relations, the parents preferred to have their children bussed to schools miles outside the city or attend schools further away in Plymouth. The construction of white identity and territorial rivalry, however, are not restricted just to school children. Adults ‘inter-marry’ (sic) within their own residential area and thus reinforce their local white identity: ‘You never saw, hardly ever saw foreigners here, so there was a very insular, and even if you came from, I mean, if you lived in Devonport and you moved to some parts of Plymouth, what’s regarded, it’s all Plymouth, but Devonports regard themselves as separate, there’s rivalry there. There’s

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rivalry between Efford and Eggbuckland, they don’t intermarry. One of the things I’ve noted with the work I do is that families don’t marry outside their estate, it’s almost like they’re a village, like Efford. They’ll marry within Efford and . . . Swilley will marry in Swilley, you don’t marry from St Budeaux if you live in Swilley.’ Q: ‘It’s all tribal stuff.’ A: ‘Very, very tribal.’ The local residents acknowledge the importance of this emotional identity and the emotional sense of belonging to specific group and place and were both critical and aware of outsiders, usually holding some power who do not accept the conventions and importance in these constructions of identity. They believe that they impose irrelevant and inappropriate ideas on communities which ultimately reject them: There’s a lot of tribal relationships, I can only put it like that, in these areas, where everybody knows everybody else and is inter-married and inter-related. I think it is not only at a local level, but at a global level, people ignore these tribal structures and try and impose very, very foreign unworkable structures on them. The people who they’re imposed on don’t understand. They don’t understand how it works. They quickly revert to what they do understand which is their tribal affinities and loyalties and so on. There is in some sense, after Fanon (1968), an imposition of a way of being, both at the level of political economy and on a psychological plane, but in this case, the result is tension between different white groups rather than a psychology of oppression. In trying to theorise this socially Les Back’s (1996) work is useful. Back talks of a London estate ‘Riverview’ which was seen as a shining example of the post-war boom, a place where you could live safely and have and feel a sense of community, the ‘golden age’ of community if you like. The allocation of ‘problem’ families created both hostility and an emotional yearning in the first generation of residents to return to the perceived stability of the Golden Age. Although it is not possible to talk of any one Golden Age, there are a set of identifications for each generation which are expressed in an emotional attachment to different lifestyles; this was the case in both Bristol and Plymouth and gave people a strong sense of identity, of where they had come from. The problem with this is that these strong attachments and identifications with ways of life often lead to the denigration of Others, to newcomers and outsiders who bear the brunt of the hostile projections of the established group. People felt particularly threatened by specific groups, asylum seekers, Muslims, East Europeans; even

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though they knew very little about these groups, they represent a symbolic threat to white identity. We thus tend to create our own white identity at a local level which often leads to exclusionary practices and racism (see Clarke, 2003b). The very local level that this is expressed at is clear in this quote: You just feel totally different to everybody else. Everybody else is a foreigner. You come across the water and everything is foreign. This was not an immigrant or asylum seeker Other speaking, but someone who had moved a few miles away from Cornwall to Plymouth. If we think about Zizek’s (1993) psychosocial model then it appears to hold some water. The bond that holds a given community together is the way in which we share our enjoyment. What we fear most is the theft of that enjoyment by others. Our enjoyment is made up of all kinds of things, ways of life and mythologies. It is the way in which we imagine our community to be and therefore is often based in a nostalgic attraction to another way of life that never really existed or has been lost. This could be seen in several studies but couched in slightly different terminology (Seabrook, 1973; Rustin, 1991; Hoggett, 1992). Rustin highlights Seabrook’s work in Blackburn in the 60s whereby the Asian community started to take on some of the characteristics of the white working class while simultaneously, through economic decline and disintegration, the white working class suffered a loss of these qualities. The white community projected into the Asian community the demoralised and disintegrated state they were experiencing in the form of hostility towards the Asian community. Similarly, Paul Hoggett’s (1992) study of Tower Hamlets shows that tension between communities corresponds to a period of sustained uncertainty for groups and individuals where both group and collective identity are challenged and undermined. Often one community takes on the lost characteristics of the other. Indeed for Hoggett , the resentment between white and Bangladeshi communities is ‘made poignant by the fact that the latter community has many characteristics – extended and extensive kinship networks, a respect for tradition and male superiority, a capacity for entrepreneurship and social advancement – which the white working class in the area have lost’ (Hoggett, 1992, p. 354). I feel that what often gets lost is the idea that a strong sense of cohesion at the cost of exclusion leads to the emotional construction of white identity; indeed, disintegration and denigration can paradoxically lead to the maintenance of white identity through imagination, identification and an emotional attachment to a golden age. Community cohesion and attachment can have both detrimental and positive aspects. White identities are constructed from multiple experiences, geographical locations, community and attachments and multiple ethnicities.

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Discussion and conclusion In this short chapter I have given an overview of some of the psychosocial, or psychoanalytically informed, thinkers who I feel are important when we think about identity construction before going on to discuss the strong emotional bonds that construct white identity. I feel that if we think psychosocially about the construction of white identity then there is a complex amalgam of psychological mechanisms at work; projection, identification and projective identification which are bound up in the human imagination. There are also very clear socio-structural factors at play: housing, education and access to welfare. Both psychological and socio-structural are bound up in the notion of community, tradition and a sense of shared, as well as individual, identity. White identity seems increasingly to be concentrated at a more local level as people try to source some stability in an ever changing world. People appear to feel threatened by specific groups, immigrants, Muslims, East Europeans, etc. and while they know very little about them, they are symbolic of specific threats to identity which is always marked by difference. In other words, a sense of instability of who we are produces contempt, or at least fear of other groups that is based in very little real experience or evidence. Being British is too big now and too tainted by strangers in our midst; instead we see a move to a certain form of white Englishness. Like a mirror we start to reflect ourselves in the Otherness of the Other and there certainly seems to be a shift since 9/11 and 7/7. It seems the more conflict the more cohesion as people regress into a defensive position, unconsciously and consciously, toleration of difference fades and the more people feel threatened, whether this threat is real or imaginary, the more rigid and local white identities may become. As an emerging discipline there is much debate as to what the psychosocial is, should it have a hyphen or should it be just psychosocial. I very much agree with Wendy Hollway who says: ‘The hyphen in psychosocial is important: it means that wherever you encounter the social, you encounter it multiply mediated by the psychodynamic and vice versa’ (2004, p. 7). But to add a twist to this, there has also been a long-running debate as to what constitutes an emotion and whether they are based in our biology, whether they are situational in terms of social constructionism or whether there is a relational psychodynamic interplay, or a complex amalgam of factors. I have previously argued (2003b) for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human emotions which contains elements of social constructionism, interactionism and psychodynamic processes. This is the position that I take because it enables us to look at and address issues such as social action, agency, gender and the embodiment of emotions without wholly discounting elements of biology, or resorting to biological reductionism or the social, or reducing explanation to one or the other. Quite often there simply is no social encounter, the encounter is mediated through a third party, for

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example, media speculation and conjecture: we come to hate those we have never met. The encounter with the other is simply a phantasy about how others are, behave and feel.

Acknowledgement The research in this chapter was funded by the ESRC grant no: RES-14825-003. The co-investigator was Dr Steve Garner and the Research Associate Rosie Gilmour.

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Back, L. (1996) New Ethnicities and Urban Culture –Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. Clarke, S. (2002) ‘Learning from Experience: Psycho-Social Research Methods in the Social Sciences.’ Qualitative Research 2(2), 173–194. Clarke, S. (2003a) Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, S. (2003b) ‘Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Interpretation of Emotion.’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33(2), 143–161. Clarke, S. (2006) ‘Theory and Practice: Psychoanalytic Sociology as Psycho-Social Studies.’ Sociology 40(6), 1153–1169. Clarke, S. and Garner, S. (2005) ‘Psychoanalysis, Identity and Asylum.’ Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 10(2), 197–206. Clarke, S., Garner, S. and Gilmour, R. (2007) ‘Home, Identity and Community Cohesion.’ In M. Wetherell, M. Lafleche and R. Berkeley (eds) Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion. London: The Runnymede Trust/Sage Publications. Dalal, F. (2002) Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Sociology. London: Brunner-Routledge. Fanon, F. (1968) Black Skin White Masks. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Freud, S. (1919) ‘The Uncanny.’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XVII (1917–1919). London: Hogarth Press, pp. 219–252. Freud, S. (1969) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Hogarth Press. Hoggett, P. (1992) ‘A Place for Experience: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Boundary, Identity, and Culture.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, 345–356. Hollway, W. (2004) Editorial. Critical Psychology 10, 5–12. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: Sage. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1994) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.’ In J. Mitchell (ed.) (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein. London: Penguin. Lucey, H., Melody, J. and Walkerdine, V. (2003) ‘Transitions to Womanhood: Developing a Psychosocial Perspective in One Longitudinal Study.’ International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6(3), 279–284. Macey, D. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta Books.

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Phillips, T. (2005) After 7/7: Sleepwalking Back to Segregation. Accessed at: http:// www.cre.gov.uk/. Rustin, M. (1991) ‘Psychoanalysis, Racism and Anti-Racism.’ The Good Society and the Inner World. London: Verso, pp. 57–84. Seabrook, J. (1973) City Close-up. London: Penguin. Zizek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press.

10 Panic and Perjury: A Psychosocial Exploration of Agency ∗ Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson

The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the predicament of one man, Vince, in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to the understanding of agency. In the process we note the role of what we prefer to call affect, rather than emotion, in most contexts. If emotions are, as Blackman and Cromby (2007, p. 6) suggest, ‘those patterned brain/body responses that are culturally recognizable and provide some unity, stability and coherence to the felt dimensions of our relational encounters’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, because we are focusing on unconscious dynamics in this chapter, the term affect proves more relevant to our analysis than the emotions of anger and shame that are, arguably, the core suppressed emotions in the account. Vince himself never talked in terms of specific emotions, but rather, in line with Blackman and Cromby’s definition that ‘feelings register intensive experiences as subjective experience’ (ibid.), of how he was experiencing his painful world. In highlighting his embodied ‘sickness’, and the accompanying anxiety, we focus on the affective dimension. In this usage, anxiety is an affective state. A psychosocial analysis is attentive to the co-presence of the psychic and social dimensions of human behaviour, in a non-reductive fashion. This means specifying their joint effectivity on a person’s meanings and actions. Vince, the subject of our chosen case study, apparently had a stark choice to make: try to hold onto a job that he dreaded but needed, or return to life on the dole. However, this predicament had turned into a crisis when he became sick and could not go back to work, a situation apparently denying him any choice. His illness, some might say, had caused him to forego the choice, at least temporarily. But what theorisation of the individual subject would be entailed in seeing his illness also as a choice, one that solved certain problems, even as it created others? In particular, we are interested in demonstrating an approach to this question that is based on the detailed analysis of empirical data, since so much of the debate remains exclusively theoretical and thus rather abstract. 123

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The difficulty of drawing up models that include both structure and agency without simply collapsing one into the other has been a perplexing one for social psychology (Harré, 1977; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Gergen, 1989) and social theory (Giddens, 1979; Elliott, 2001). Both approaches are avowedly interested in the interaction of individuals with the social. The psychosocial approach we explore here does not resort to reductive mentalist accounts in its understanding of the effects of unconscious dynamics. We fully acknowledge the importance of the social in explaining human choices. The idea that social discourses construct an array of subject positions provides a non-individualistic way of linking individual subjects and the social world. What seems to be less well understood is what ‘produces the specific “choice” of location a particular individual makes amongst the available identity positions’ (Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman, 2003, p. 39). This question pinpoints the issue of choice as unavoidably implicating individuals in a way that is neither separate from the social world they inhabit, nor reducible to it, but rather ‘always already’ psychosocial. The theoretical problems involved in using the term choice illustrate how delicate the deployment of each relevant concept can be in our efforts to transcend dualism. We have argued elsewhere (Hollway, 1984, pp. 237– 238, for example) that more attention is needed to the affective investment involved in particular discursive positions, and that individual histories are important to understand these investments. In Hollway’s formulation, the term investment, based on affective processes, replaced choice because the latter implied a rational, decision-making subject that easily reduced to a model of an information-processing, asocial individual (p. 238). As is the case with choice, so it is with agency. According to Bruner (1990, p. 9), the term ‘implies the conduct of action under the sway of intentional states’. However this too depends on an idea of conscious, rational choice. It also sees actions as discrete episodes rather than as a continuous flow of social practices. The latter idea leaves open the question of the rational intentionality of agency and leaves space for the influence of the primary unconscious, which, according to Elliott (1992, p. 4), is ‘the dimension through which human beings create themselves anew’. In this chapter, we use a psychoanalytically informed idea of investment to emphasise that identity conflicts experienced within the flow of social practices are not necessarily resolvable by conscious intention or will. In our analysis of Vince’s choices, we take the workings of unconscious conflicts to be of central importance. Unconscious dynamics involve experiences that are not able to be thought (because they are unbearably painful or anxiety-provoking). The implication is that this kind of experience lays down its traces on and in the body; that is, through affect. This postulate enables us to notice different dynamics in our empirical data, based on which it is possible to reinterpret choice and action. This idea that meanings are mediated by psychic dynamics entails, first, taking into account

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how current choices signify through biography (in which social events and discourses were, in their turn, mediated by psychic events) and, second, paying attention to how current social experiences are mediated by defensive psychic organisations (both intra- and inter-psychic).

Method and analytic procedure The data used in our case study were produced from two interviews with Vince (a pseudonym), conducted by Wendy Hollway (WH), each lasting for approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, 1 week apart.1 Our research methodology, consistent with our theorisation of subjectivity, follows psychosocial principles. It involves positing a subject – including a research subject – ‘whose inner world is not simply a reflection of the outer world, nor a cognitively driven rational accommodation to it’. This research subject ‘cannot be known except through another subject; in this case the researcher’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, p. 4). In practice this is achieved by monitoring one’s response to the encounter based on the theoretical principle that affect is a dynamic entity that travels across porous individual boundaries (Blackman and Cromby, 2007, p. 6). The question of researcher reflexivity (as it is now usually posed) is important when psychoanalytic principles are introduced in data interpretation, as we do here. Psychoanalytic interpretation originates in the clinical situation, where the warrant for any interpretation emerges in the therapeutic relationship. What is the warrant in this context? This is an important emergent debate that we can only acknowledge briefly here. For us there are two forms of warrant for psychoanalytically informed data interpretation, forms that are inseparable in practice. First, there are the researcher’s multiply informed (hermeneutic) interpretations of interview claims in the context of everything that is known about the person (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, Chapter 4). These are informed by many theories, both formal and informal, explicit and implicit. Second, there is significance as it is revealed in what clinical psychoanalysis would call the countertransference responses of the researcher.2 For example, I (WH) experienced a strong need during the interview to protect Vince, and after I left the interview felt fury at the boss, experienced as a strange, almost alien, emotion which was presumably an introjection of Vince’s suppressed anger (see below for how this was used in our case analysis). This provides an example of how to use the psychoanalytic principle of affective unconscious intersubjectivity to theorise the effect of research relationship(s) on the production and analysis of data (Hollway, 2004). We have discussed this in the context of other case analyses (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, pp. 47–52, 65–68). The research topic, which posed the question about the theoretical relationship between fear and anxiety, required inferences to be drawn about people’s internal states. Drawing as we did on a psychoanalytic theorisation

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of anxiety, it was not appropriate to rely on interviewees’ conscious selfknowledge of such states. This led to the development of the Free Association Narrative Interview method (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000), based on the principle that, by enabling free associations to the interview questions, unconscious dynamics could be symptomatically inferred. The first interview consisted of seven questions phrased to elicit specific narratives about experiences of criminal victimisation, risk, fear and anxiety (see Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, pp. 37–38). The second interview questions were constructed after both researchers (WH and TJ) had listened to the audiotape from the first interview and identified what we considered to be significant issues for follow-up. Consistent with our theorisation of the psychosocial subject as a defended subject, our data analytic procedures were based on the principle that accounts cannot necessarily be taken at face value. Thus, in addition to typical thematic and narrative analytic procedures, we paid particular attention to the links (free associations) between textual elements and behaviours that signalled conflicting feelings about the material; for example, changes in emotional tone, long pauses or avoidances. These are some of the symptoms that make visible otherwise invisible internal affective states.

Going off sick Vince was a married man in his 40s who lived with his wife and three children on a council housing estate in the north of England. He was thin, wiry and, in the interview, quiet spoken and unassertive or timid. He described how, as well as working long hours as a long-distance lorry driver for 12 years, he had been an active man in his spare time, transforming their council house and actively enjoying gardening and his children. Now, ‘I’ve lost interest in virtually everything’. ‘Feeling ’ow I am like, I tend to keep meself to meself you know, and for peace and quiet.’ He had eaten very little since he had been off work, could not stand watching television and even ended up turning off his music tapes. ‘Little lad, like, er, a few months back,’e says to ’is mum like, he says, you know “what’s the matter wi’ me Dad like, ’e never speaks” like, you know.’ After 5 months, he was still signed off work with depression and was on medication that ‘can ’elp me sleep and get over me anxiety’. His state was uncharacteristic, as he used to be ‘so outgoing, you know, happy go lucky’. The period of sick leave began when, one morning, Vince was unable to go to work: ‘And I got up on Monday morning and er, I was sat over there like, and er . . . I felt absolutely shocking like, you know, just terrible. And er I asked me wife to ring the firm and just to say, well look, you know, I won’t be coming in like, I’m feeling ill like.’ His wife rang the firm and later also rang the doctor. She ‘rang without me knowing like, you know, ’cos I kept saying “no, don’t phone the doctor” like, I’ll be OK, I’ll just – she told me like [that she’d phoned the doctor] – I started panicking

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then you know, because er I’m, what’s happening. You know, me ’eart were beating and pounding away.’ Vince’s preferred way of dealing with feeling ill was to ‘just ’ave a bit of time off’ (without involving the doctor) in the expectation that the rest would be sufficient to enable him to return to work. On this occasion he started panicking, not earlier in the morning when he first realised he could not go to work, but once his wife had involved the doctor. Presumably, he could no longer deny that his ability to carry on with his job was under threat, and with it, as we argue below, a part of his identity. After 5 months, Vince’s experience was ‘I don’t feel any better now than when I first came off’. The doctor had found no organic evidence of an illness. Vince had attended some sessions of counselling, which the doctor appeared to think had been no help and he had just started a course of group therapy recommended by his counsellor. He found it ‘hard to explain at times . . . how you do feel. I mean that court case now. I mean I think about it every day and every night, you know, it’s still with me’. We address the meaning of the juxtaposition of these two sentences through our principle of free association. The fact that Vince’s train of thought moves from his attempts to explain feeling ill directly to the court case is, in our view, a clear indication of the emotional connection between the two. He went on to explain that 3 years earlier he had had his lorry stolen from outside the firm’s office. As was standard practice he had left the keys in the cab. Although it was normal practice, the insurance company argued that this invalidated the firm’s insurance claim. His boss was furious, and decided to take the insurance company to court, at the same time as telling Vince that he would lose his job if he didn’t get the money back. Vince presents his illness as occurring as a result of the 3 years of stress waiting for the court case to resolve itself. However, he is aware himself that perhaps things are more complicated. Despite the court case being won (indeed as we will see his boss had reason to be happy with him and so he was certainly keeping his job) he did not feel better: And er, it took 3 years to get there like [to court]. So obviously I were worrying for 3 years, at end of it all if he didn’t get ’is money, I’d be out of a job like. And ’e did win ’is claim. Er, but I still wasn’t too ’appy like. Obviously I’d been worrying all them years like . . . (WH: And then?). Well you know, everything – that were last November – it got to court and then Christmas ’olidays like. It er, you know, we ’ad us ’olidays like. At that particular time I thought well once it’s over and done with, that pressure would go like. But it didn’t (WH: Oh right.). So I’m off er, now with depression. You know, ’cos obviously it’s got me down that much. The fact that Vince did not begin to feel better once the court case was won alerts us to the possibility that we need to understand Vince’s difficulties in

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a wider context and understand more fully his psychosocial reality. Let us start where Vince did, with the experience of his job.

Running on empty In assessing the contribution of Vince’s job, and the threatened loss of it, to his present predicament, it is important to examine the evidence of what the job meant to him. Its primary, bodily meaning was the relentless experience, year in, year out, of punishingly long hours. At first when the company was new and Vince was the only driver, he did ‘all the runs – what three drivers do now’, working ‘14-hour days . . . some days 17 hours . . . solid driving’, undertaking ‘500-mile, 600-mile runs’ daily, ‘3,000 miles a week’, ‘hundred thousand miles a year’. Rest stops were few on the longer runs, an infraction assisted by using a lighter 3.5-ton van which did not need a tachograph. The pressure also meant that breaking speed limits became routine. This could be particularly risky in the vans they used at first: ‘if it was slippery or wet . . . they’d spin and everything’. These rushed, stressful, long daily runs – setting off at 3 o’clock in the morning, arriving home at 9 at night, having spent the evening preparing the next morning’s load – were necessary because ‘nights out’ allowances were not paid. Unsurprisingly, this gruelling routine took its physical toll. It left him feeling ‘really tired’, ‘flat on me feet’, and that was before he started the day’s driving: ‘every day were er absolutely murder’. On weekends he was ‘so tired’ that, after the family shopping, he ‘just stopped in’. His driver mates told him they would need 2 or 3 days to do what he did in a day; one warned him he was headed for an early grave (‘never see 45, way you’re going’). He was not unaware of the problem: ‘I knew eventually there’d come a day like, you know, when I wouldn’t be able to do it, you know, physically.’ After a few years, tiredness gave way to exhaustion. He lost the ability to relax (‘I ’ad to be doing something all time’) and to sleep properly (‘I couldn’t really keep me eyes open, but I couldn’t sleep’), a state exacerbated in the final 3 years by the additional stress of the impending court case. Whenever he expressed concerns to his bosses about the length of the runs, the number of deliveries, the safety of the vans and the need for more drivers, the answers were dismissive. According to Vince, he was told how they needed ‘to build the business up’, that the business ‘can’t afford it’, or, more brusquely, ‘do it or leave it’. ‘They just wasn’t bothered. As long as the job got done.’ Being paid as ‘staff’ rather than by the hour meant no overtime payments for the long hours worked – not even for the annual stocktaking weekend. It meant no meal allowances. It meant a Christmas bonus that was dependent entirely on the goodwill of the boss, who cleverly turned it into a form of attendance allowance and halved Vince’s for the year he was off sick for 3 months. This was the only extended time he had had off, the result of needing cortisone injections in both his arms, which had seized up as a result of the long hours

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spent driving. His latest pay rise was a mere 2–3 per cent, this at a time when, according to his estimates, the firm’s turnover had increased by 4000 per cent since it started out. And while Vince was facing the much-reduced income of statutory sick pay, his boss ‘has got to be a millionaire now’.

A family man Vince stayed in this job when others would have accepted unemployment or taken a casual, ill-paid job instead. To understand Vince’s commitment to this job we need to consider his investment in the idea of the ‘family man’. His home and family come across as the most important things in his life. His three children he describes as ‘the best thing that ever happened’ to him. He supported his wife’s ambition to work as a qualified nurse, whatever the financial hardships that might entail. His early married years were spent converting their old council house to its present modernised and immaculate state, so that he could say, with justified pride, ‘we’ve managed to get it as we want it’. Since then (and before he became too tired to do much), weekends would be spent on home-related activities – shopping, decorating and gardening. A defining feature of being a good family man in developed, patriarchal societies is being able to protect and provide (Gilmore, 1993). Crucial to this is the ability to be a breadwinner. It can be argued that Vince was identifying here with that influential version of working-class masculinity that celebrated the ability to undertake hard, physical graft through long days (and nights), year in year out, with fortitude, humour, and in fraternal solidarity with fellow workers (Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, 1956). This industrial, manufacturing-based world of work began to unravel in the mid1970s and, under Margaret Thatcher’s relentless neoliberalism, accelerated during the 1980s. Talk of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ was usually connected to the decline in manufacturing jobs (cf. Campbell, 1993; Mac an Ghaill, 1994) and their replacement by jobs in the service sector, the infamous ‘MacJobs’ of the post-industrial era. These jobs signify femininity, not masculinity (cf. Bourgois, 1995) and, in any case, are often too casual, temporary or illpaid to provide the basis for a secure breadwinning identity. Thus, Gorz’s (1982, 1989) post-industrial vision and the crisis of masculinity go hand in hand with serious implications for those wanting to be good, family men. From this perspective, Vince’s refusal of unemployment or low-paid casual employment makes sense. As he put it: I could ’ave took er, another job like but er, financially you know, I mean the jobs now like – I mean you’re talking £100 a week and there’s just no way you could live on it like, you know. I mean there’s people say to me like, you know, ‘well why don’t you get another job like?’ You know, I say ‘basically it’s down to money like, you know, you just can’t live on it’.

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Biographical significations When we explore the biographical origins of Vince’s identity, the relationship between the present threat to his breadwinner status and his own childhood adds a further dimension to understanding Vince’s choice to hang on to his job. His father had been a heavy drinker, who had ‘no time for the family’, who put them ‘through a lot of hardships’, especially his hard-working mother, who eventually left him. During his teen years Vince actively disidentified with his wastrel father: ‘I used to think to meself, well there’s no way I’m gonna be like ’im’, a phrase he used more than once. He described his younger brother as ‘a bit of a pain in the neck’, because, when younger, he would lie in bed all day and ‘would never go to work’: it was not that he could not get a job, like Vince, but ‘would not’ – with all its connotations of wilful refusal. His elder sister was ‘great’, ‘totally different’ from him and his other siblings. She had done ‘very well’ – by which he meant ‘doing a lot of reading and staying in’ (as opposed to going out drinking), and really liking home life. So, his hard-working mother and home-loving sister were spoken of in respectful, somewhat idealised terms; his brother’s indolence was an irritant; his father’s wastrel life roundly condemned. In narrating each of these relationships, the significance to Vince of hard work and family-centredness was repeatedly revealed. It is worth noting that, despite the connections of the provider discourse with masculinity, Vince’s identification as a selfless (family first) hard worker derived from his mother and involved a disidentification with his father. The character of his attachment to his job also suggested a strong unconscious identification with his own sons, not via the adult provider part of himself but via Vince as the son who was himself deprived of a father who worked (and whose failure to work he despised). At this stage, how can we summarise Vince’s ‘choice’ to remain in a job that had all but wrecked his health and that his friends thought he was crazy to be doing? (‘It’s not a job you’ve got, it’s a sentence’, was how one friend memorably put it.) The answer has a social, a discursive and a psychic dimension. The social dimension emphasises the restricted employment choices for unqualified working-class men in 1980s Britain, a time of rapid industrial decline and rising unemployment. To see why Vince decided to put up with dreadful employment conditions in return for the relatively high wages, attention needs to be given to his sense of himself as a family man. The discursive dimension points to Vince’s positioning in a provider/protector discourse. However, we need also to understand the particular biographical dimension and his unique investments in this position. Using some biographical evidence, we suggested the importance of his disidentification with a failed and rejected father, and his identification with his hard-working and long-suffering mother. However, the exploration of his relation to his

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boss suggests a further seam of significance in Vince’s paralysing inability to work or to give it up at the time of interview.

Committing perjury In the second interview, Vince adds another layer to his earlier account of the effect of the stolen van on him. In a nutshell: ‘apart from worrying about getting sack, I were also worried about committing perjury, ’cos that’s actually what I did.’ Briefly, the boss asked Vince, via another employee who claimed to be a witness, to alter the evidence that he had initially given to someone from the insurance company about exactly where the van had been parked when it was stolen. This was to make it seem that the van was parked on private land and not partly outside on the road. Vince felt that he was in an impossible position: And they’re using me as a – well as a pawn type of thing. He’d threatened to sack me, you know, frightened me, so hopefully, you know, I’d go along with them like. Well I did do. And er, like I say it took three years to get to court so obviously I – apart from worrying about getting sack I were also worried about committing perjury, ’cos that’s actually what I did. Vince’s revelation here reconfigures the meaning of his prior account regarding the significance of the court case and its effect on his health. In what follows, we will approach the eventual question of whether and how his going off sick from work was a choice of which he was the agent, first by exploring further Vince’s relationship with his boss and second by considering his investment in a moral identity. One important theme of this extract culminates in Vince realising something about his boss. Prior to this, he implies, he believed that a forklift truck driver was responsible for the plan to lie about the position of the van. Later he comes to accept that his boss was also involved. Not only did the boss exploit Vince’s labour and coerce Vince into perjury for the sake of winning an insurance claim, to add insult to injury, the boss paid Vince for his cooperation: Anyway when we got back to work like [after the court case], I went into canteen to er, get changed and er, he shouted me into his office like, came into canteen, he said ‘can I just see you in office like.’ So I went to office, and he gave me some money. And then he took it back off me like, and then he said ‘oh, I think I’ve give you (the forklift driver’s) as well.’ (WH: Mmm.). So I gave it him back, then he gave it – he said ‘no you’re alright like’ and he gave it me back. . . . What it was then he said er, – what did he say now er, he gave me money, he says ‘don’t let it happen again,’cos

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we’ll not get away wi’ it again.’ So that more or less convinced me that, you know, he did know. Well to me anyway like. Vince’s conclusion is remarkably uncertain: ‘So that more or less convinced me that, you know, he did know. Well to me anyway like.’ Surely it would be more accurate to say that the boss ‘was responsible’. So why does Vince soften this conclusion? Why is he still invested in the boss’s good character, despite what he conveys as a bitter betrayal? As with our enquiry into the meanings that the job holds for Vince, we can sketch a social explanation and also provide evidence for two elements of a psychic explanation. To threaten Vince with the sack if the insurance case was not won was not only unfair (bullying) because Vince was following company practice, but it meant that the future of his job was largely out of Vince’s control. The boss’s strategy suggests that he knew just how important was Vince’s job to him and we know how often the boss had dismissed his complaints about unreasonable conditions of work. Perhaps Vince’s wish to continue to believe in his boss derived from the history of him getting the job. Vince had been unemployed for 3 years at the time and his wife worked behind the bar at a pub and got to know the boss that way, finding out that there would be a driving job in a new business he was setting up. Vince worked in that job for a year but was laid off when the boss closed it down. The full reasons were not clear from Vince’s account, but there was a problem with employee theft. This was significant because the boss treated Vince as an exception, as the trustworthy one, and said he would give him the first driver’s job when the new business was ready to start up 1 year later. Vince duly started the job, having remained unemployed in the interim, waiting. The boss’s word was reliable and in this respect he already had the power to make or break Vince’s fortunes by conferring employment: Vince depended on that promise for a year. At the beginning, the new business felt like a shared venture: working hard in the early stages in exchange for the rewards of a ‘good living’ later. Vince committed himself to this vision of the future. He said, ‘at first, they promised everything and they’ve just gone back on their word. They’ve just . . . pushed and pushed and pushed and they don’t know when to stop.’ These interpersonal characteristics of the relationship make sense in terms of the power relations given by the hierarchy of the business and mediated by an old-fashioned class discourse. The boss has the power to threaten and bully, to offer and withdraw employment; the employee is scared, dependent, also grateful and admiring of his boss’s success (‘He’s very clever. Very shrewd. . . . He is a good business man you know.’). The external, material power relation is clear here, but it does not fully explain the interpersonal dynamics between the two men, which resemble those of a bully and victim (e.g., the forklift truck driver is not victimised in a similar way). WH’s fury with the boss and her strong feeling of wanting to protect this vulnerable

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man are further sources of information about Vince’s relationship with his boss. The boss has come to know, over many years, that he can get away with exploiting Vince and now he succeeds in coercing him too. Vince has long found the boss frightening (‘he’s very intimidating’) and been compliant and so it is not surprising that at this moment of choice he does not change the well-established dynamic and stand up for what he believes is right.

An honest man betrayed by the boss However, many employees would not have felt so betrayed (the boss’s reprehensible behaviour did not surprise or shock me, TJ, for example). His continuing reluctance to acknowledge the boss’s dishonesty suggests an idealisation of the boss by Vince that has the flavour of an ideal father figure: a powerful figure that supported Vince in ways his own father had not. Faced with betrayal by this man, his disillusionment would be all the stronger, as it turned out to be. It is possible there was transference from the father figure to the boss (both of whom he described as frightening) once he felt let down by him, just as his father let him down. Having admitted perjury to the interviewer, Vince could return to the question of why he went off sick when the court case had been successfully resolved, enabling him to keep his job. This time, the ending is different: And er, obviously at end of this court thing like I – I thought well, at least it’s over and done wi’ you know, the pressure will go. But it never did. So I carried on working for a few month and er, like I say, eventually I just cut off. ‘Just cut off’ suggests that his sickness was a way of severing his painful relations with his work. Given the context of this account, directly following the story in which the boss’s role in his perjury is incontrovertibly demonstrated, and given the growing expression of his hurt at the boss’s betrayal as the interviews progressed (he ‘feels betrayed’, the boss ‘just ripped me apart’ and ‘used me as a pawn’), we can conclude that it is not only his job but his boss that Vince is cutting off from. Vince prefaced the story of the perjury by emphasising, in the present tense, how terrible he feels about what he did. In the context it is clear that he is no longer referring to how terrible he felt during the 3 years, but to his feelings about committing perjury. There is shame implied in this direct address to the interviewer (‘this will surprise you like’); shame being relived as he now comes clean, after avoiding the admission in many places where it would have been relevant during the interview. Paradoxically, Vince seemed to be motivated by his identity as an honest man, even as he was revealing a serious dishonesty. By his revelation, he was being honest in relation to the researcher. In this way he could be said to be repositioning himself, in a new

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relationship, as honest. He described his response to being paid by the boss for perjury as follows: So the first thing I did then. I rang me wife and I were really upset like and I said ‘you’ll never believe what’s happened’ and I told ’er. . . . So I just came ’ome and er, I gave money to lads. I didn’t want anything to do with it. Just split it between three of them (WH: Mmm.). And I was so (WH: Mmm. Mmm) mad and I don’t know – I just couldn’t believe it. He conveys his distaste for the money, which, because it was given as a reward for his dishonesty, was dirty money (‘I didn’t want anything to do with it’). His action in giving it away implied that at least he would not be guilty of the charge of having committed perjury for financial benefit. However, the taint presumably remained, not least because the money did benefit his children (who, we assume, were not told of its provenance). He also, unusually in the interview, conveyed his anger at being put in that position (‘I was so mad’). We need to inquire about the sources of Vince’s investment in honesty, since we can imagine many justifications that could have been used to mitigate the dishonesty of his perjury. Not being a liar was central to his self-concept: ‘I think they ’urt me in the fact that, like I said to [my wife], I’m not a liar (WH: Mm). If anything I’m not a liar and that’s what they made me do.’ Assuming that ‘if anything’ means ‘if I’m anything at all . . .’, he is saying that being an honest man is more important than other aspects of his identity. This remains in the present tense, despite his acknowledged act of dishonesty. His identity goes beyond a single, coerced behaviour: ‘I’ve worked for this company 12 years and, for being honest, hard-working, this is what I end up with.’ It is this robbing him, a powerless man, of perhaps the most crucial aspect of his limited power, namely, his self-esteem as an honest, hard-working man, which turns the boss’s coercion into a betrayal. It silences his (honest) voice, literally, and forces him to adopt their (dishonest) one. The emotional strength of this experience is illustrated in a thrice-repeated phrase attributed to the forklift truck driver during the story of how Vince was asked to lie about the position of the van, ‘I’m not putting words into your mouth’, each time conveying more powerfully Vince’s indignation that they were doing just that. This demonstrates the importance to Vince of being able to speak honestly. To feel forced to tell a lie robs him of control, entails a painful re-evaluation of his boss’s honesty and undermines his ability to trust: ‘With the company, like, I’ve lost a lot of trust in people . . . I’ve really trusted ’em and I think they’ve let me down in that respect.’ This left

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him with a feeling of betrayal: the boss not only let him down (that was not new) but forced him to let himself down: ‘If anything I’m not a liar and that’s what they made me do.’ The vehemence of ‘if anything’ is both poignant and revealing: it establishes honesty as bedrock to his sense of selfworth, even as it begins to explain why it hurt, and continued to hurt, so much, leaving him with bitter feelings about his work and the company as a whole. This added theme in Vince’s relation to work – namely, the loss of trust and honesty in his relationship with his boss – provides us with the necessary understanding of what Vince meant by ‘cutting off’ when he went sick; a profoundly felt meaning, central to his identity, leaving him further bereft of hope and self-worth.

Conclusion Referring to his act of perjury after its admission, Vince expresses the conflict between determinism and agency in the following words: He forced me to do it, yeah. I mean and I think to meself now (pause) I’m trying to kid meself saying he did force me, you know, I’m blaming meself for that. I mean I think I could have said ‘no, no way, I’m not doing it’. I ’ad the choice you know. Obviously I was frightened of losing me job and (WH: mm) basically that’s why I went along with it. The determinism in this statement reflects Vince’s experience of material power relations, because the boss had the power to sack Vince. However as soon as he has claimed he was ‘forced’, he changes position: ‘I could have said “no, no way, I’m not doing it”.’ Taken together, these two statements express this aspect of Vince’s mental conflict. Although these two positions are in conflict, they are not contradictory. Put simply, Vince is saying that he both had and had not the choice to say no: had not, because the pressures were so great that he felt that he was forced. This is an example of Barnes’s (2000, p. 15) argument that choice and causation can be compatible. We do not see this apparent contradiction as a problem in everyday discourse, although the idea of compatibility of the two positions fails to acknowledge the painful mental conflict that Vince is experiencing and how it is central to his agency. While he is forced to choose perjury, this does not resolve his mental conflict, rather it exacerbates it: he feels worse, not better, when the court case is resolved and he can keep his job. He then ‘cuts off’ by going on what turns out to be long-term sick leave. We have detailed the meanings of Vince’s job using a psychosocial perspective. It made sense to divide the meanings of his job into three for this purpose. First, the experience of his daily job (the exploitation, the danger, the exhaustion, the powerlessness to improve his conditions, the determination to carry on); second, the significance of having a respectable

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job (being employed, providing for his family, being worthy like his mother not worthless like his father); and third, the relationship with his boss (the gratitude and dependence, the trust, the fear, the idealisation, the betrayal, the moral taint). Once we are aware of all of these sources of significance, we can understand the full extent of Vince’s inner conflict about his job. Not only was it exhausting and threatening to his health and he dreaded it, not only had he worried for 3 years about being held unfairly responsible for the van’s theft, not only did he discover that his boss was a bully and dishonest, but also he compromised himself in a way that was central to his self-respect. Working for his boss came to signify moral corruption. At this point, then, he hated the job even more but he still could not consciously bring himself to give it up. Yet that outcome was about to be achieved by his ill-health. What can this painful case tell us about choice and agency? In what sense can we say that he has been the agent of that outcome? We have made it clear that Vince’s intentions cannot be reduced to his conscious awareness. He had come to dread his job and it must follow that a part of him wished to be rid of it. It is also clear that this part was in fundamental conflict with another part (one shot through with fears of failing as a family man) that dreaded not having this job. A psychoanalytic model of subjectivity defined by mental conflict and based on affect is much more plausible in Vince’s case than one relying on the idea of a unitary rational subject. It therefore needs to inform our idea of agency. When mental conflict is too painful – and surely Vince’s is a poignant example – it cannot be thought (Bion, 1962). By becoming too sick to work, Vince achieves a resolution, not through thought but by the action of his body; action based on affect. This resolution is an elegant one. On the one hand, he has not chosen to quit his job. He and others can honestly say that he would be working if he could. His intentions remain unimpeachable. On the other hand, his collapse has achieved that desired-and-feared situation: he does not go to work. The resolution is also impressive in that he can hold on to the possibility of his job in the future (it will be held open for 2 years). Unfortunately since a return to work would – unless things changed considerably – precipitate the conflict that his sickness resolves, we fear that Vince’s illness will remain with him as long as there is any risk that, by getting better, he would feel obliged to return to his job. If, as we have argued, his sickness is the resolution, then it will have to continue. Clearly the cost of this resolution is huge. Can we say that Vince chose this outcome? Yes, if we define the agent of this choice as the subject of unconscious conflict; that is divided, defended, affective and embodied. In this view, Vince chose to leave his job. We are not arguing that all choices are experienced in conditions of such mental conflict as this: each choice must be situated in its psychosocial specificity. On other occasions, Vince or some other agent might face more or less

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difficult external circumstances and be capable of thought resulting in reasoned action. Our psychosocial theory can understand those cases too. A theory of the subject of choice and agency must be applicable across this whole spectrum.

Notes ∗ An extended version of this paper was published in 2005 in the British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 2, 147–163; the text is used with kind permission.

1. These were part of a corpus of 37 double interviews conducted within an ESRCfunded project titled ‘Gender difference, anxiety and the fear of crime’ (Grant number L21025222018). For methodological details see Hollway and Jefferson (2000). 2. Clinical psychoanalysis uses the terms transference and countertransference precisely to refer to the affective transfer that crosses individual boundaries and provides a form of emotional communication.

References Barnes, B. (2000) Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London: Sage. Bion, W. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Maresfield. Blackman, L. and Cromby, J. (2007) ‘Editorial: Affect and Feeling’. Critical Psychology, 21, 5–22. Bourgois, P. (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Campbell, B. (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places. London: Virago. Dennis, N., Henriques, F. and Slaughter, C. (1956) Coal Is Our Life. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Elliott, A. (1992) Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, A. (2001) Concepts of the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press. Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2003) ‘Taking a Stand: Using Psychoanalysis to Explore the Positioning of Subjects in Discourse’. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(1), 39–53. Gergen, K. (1989) ‘Social Psychology and the Wrong Revolution’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 19, 463–484. Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. Gilmore, D. (1993) Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London: Pluto. Gorz, A. (1989) Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. Harré, R. (1977) ‘The Self in Monodrama’. In Mischel, T. (ed.) The Self. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 318–348. Hollway, W. (1984) ‘Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity’. In Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (eds) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London: Routledge.

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Hollway, W. (2004) ‘An Appropriate Research Paradigm for Evaluating Psychoanalytically-Informed Practices’. International Journal of Infant Observation and its Applications, 7(2/3), 26–42. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: Sage. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994) The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham: Open University Press. Potter, J. and M. Wetherell (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.

11 Separation and Changing Identity in Becoming a Mother Cathy Urwin

Introduction ‘Identity’ self-evidently involves both social and psychological processes. Yet it is difficult to put the two together in meaningful ways. Traditional definitions tend to emphasise identity in relation to group membership, thus conflating the individual and the social. Alternatively, identity is equated with an individual’s essential characteristics, loosing constituting effects of social processes. More recently, sociological or post-structural definitions have stressed identity’s ephemeral qualities, highlighting how it is when we are threatened with a ‘loss’ of or ‘crisis’ in identity that we become most conscious of it. ‘One speaks of identity when one is not sure where one belongs’ (Bauman, 1996, p. 19). Hall captures the non-unitary nature of identity in his definition: ‘the unstable point at which the “unspeakable stories of subjectivity” meet the narratives of history and of a culture’ (Hall, 1988, p. 440). This raises the question of how individuals achieve psychological continuity in conditions of historical and geographical disjuncture or social fragmentation. This chapter explores emotional processes involved in changing identity with particular reference to becoming a mother for the first time. This transition can profoundly challenge a woman’s sense of who she is. While mastering new skills and dealing with sometimes conflicting expectations from family and society, she must move from being her parents’ child to also being a parent herself. The psychological work in this is all the more complex because she is required to identify with and respond sensitively to the baby’s needs at a time when, in the months after the birth, she may need ‘mothering’ herself. There is always the potential, at a conscious or unconscious level, of feeling rivalrous with or displaced by one’s own baby (Harris, 1987). The mother may also feel that she is missing out on opportunities that might be available in other aspects of her life. Sustaining oneself through these potentially turbulent emotional processes requires support, from partners, family and wider community. These provide continuity, practical help 139

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and a context in which childcare practices are given meaning. How do new parents manage the transition to parenthood if they are transposed to very different cultural contexts? I became interested in these issues when working as a child psychotherapist with under-fives and their parents living on a deprived housing estate serving an ethnically diverse community (Urwin, 2003). A large proportion of referrals were for children having difficulties separating from their mothers, for example, at the start of nursery school. But for children to separate, their mothers must be willing to leave their children. As a psychological process, separation includes the capacity to sustain the belief in being loved when one’s parents or significant others are not there. It also includes being able to disentangle one’s feelings from those of others. Perhaps the referred children were responding to their mothers’ feelings as well as to their own? Typically, these children’s parents were raising them in very different circumstances from those of their own upbringing. Often there had been a traumatic dislocation from their countries of origin. Trying to understand the children’s anxieties would generally lead to an exploration of mothers’ experiences of separations, including their babies’ births, any bereavements and the loss of homeland, culture and family connectedness. We would also explore the practices that might support separation in the home country, often unavailable in the inner city environment. Putting their experiences into words appeared to help the family establish a new relationship with what had been lost. The psychological work involved in this was a kind of mourning that eventually allowed the parents to be in touch with resources within themselves and the community or extended family. Reducing the mothers’ anxiety, this enabled the children to play, to make other relationships and to separate. Another consequence was that the mothers achieved a stronger sense of identity as effective parents. This was shown, for example, by mothers feeling that they had achieved a better balance between their own needs and their children’s, recognising that issues affecting them were experienced by other mothers, being willing to gain support from other parents in reciprocal arrangements like babysitting, and being active advocates for their children in relation to authority, for example, in sharing information with teachers. Central to the subjective component of mothering identity appeared to be the mothers’ ability to sustain the emotional experience of missing and thinking about their children when they were not with them; their children were both on their minds and also separate from them. These characteristics applied to families referred for help. Yet they may be far more generally experienced in negotiating such a major psychological transition as parenthood. This chapter aims to illustrate the significance of issues of separateness and separation in changing identity in becoming a mother through drawing on observational material from a psychoanalytic infant observation study of six first-time mothers and their babies. These

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were part of a larger group of mothers and infants involved in a study of mothering and identity sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),1 who were all interviewed before their babies’ births and during and at the end of the first year using the Free Association Narrative Interview (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). The chapter focuses on three women and their babies from different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds, who nevertheless represent features of the group as a whole.

Psychoanalytic infant observation as a research method First developed for training child psychotherapists to become attentive to minutiae of infants’ emotional lives and family relationships, psychoanalytic infant observation was chosen as a method to supplement semi-structured interviewing because it offers rich opportunities for understanding complex psychological processes associated with infants’ effects on their parents while providing snapshots of family life in the community (Bick, 1964). The baby is observed for an hour a week in the home by a single observer, who gets to know the baby and family while maintaining a friendly but non-participatory style. Observers write up as full account as possible of what they observed after each observation and meet weekly for a seminar, focusing each time on a written record of one session with one particular baby and mother, noting dominant dynamics and following developmental themes. Here, the mothers and babies were observed from birth for 1 year. The observers were child psychotherapists or child psychotherapists in training who had already undertaken infant observation. The seminars were supervised by myself. Observing the emotional effects of the observational material on the seminar group proved particularly useful in exploring the impact of cultural differences (Urwin, 2007).

Some general findings In our observed group there were two Bangladeshi mothers, both born and educated in the UK, an African and an African Caribbean mother, and two white mothers, one of whom was South African. Though not a clinical sample this emerged as a vulnerable group, commensurate with the deprivation and social diversity in the area. The incidence of difficult births was strikingly high. All the observed mothers moved house during the study, or were planning to do so, reflecting in part the amount of temporary housing locally and a high density of migrant families. While some of the mothers were at times depressed, all went through periods of what we have described as ‘existential loneliness’, an anomic state associated with both the shock of the baby’s dependence and the mothers’ disconnectedness from identity-defining aspects of their previous lives (Urwin, 2007). Like all mothering research, we found that mothers’ relationships with their own mothers

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gained significance in dealing with these anxieties. We often heard idealised versions of mothers’ memories of their own upbringing and home country, even where they were determined to do things differently from their own mothers. But contact with parents was not always easy given conditions of immigration and contemporary migration within the UK. The following example of Laura, a white British mother, illustrates mothers’ vulnerability to feeling swamped by babies’ demands as they respond empathically to their babies’ emotional states. It also illustrates difficulties in keeping in touch with parents that apply even where parents live within the UK (Flakowicz, 2007).

Laura: Managing the ambivalences of parenthood Laura was a competent professional woman planning to return to work within 6 months. She had grown up in a small town in rural England and had come to London for work. She was delighted to be pregnant. In some respects for Laura the issue was to separate from the ideal baby of her imagination in order to meet the ‘actual’ baby of reality. The observer met Laura about 1 week before the baby was born. Laura was pleased to talk, noting ‘it’s the last time I can be a bit selfish; later on the attention will be more on the baby’. She had enjoyed feeling ‘special’ when she was pregnant. She did not know the sex of the baby and hoped to have a little girl. She portrayed an idyllic image of togetherness that included her partner, Barry, and how they would both interact with ‘the bump’. Laura in fact gave birth to a little boy, Arthur. Unfortunately the labour was long and extremely painful. Arthur was placed in special care to allow mother and baby to recover. To Laura’s distress, he was bottle fed during this time. At the first observation, Laura’s mother, who lives several hundred miles away, was present. She held Arthur for a time. This gave Laura space to tell the observer what had happened. Initially Laura’s account of the birth was fiercely cheerful. By contrast, her mother referred to her grandson’s birth as ‘traumatic’. While she was holding Arthur, she said that, every time Laura said ‘push’ in her account, baby Arthur reacted by freezing. One explanation of Arthur’s reaction is that he was responding to tensions in his grandmother’s body as she took on board her daughter’s painful situation, which, at that time, Laura could not allow herself to feel because she feared being overwhelmed. When her parents returned home, and Barry was back at work, Laura was left alone with the baby. Given the close identification between mother and daughter, unsurprisingly Laura described feeling ‘ripped away’ from her mother. Her father gave Arthur a web cam, to allow the family to see and talk to each other from a distance. However, for Laura the idea of virtual contact with her parents was not much help. During the observer’s next few visits Laura complained about the lack of sleep and having to feed Arthur many times during the night. At 3 weeks, she volunteered,

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‘Sometimes I dream at night that I breastfeed him, but then I realise that I was not actually feeding him. I have to make sure if I am really doing it’. It was as if she was asking herself ‘is this really a reality or is it just a dream?’ In describing feeding Arthur, she indicated her sense of having been intruded upon by something or someone she did not yet recognise, giving her feelings that were unexpected and hard to place. She described Arthur as ‘a bit aggressive’ and how ‘sometimes when he’s feeding he gets so frustrated, holding the nipple in his mouth and making angry, growling sounds like a little puppy’. Sleeping remained extremely difficult so that Laura was prepared to travel long distances with Arthur to stay with her parents in the countryside, where baby and mother both slept soundly. Without her parents there, Laura felt very uncertain about her new role, and felt her partner ‘was not really much help at this stage’. Baby books were unhelpful as advice was often conflicting. From friends, Laura got some reassurance from noticing that she was not the only one who was uncertain about what to do. Arthur himself, however, was a gregarious baby, who sometimes seemed to turn on his smiles for other people. Laura was pleased and excited by Arthur’s engaging behaviour towards the observer and others. Yet she also gave the impression that she was not ready to include another person into their relationship. First thoughts of weaning, for example, were contradictory. On the one hand, Laura complained of how Arthur would snatch at the breast, scratching and ‘digging his nails in’, and found the feelings this gave her upsetting. But she could also feel dismissed by Arthur’s wider widening interests. Arthur at 3 months, 1 week Laura described how she had been reading a magazine and Arthur saw pictures of colourful fruit toys in there. He pulled them towards himself and licked them. She said that it was like he wanted to say ‘I am ready for these now, I don’t want this boring milk. I want these nice things’. Laura experienced the quick passage of time and change as painful and, perhaps, rejecting. On the one hand, she was pleased with Arthur’s development. At the same time, she also felt the loss and the reality of not being able to go back in time. In the observation 3 weeks later, Laura is in touch with the sense of loss as the little baby she has just got to know is already beginning to disappear. Arthur at 4 months, 16 days He was moving one hand up to his face. Laura picked him up and lay him across her lap. Laura said that Arthur was touching his ear and added that, ‘This is a classic sign of teething’. She had read this in a book. ‘There are other signs; like when his cheeks go pink and also the drooling.’ Laura said sadly, ‘So he has all the classic signs, but I hope that he will not

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teeth yet for another two months.’ She sighed. The observer said that it all happened so quickly; Laura said that ‘it is strange to think that all this happened just on milk, all this growing’. To cope with this despondent and depleted state Laura drew on her organisational capacities. She needed to return to work before 6 months to fulfil the conditions of her contract. But the major focus for her energy became planning her own marriage. This entailed visits not only to her parents for preparations but also to some of Barry’s relatives who lived abroad. For several weeks there was a sense of constant shifting and moving around, and many observations were cancelled. Laura went so far as suggesting stopping the observation so as not to ‘mess (the observer) around’. The observation group felt that this was an implicit request for someone to tolerate the upside-downness and ruptures that Laura had to work through. In the event the wedding was enjoyable and provided a sense of connectedness and an extended family around the child. Fairly soon after the wedding, Laura returned to work. Barry’s parents looked after Arthur. When Arthur was around 8 months, Laura told the observer the family planned to leave London, to live in a small market town some distance outside London. The last observations took place in the new house. By this time, Laura was more settled. She had created an external framework in some respects modelled on a version of what she had known in her own upbringing but which she had brought about through her own efforts. In this environment she felt more confident in her strengths and accepting of limitations. The observer felt that things were ‘more real’. In the following extract, from the first observation in the new house, Arthur responds to the sight of the observer and his father by crying. The observer suggests that her arrival and the presence of the father are experienced as hurtful because they bring disruption, rather in the way that teeth bring the end to the breast-feeding. Arthur does not cover his upset feelings with a charming smile and neither does Laura restrain herself from swearing at him. Arthur at 10 months, 12 days Laura held Arthur on her lap. He snuggled into her breast and looked up at her slightly. He began sucking rhythmically. Barry stood in the sitting room looking at his electronic diary. Arthur kept looking at his Dad momentarily when he was not sucking. Laura let out a loud ‘ouch’ and told the observer that Arthur had got two upper teeth. She said that he was quite upset recently because of teething. He paused for a little break and Laura was about to change her breast when he suddenly flinched back as if to look at Dad and hit his head on Laura’s chin. His eyes filled with tears. He looked at the observer with a reproachful ‘look what you have done to me’ look. Laura held his head in her hand and rubbed it,

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wanting to make him better. He continued looking at the observer with his eyes full of tears. The observer said that he was looking at his Daddy and also looking at her and that he did not know what kind of stranger she was. After finishing the feed Laura put Arthur down and talked to Barry intermittently about the journey to visit one of their friends. Arthur picked up a magazine that was lying on the floor. He brought it to his mouth and bit a piece of it with his front teeth. Laura removed it saying under her breath ‘little bastard’. It took time for Laura to recognise the baby’s demands and aggression as indicating how much he valued her. For all the mothers in our group, weaning produced sadness and reflection. At the same time the emergence of attachment behaviour was affirming of their identities as mothers. The infant’s selective attachment behaviour towards the mother indicates differentiation between mother and baby; it also signals to the mother both her baby’s separateness and her special appeal. Thus the self-conscious experience of the self as ‘mother’ is established retrospectively around this experience of loss, and is itself a partial solution to it.

Azra: The significance of the infant’s attachment for mothering identity As in many cultural groups, in Bangladesh the extended family plays a central role in supporting mother and baby practically and emotionally in the first months. Both our Bangladeshi families found creative solutions to the disjunction between traditional cultural patterns and realities of living in contemporary London. Azra grew up in London and was strongly connected to the local environment, telling the observer about her school at the first visit (Layton, 2007). Azra’s mother had died when Azra was a teenager. When she was 18, Azra had an arranged marriage, which took place in Bangladesh. Azra returned to the UK but her husband, Javed, remained behind until immigration could be sorted. Before her pregnancy Azra had been working in a busy apartment store. By contrast, her husband was unemployed at the beginning of the study. On her marriage, normally a bride would move into her husband’s family household, husband staying in his family home. Azra and Javed had their own temporary flat provided by the council. However, while waiting for the arrival of the baby, a boy, Zamir, and for much of the first months, they went against tradition and stayed in Azra’s father’s household. This consisted of her father and stepmother, their two small daughters and Azra’s two younger brothers. Her older brother and sister, who were both married living elsewhere, would leave their small children to be minded by the stepmother.

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This arrangement had practical advantages. In contrast to Laura’s situation, there were many people to look after the baby. It also had psychological advantages. The new baby could be more or less absorbed as another sibling into the household, which could help with some of the mother’s feelings of being displaced, mentioned earlier. At the same time, Azra could claim a special role in the family as the new mother. The observer’s first visit after Zamir’s birth had a strong sense of celebrating the arrival of the new baby and Azra’s changed status. For Azra, as for Laura, the baby’s dependence stirred up mixed feelings. For Azra, her mother’s death made the struggle more poignant. This was particularly obvious when Azra began to try to move back into her own flat. She was reluctant to spend time there. She would arrange to meet the observer at the flat, change her mind at the last minute and relocate herself at her father’s. She described his household as being ‘like a nursery’. The following observation, one of the first to take place in the flat, gives a sense of Azra’s isolation. It was a cold day. Azra explained that she had already been out and had to wrap up the baby warmly. A feeding bottle was on the table, indicating that Azra was already thinking about weaning. Zamir at 2 months Zamir was unhappy. Azra noticed he had been sick. She said that he was naughty and pulled him out of the baby chair by one leg and he hung upside down for a few seconds. She took him on her lap while he writhed uncomfortably. She complained that he was always moving around like this. She offered a bottle. He refused to take it. She tried again, putting the teat in the corner of his mouth. His body gyrated in protest. . . . He was now clearly upset and distressed. She stopped trying to feed him. He calmed down and looked around the room. Azra tried to feed him again and this time he accepted the bottle. Azra went on to explain that she was feeding Zamir formula because when she was breast feeding him he was always attached to her and she could not get anything done. He was very demanding. Where Azra found the baby’s attachment to the breast too demanding, the observer feared that Azra found her too demanding also, sometimes cancelling observations or making herself unavailable. However, the observer persisted and in the following month noticed a change, feeling more accepted and that Azra was less anxious. Javed was present. Chatting to the observer, he described the pattern of naming in Sylhet, and how one would usually choose a name from the Koran, adding father’s and maybe grandfather’s names. The observer noted that in that way you would know the whole history. Javed smiled and said, ‘Sylhet is a rich country’.

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Materially, Sylhet is a poor country. But Javed was talking about the richness of a familial and cultural heritage, to which at that moment he felt connected. From this time subsequent observations generally took place in Azra’s flat, Azra looking forward to the observer’s presence. In parallel Azra began to notice Zamir’s needs for companionship, taking pleasure in his growing attachment. She shared with the observer new emotions associated with motherhood. At 6 months, 3 weeks, for example, Azra proudly told the observer how she now worried about Zamir if she left him; he was always on her mind. She understood from a relative that ‘this is the way things are with children.’ The significance of extended family on the father’s side came to the fore, giving the impression that Azra and Javed were more grounded as a couple. In the following observation the observer heard for the first time about a grandmother in Bangladesh. Zamir at 6 months and 3 weeks Azra put an embroidered cotton throw down on the floor and put Zamir on it. Zamir’s grandmother in Bangladesh had embroidered the throw . . . Zamir kicked, crawled and rolled happily. . . . He eventually tired. Azra said she would put him to bed. . . . The cot now had curtains, cushions and a bedspread embroidered by the grandmother. . . . Azra said that it had taken her two months to do this work. . . . Azra stepped back to watch with the observer. Zamir played gently with his toy, stroking it with his face and hands, kicking the bolsters with his feet, and making sing-song sounds to his toy. The observer commented that he was now able to go to sleep by himself. Despite no longer having a mother herself, the appreciation of the throws from her mother-in-law suggests that Azra feels more supported. Via her husband and her marriage she is connected to his mother and to the country of origin; there is continuity in space and time. Azra is enjoying her baby and feels more in command of being a mother herself.

Martina: Integration of work and mothering roles Even for bottle-fed babies, weaning is important in the development of attachment behaviour and helps to confirm mother’s sense of identity. One advantage of weaning is that it makes the mother’s return to work outside the home easier. All the mothers had been working before their babies were born and planned to return after maternity leave. In practice they varied in how far they sustained this intention. For some, as for Azra, postponing returning to work felt a positive decision. For others, returning to work facilitated mothers’ sense of efficacy and self-determination, strengthening identity in motherhood rather than the reverse. In contemporary Western society we have become accustomed to thinking that women’s responsibility

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for infants’ emotional well-being is in opposition to paid work and working identity outside the home. But this is not so in all times and cultural locations. Contributing to the survival of the family and the responsibility for bringing in an income can be part of mothering identity rather than in opposition to it, as Martina illustrates (Thorp, 2007). Martina and her husband, Kunle, a little older than the other couples, come from Senegal and are in the UK to earn money to improve their standard of living. Both come from large families, Martina’s mother having also adopted some of her relative’s children as well as having a high-powered job. Both Martina and Kunle come from royal lineage. This is reflected in their choice of their baby’s name: ‘Princess’. In London they hold poorly paid jobs with a well-known store chain and were working nights before the baby was born. This remained the case when Martina returned to work on a very part-time basis when Princess was 6 months. The observations took place first thing in the morning when Kunle was back from work and before he went to sleep. This time reflected the observer’s importance to the family. The observer felt that their decision to be observed reflected the parents’ awareness of being unsupported by extended family, few of whom lived in London. Both parents talked of missing their mothers and their country, described as a ‘beautiful’ country, where people were friendly and caring. Princess’s birth was early, difficult and with complications for Martina. Princess was already 3 weeks old when the observer met the family. The parents were excited, having been up half the night following a naming ceremony in which they had gathered what relatives and Senegalese friends that they had and members of their church. But the shock of the difficult birth remained pervasive and contributed to a womb-like atmosphere in the early observations and a sense that Martina felt isolated and unprotected, at the mercy of the baby’s demands. To get some relief, she had tried to introduce bottle-feeding alongside breast-feeding, but Kunle would not hear of it. In fact Martina herself believed strongly in breast-feeding. The following extract illustrates how, preoccupied with her isolation and exhaustion, and her own need to be looked after, it is difficult for Martina to connect with her crying baby. Martina told the observer on her second visit that: Princess at 4 weeks Martina hadn’t heard from her mother. She had expected her to come over at Christmas and her mother kept saying she was very busy. Her mother was always very busy and she didn’t know when she was coming. The observer felt that Martina felt very neglected and let down by her mother’s promises. Martina gently began to tug on the poppers of Martina’s babygrow and undid the nappy. At that point Princess began to cry angrily with her eyes shut. Martina’s motions were quick and efficient.

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Once the nappy was changed Martina picked her up and Princess stopped her cries and Martina dressed her in silence and made no eye contact. When picked up Princess’s head flopped to the side. Princess frowned and screwed up her face. Martina prepared to breast feed Princess but today she found it hard to latch on. It was only after Martina spoke to her, murmuring to her for the first time, that Princess managed to suck at the nipple. The thought of being able to return to work sustained Martina through these difficult times when she seldom went out of the house. In the first visits Martina always wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the company she worked for. Maternal Grandmother did visit, and the atmosphere became lighter and more playful. However, at 4 months, the observer learned of a cultural expectation that Martina was trying to resist. Martina’s mother was coming to an end and she wanted to take Princess back to Senegal. Martina explained that many people in Senegal would give their child to their mother or relative to look after for some years while they were working or studying. But she could not give up Princess. Martina’s mother was working. The girl who helped in the house would look after Princess. Martina could not be sure that Princess would be well treated. Relieved, she said she was breast-feeding anyway, and Princess would not now take a bottle. Unsurprisingly, Martina’s attitude to weaning from the breast and introducing solids was ambivalent. Martina’s GP noticed her isolation, and prescribed walks in the open air and Sure Start groups. It was a relief when, at 8 months, a rather passive baby began to crawl. A major factor in this shift, however, was Martina’s returning to work, where she felt able to contribute to the family budget. Although her work was different from her mother’s, Martina was ambitious to provide for her family. With Kunle looking after the baby, her return to work brought a new lightness to the household and she conveyed a sense of well-being, agency and purpose. During the last months of the study, the couple’s recognition of their relative isolation became stronger. Martina attempted to create a supportive family around them. She planned moving to Kent where she had relatives. Martina feared Princess’s alienation from her own cultural traditions and language if they remained in the UK and grieved for Princess’s lack of access to her wider family. Martina talked of returning to Senegal in a few years. The radio was permanently tuned into a Senegalese channel. At the same time a more nuanced picture of the beautiful country emerged, as Martina also talked about difficulties and divisions. The observer believed that Martina was more actively integrating her experiences and mourning the loss of her homeland. Martina’s parents planned a celebration for Princess’s first birthday. Martina explained its significance in terms reminiscent of the African concept of ‘mdlezana’ meaning something like ‘the mother-and-child in their union

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and togetherness’, which ends when babies can stand on their feet and walk (Maiello, 2000). This change in the baby’s status also signalled change in the mother. From this point Martina actively planned to separate from Princess and to talk about having a second child. The observer made a further visit to Martina a few weeks later. With some satisfaction Martina told the observer that she had managed to find a Senegalese woman who was able to look after Princess over night on some nights a week. In this way she could increase her working hours and contribute to providing for the family. Martina thus reproduced a childcare pattern consistent with her cultural experience and probably her own upbringing.

Conclusion In illustrating some of the emotional processes involved in mothering identity, in this chapter I have highlighted how a sense of identity presupposes psychological work. Paradoxically it is in giving something up that we know most clearly who we are. For infants, weaning may play an important role in organising the sense of self; awareness of attachment, dependency and the uniqueness of relationships heighten awareness of separateness and one’s own being. Attempting to answer the question ‘who am I?’ can go some way towards justifying and absolving this psychic pain. Comparable processes happen for mothers. Put crudely, when children leave their mothers, at weaning, to start school, to stay away with friends, or indeed when they buy their parents presents, parents’ emotional reactions to their children’s growing autonomy tell them, retrospectively, about defining qualities of parenthood. Cultural and historical diversity in what counts as good mothering sits uneasily with emphases in psychoanalysis and much developmental psychology on the exclusivity of mothers’ responsibility for their babies’ emotional well-being, often at the expense of babies’ other relationships. Nevertheless, a psychoanalytic framework is valuable in understanding immediate and trans-generational effects of trauma, broken family ties and the psychological challenges to becoming a mother in very different circumstances to those of one’s upbringing. The environment is crucial for emotional as well as practical support, making it possible to sustain reorganising family relationships internally as well as externally. I have used psychoanalytic infant observation to illustrate how connections, via identification, between mother, baby and mother’s own infancy, before there are words, exemplify ‘unspeakable stories of subjectivity’ integral to identity, as described by Hall (1988). As for ‘narratives of history and of a culture’, in this study parents asserted or constructed connections with homeland and specific parental patterns with striking ingenuity. Freud (1920) described separation from the mother as ‘the first cultural

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achievement’, as social norms affect assumptions about when and how this comes about. Interestingly he concluded that the child’s sense of identity emerged simultaneously. To illustrate how this might come about, Freud described a child becoming fascinated in throwing away and pulling back a cotton reel on a thread. Freud argued that this game symbolised the child’s controlling the mother’s departure and reappearance, though he could not do so in reality, and the survival of the self. As mothers and infants and small children separate, culturally produced markers of appropriateness and meaning enter the structuring of the psyche. They must also enter into the reflexive identification that tells us who we are. This chapter has aimed towards a psychosocial account in which cultural processes are integral and internal to psychological processes rather than grafted on afterwards.

Note 1. Directed by Wendy Hollway and Ann Phoenix at the Open University, titled: Identities in process: Becoming a mother for Bangladeshi, African, African Caribbean and White mothers in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. For accounts of observations all six observed babies and mothers, see International Journal of Infant Observation (2007) 10, 3 Special issue: Becoming a mother: Changing identities. I am particularly grateful to Monika Flakowicz, Sandy Leyton and Judith Thorp, whose observations are described in this chapter.

References Bauman, Z. (1996) ‘From pilgrim to tourist – or a short history of identity’. In S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage. Bick, E. (1964) ‘Notes on infant observation in psychoanalytic training’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43, 628. Flakowicz, M. (2007) ‘Daughter, mother, wife: Transitions from ideals to the real family’, International Journal of Infant Observation, 10, 3, 295–306. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition 18, London: Hogarth, pp. 7–64. Hall, S. (1988) ‘Minimal selves’, Identity: The Real Me, ICA Documents 6, 44–46, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harris, M. (1987) ‘Depressive, paranoid and narcissistic features in the analysis of a woman following the birth of her first child and the death of her own mother’. In M. Harris Williams (ed.) Collected Papers of Martha Harris and Esther Bick, Perthshire: Clunie Press. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: Sage. Layton, S. (2007) ‘Left alone to hold the baby’, International Journal of Infant Observation, 10, 3, 253–266. Maiello, S. (2000) ‘The cultural dimension in early maternal/infant interactions and psychic developments: An infant observation in South Africa’, International Journal of Infant Observation, 3, 80–92.

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Thorp, J. (2007) ‘The search for process of becoming a first-time mother’, International Journal of Infant Observation, 10, 3, 319–330. Urwin, C. (2003) ‘Breaking ground, hitting ground: A sure start rapid response service for parents and their under fours’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29, 3, 375–392. Urwin, C. (2007) ‘Doing infant observation differently? Researching the formation of mothering identities in an inner London borough’, International Journal of Infant Observation, 10, 3, 239–252.

12 What Is This Thing Called Love? Narratives from Two Generations Joanne Brown

Introduction Consider a woman in her 20s who cannot leave what she feels is an emotionally neglectful relationship, after a childhood of inattention, loss and loneliness, or a man in his 60s who wants to change his enmeshed, suffocating relationship with his wife after 40 years of projective gridlock,1 or the woman in her 30s who might want a relationship, but simultaneously declares that she is no fit state for one and feels repellent to people, or the man in his 40s who wants to try to be more emotionally present for his wife and family, but eschews conflict. Are these vignettes of intimacy ones that we can or should understand sociologically or psychoanalytically? This book calls for a kind of binocular vision in which we are asked to zoom in on the micro (personal, familial histories, self/other experiences, self-narratives, etc.) and pan out to the macro (socio-historical structures, socio-cultural discourses) and look at the ways in which they intersect. The chapters in this section take different aspects of emotion and identity in the private sphere (by focusing on our feelings about ethnicity, gender and parenting) and demonstrate that a specifically psychosocial approach offers more comprehensive and in-depth insights into our conflicted feelings about community and difference, masculinity and work and motherhood and ancestry than an exclusive focus on intra-psychic (psychoanalysis) or external (socio-historical) factors alone could provide. Similarly, this chapter argues that the conflicted feelings that we may have about ‘this thing called love’ and what we do in its name are best understood by combining insights from socio-historical theory and psychoanalysis. So what does this psychosocial binocular vision look like when applied to one of the above vignettes? • Simply, a micro reading might reveal that the 20-something woman in the neglectful relationship is not able to leave her relationship, because of her identification with worthlessness, disappointment, rejection, neglect 153

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and aridity (experienced and perceived by her in a traumatic childhood). Similarly, ‘Vince’ in Chapter 10 is unable to leave his gruelling and exploitative work, because of his identification with his hard-working mother and because of his disidentification with his ‘wastrel father’. • But a macro reading might reveal that she is also a woman of a certain generation who has started going to college and accessed a new discourse of intimacy (Giddens, 1992). • However, finding non-abusive intimacy might be complicated by this woman’s experience of paternal neglect and this is where the micro and macro intersect. This woman’s personal experience, for example, may have led to an ideologically specific form of gendered experience (an almost a priori contempt for men and their failings as men). Moreover, her experience of her parents’ unhappy, lifeless marriage and divorce may have converged with a prevailing cultural deconstruction of romance into a cynicism about the possibility of romantic love, at the same time as a barely acknowledged yearning for the hope and vitality it might signify. In the first interpretation of this woman’s life, we can possibly see how patterns of self/other experience laid down or internalised in childhood become the prototype for later relationships. In the second interpretation, we can ask whether the socio-historical and cultural conditions she has inhabited have ‘encouraged individuals to open up psychic space in an attempt to explore oneself and one’s relationships’ (Craib, 1998, p. 170),2 thus challenging those internalised patterns. In the third interpretation we can see how the psyche impacts on how we occupy the social and vice versa. That is, we see how an ideological position might be adopted as a kind of displacement activity and denial of an anger directed at a much more specifically located man – ‘in the name of the father’. These micro, macro and psychosocial interpretations of this woman’s patterns of intimacy are one of any number of interpretations, but they serve to remind us that the psyche (micro) and social (macro) are not separate impermeable spheres, but more like, as with Freud’s (1923/1991) structural model of the mind, colours melting into one another. This chapter will summarise work that has been discussed in more extensive detail in a previous work (see Brown, 2006b) and apply a psychosocial binocular vision to one particular aspect of intimate life – our experience of romantic love. It will be shown that romantic love needs to be understood as a psychosocial phenomenon and it will be argued that romantic love is a compelling concept, because it speaks to fundamental attachment needs (as explicated in psychoanalysis) and socio-historical scripts (as outlined by sociologists of emotion, historians, cultural critics, and so on).3 It will analyse the love ideals narrated by two age groups in their 30s and late 70s at the end of the twentieth century. It will be shown that this private

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sphere of life (our loves and hates) cannot be understood without reference to the public sphere and it will conclude by asking whether a psychosocial approach to emotions research can contribute to the ‘transformation of intimacy’ in peoples’ everyday lives. The next section briefly introduces the methods adopted in the study on which this chapter is based and clarifies the aims of this chapter. Part 2 refers to the many answers that exist to the question of what love is from sociocultural, philosophical and psychoanalytic theory. Part 3 compares the two age groups’ narratives about marriage, monogamy and gender, and Part 4 focuses on the older age groups’ narratives of war and how this affected their narratives of intimacy. Part 5 focuses on how the younger interviewees’ positioning in a so-called therapeutic culture (see Richards and Brown, 2002) has inflected their narratives of love.

1. Love talk As part of a previous study (ibid.), ten in-depth interviews were carried out with three women (Mrs Archer, Mrs Frost and Mabel) and three men (Eddie, Terry and Mr Williams) who were born in the 1920s (and lived through two world wars) and four women (Sam, Sarah, Rachel and Zadie4 ) who were born in the 1960s/1970s and grew up in the conditions of ‘late modernity’ (Berman, 1983) and in the context of a so-called de-traditionalised western society (Giddens, 1992). All of the interviewees were white and came from traditional working-class backgrounds, although three of the younger women were university educated.5 The work on which this chapter is based asked many questions about sociological, existentialist and psychoanalytic approaches to understanding what romantic love is, or ought to be, and about the narratives of life and love recounted. The aim of this chapter, however, is more modest and will focus on how these two groups of people aspired to, or were ‘hailed’ by, different discourses of intimacy with different practical consequences for their lives. Day Sclater (1999) refers to us being hailed in order to explain that ‘discourses . . . invite us to identify with an image of ourselves, implied by the discourse’ (p. 113) and that we have some choice in this (albeit sometimes unconscious). This chapter aims to look at how the interviewees in this study have negotiated, resisted and/or been saturated by narratives and ideals of love. And this aim is different from trying to access the landscape of these interviewees’ internal worlds and from any in-depth analysis of their idioms (see Bollas, 1989) and ways of feeling and thinking about the world. But it does allow us to speculate on how their structural positions and cathexis of the social might have affected their emotional lives and relationships. A comparison of these cases is complicated, however, by the different life stages that the interviewees were at (affecting their sense of agency, desire and memory) and this was a particularly poignant point when interviewing

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the older age group. As Mrs Archer (in her 80s) said, ‘there’s nobody in the offing now’, thus indicating perhaps that there was not enough promise or hope in the future that she could talk about. This raises the importance of researchers being reflexively aware of the emotional dimensions of research for them and for their participants (see Brown, 2006a). In the above case, for example, Mrs Archer reflects on potentially painful feelings of loss and closure.

2. What is this thing called love? I have detailed elsewhere (Brown, 2006b) the way in which romantic love has been deconstructed and rendered suspect in socio-cultural, existentialist and psychoanalytic theory. For example, from a socio-cultural viewpoint, romantic love is our cultural script, expressive of a contradictory intellectual and political lineage. It is a discourse of love into which we are born and by which we are penetrated (Barthes, 1978). From an existentialist perspective romantic love is seen to be compelling, because it saves us from a feeling of instrumentality and aloneness (Sartre, 1943). According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, romantic love is seductive because it promises to close the door to our insatiable desires and inaccessible needs (Salecl, 1994/1998). From object relations psychoanalysis we learn that romantic love is compelling because it recalls the exclusivity, need and passion of infancy and childhood (Kernberg, 1995). As Elam (1992) points out each text must in some way redefine what it means by romance. She quotes Henry James’s general definition of romance as experience liberated, disembroiled, disengaged, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions we usually know to attach to it (p. 6). De Rougemont (1940/1983) similarly argues that romantic love depicts the loss of self, suffering, disruption, transcendence and passion, which, he says, is irreconcilable with marriage and/or long-term relationships. Romantic love can be thought of as partaking of a romanticist and rationalist heritage, but the critiques outlined above focus on its romanticist subtext, because this needy, narcissistic and passionate love is not seen as reality-based or conducive to concern for the other. However, Mitchell (2003) defends the romantic sensibility (with a healthy capacity for episodic, passionate idealisation) against its detractors who would see it as regressive. Mitchell does add, however, that it is important to assess whether the idealisation of the other is in them (and unveils their masked/hidden qualities) or is an act of pure imagination. His notion of romantic love is akin to what Bollas (1987) sees as the longed-for re-experience of ‘the transformational object relation’ (p. 23). This object or relationship is believed to have the potential to transform one’s total environment. What is sought is a deep subjective rapport with an object

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(a person, a painting, a poem, a symphony or natural landscape) and an uncanny sense of fusion with it. As 30-something Rachel says: I suppose when you first get together all you want is to think how close you are and how alike you are. However, Rachel (like all of the other younger interviewees) actively deconstructs her expectations from this sublime version of love. Hence Giddens (1992) describes a new discourse of intimacy and relating which we see detailed in self-help manuals and in popular culture and everyday life more generally. This is his ‘transformation of intimacy’ thesis, which introduces the notion of confluent love (active, contingent and non-possessive love) and the pure relationship (based on democratic rights and principles). Changes in gender expectations, sexuality, reproduction and children’s rights are said to be ushering in a new discourse of intimacy to which we aspire and by which we increasingly live. This thesis will be referred to throughout this chapter in order to discuss the way in which socio-historical changes affect what might be thought of as a private realm of emotion, but also to raise the question of how much of our emotional life is subject to discursive deconstruction.

3. Marriage, monogamy and gender What Mrs Archer and Mrs Frost emphasised (like all of the other older interviewees) was the material, structural conditions of their lives (low wages or unemployment, saving up for a marriage). Giddens’s contention is that ‘plastic sexuality’ (freed from reproduction) is central to any transformation of intimacy and this clearly was not what women of Mrs Archer’s generation experienced in the way that the younger women have: A: Yeah, I knew him at school. We used to stand on street corners and have a little waffle. I: Did you? A: Kissing and cuddling. I: Mm. A: Where there was a lamppost. Our mothers used to say to us, ‘If you get in trouble you’ll go to the workhouse.’ Collins (1972) argues that ‘in a situation where men control the economic world’ a woman ‘maximises her bargaining power by appearing both as attractive and inaccessible as possible’ (p. 67). However, it was the younger, economically independent women who were more preoccupied with the ‘beauty myth’ (Wolf, 1990) which to some extent represented their ticket

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into the transported world of romance. In the following extract, Sam, for example, described what her romantic fantasies coalesced around before she gave them up: S: being a f- er a far more beautiful version of who I was, erm with no spots and er felt comfortable in her clothes, and had fashionable clothes, . . . erm being witty in response (to men), erm being desired but not in an oppressive way. Erm just, just being adored really. She was angry at this masquerade that romantic love expected of her (the sweet, sexually saturated, emotionally articulate, child-like and nurturing woman): S: But now we have other options, other expectations, and romance is incompatible with those, it’s a kind of chain. And she likened men to children who want to cling on to the idea that there is this magical, benevolent, gift bearer (the romantic heroine) who hopes for nothing in return for her emotional and aesthetic labour. The dominant ideology of romantic love that Sam deconstructs is based on sexual repression in which sex and ideals of femininity are some of the ‘goods’ that women barter with, but for the older women, virginity was one such premium good. All men were ‘out for that’, according to Mrs Archer, and a discourse of the respectable/non-respectable woman permeated the older interviewees’ narratives. Mrs Frost and Mrs Archer also condemned the consumption of alcohol which was (and still is) associated with sexual promiscuity and licentiousness. This was, however, more dangerous in their youth, because of the moral condemnation of pre-marital sex and the prospect of the work house for unmarried mothers. Collins argues that the church and marriage protected women from the uncommitted but sexually hungry male. Terry (who was part of the older generation) saw sex outside of marriage as morally reprehensible and for the ‘whoremonger’. Eddie (also from the older generation) similarly related his own views on pre-marital sex to his involvement in the church and to societal mores: E: And er I must admit that a tremendous amount of my time was taken up, not in church, but with church affairs, and of course it was absolutely taboo wasn’t it. I: Mm. E: to even talk about it. I: Mm. E: Not that we wanted to, because we spent all our lives out in the fresh air.

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Eddie is not, however ‘sexless’, he says ‘far from it’, but he questioned the quality of the emotional and sexual communication (and respect) in contemporary society – what Giddens calls ‘episodic sexuality’. Shame and embarrassment are, of course, emotions which can be used as mechanisms of social control or self-censorship and perhaps this is why we see more of vivid recall of sexuality or extra-marital affairs from the younger interviewees. The younger interviewees also took a more sympathetic stance towards questions of morality and right and wrong conduct. Hence Sarah described having an affair with somebody who was already in a relationship in the following way: I: S: I: S:

So you could isolate your relationship with him then? Yes. Yes. The reality was him as I knew him, not her. Do you think you would be able to do that now? Possibly, but I don’t know. I think if you are swept up in strong feelings it is more easy to compartmentalise things than it first would appear . . . I think it is very difficult to . . . these things happen, and I know I’d be mad at the partner I am with now, if he went out with someone else. I know it would kill me, I know it would, I know I would lie down and cry about it for a long, long time, but in the end I think it is very hard, these things do happen. They do, people do and, we shouldn’t, but we do.

Apart from Eddie, none of the older interviewees referred to experiences of falling in love, partnership or re-marriage after their spouses died and none spoke of extra-marital affairs:6 Terry: Laughing, she used to say to me er, ‘If anything happened to me before it did you’, she said, ‘would you get married again?’ I used to say to her, ‘Look, I’ve been married to you now for thirty-eight years.’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You don’t think I’m gonna start all over again do you?’ And I’ve never had any inclination whatever for another woman. Eddie, by contrast, does, however, express a desire for an empathic partner (‘I am’, he said ‘super emotional’) and he looks for this with his care worker. Although this is a platonic relationship, Eddie spoke about it as a kind of transformational object (Bollas, 1987) that for some of the younger interviewees like Rachel romance symbolised: E: What’s happened since I met Marjorie, I’ve started to live again. I: Have you? E: I’ve got something that’s interesting me. Although the older female interviewees did not speak about love as a signifier of self/other transformation, they did seem to have expectations which

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are linked with romance (monogamy, consummation of a relationship via marriage and marriage as a commitment for life). Thus for many of the older interviewees death parted them from their spouses in material terms but not in spiritual or cultural terms (they were, in existentialist terms, each other’s absolute). However, for many ‘modern’ couples who might not have religious beliefs, children or grand children, the end of a long-term relationship, by contrast, might be absolute (‘expressive openness is undercut by fears of loss’ – Hochschild, 1998, pp. 8–9). Indeed, a striking difference between the younger and the older women is in their expectation about having children. Sam and Sarah are a part of a generation in which cohabitation is increasing, marriage decreasing, divorce increasing and having children later in life is the norm. Marriage, for example, is not Sarah’s or Sam’s ideal and Sarah only refers to children once. We could say, therefore, that Sam and Sarah adopt a sublimated generative identity (see Raphael-Leff, 1993), which challenges the myth of the Woman as Mother. But what the younger interviewees also challenged was romantic fatalism (De Botton, 1993, likens it to crystal ball gazing) whereby they passively waited for their lost Aristopholean half. Indeed, Sarah (a woman in her 30s) described being single as a turning point in her life: It was and it was also frightening, because part of me also thought, well that’s alright but obviously this is some kind of temporary state (laughter). So it is like going on holiday. One can, of course, look at socio-economic and cultural reasons for the organisation of life around an axis of exclusive coupledom. Interestingly, Storr (1988) observes that our society puts too high a premium on being in a relationship and suggests that having an active sexual/love life has become the contemporary hallmark of mental health. The idea that a rich internal world may exist (Klein, 1963/1975) despite external solitude is not easily countenanced in contemporary culture and neither was it a long-term option for Sarah. A psychoanalytic explanation of this need for exclusive love, however, will focus on our entry into life as one half of a mother/father infant dyad and suggest that it is this union (and primary attachment figure and relationship) that we need to restore, in order to live an ontologically secure life. As Freud (1923) said, ‘to the ego living means the same as being loved’ and romance returns us to the question of our own adorability (p. 400). It also, according to Mitchell (2003), captures the tension between our need for home, continuity and sameness and our contrary need for the uncanny, the unpredictable and inspiration. From this section, what we can see is that for the older interviewees love, marriage and monogamy are coterminous. A preoccupation with the

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question of what love is, as we will see, clearly demarcates the two age groups interviewed. The younger interviewees, by contrast, are not married, question the possibility of life-long monogamy, challenge gender expectations and search for the truth of romance which has, to varying degrees, captured their imagination.

4. Marriage, war and separation What is central to the older interviewees’ love stories was their war experiences. The women endured long separations from their husbands, air raids and single parenting, and the men were also returning from the Second World War with experiences that prompted deep philosophical questions about humanity’s capacity for destructiveness: Tom: Well of course we had machinery on board where we could detect a submarine, and I used to stand on deck and I used to think to myself, ‘My God, there’s men down there in a steel tomb, and they’re praying to the same God that I’m praying to.’ The so-called pure relationship is inflected by an existentialist emphasis on freedom, contingency and living in the present. But it is interesting to speculate on whether these War experiences were conducive to this reflexive sensibility: Eddie: I said, ‘But you girls [i.e. me, his care workers] have got to realise, really, that when Joy and I said goodbye in the morning, we never knew whether we were . . . we were gonna see each other again.’ It could be argued that what Eddie and Joy experienced, due to material, structural (rather than fantasised) circumstances was an awareness of an obstacle to their love (money, parents, death), which could have catalysed, in Kleinian terms, a depressive and/or persecutory fear of loss. But a persecutory, paranoid relationship or state of mind is not what is described: E: But erm I often think really that . . . I know it doesn’t apply to everybody, but you see there are some people that, that they don’t realise how lucky they are to have survived. We might say that for Mr Williams, Terry and Eddie a new discourse of intimacy (about being good to one another, not assuming a victim position and thinking about those who are worse off) is catalysed by their war experience (rather than changes in gender expectations). Shortly after describing

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the way in which an Italian prisoner of war contravened certain rules, Mr Williams, for example, said: W: Well, at that moment I could have run a bayonet through him. I: Mm. W: That’s how I felt. It wasn’t that I had anything against anybody. I: Mm. W: War is a terrible thing. I: Mm. W: Sometimes you never know whether you might be actually harming your own brother. We could use the concept of depressive concern to understand what Mr Williams is referring to when he is put in touch with his own propensity for destruction (and in psychoanalytic terms this awareness of love’s adversary, hate, is crucial to a more reality-based relationship). Mr Williams’s social experience (war) and emotional experience (humanity’s destructiveness) possibly informed what he expected from his intimate relationships. His story of love was embedded in a narrative about world relations and a consideration of what people can do to one another, in contrast to the younger interviewees’ accounts of a more individualised love. He spoke, for example, about how marriage could act to unite nationalities which might otherwise be at war, but it wasn’t clear whether he had experienced the way in which war can be taken into one’s personal life or whether marriage was the idealised (or merely modest) place where aggression was not supposed to feature. A concern with the destructiveness that can colour intimate relations characterises sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on love in different ways, but Mr Williams said that he didn’t ‘like to dwell on misfortune’ and he said that ‘you just have to think of people who are worse off than yourself’. He and his wife, for example, could not have children, but there was no sense of ‘why me’, and this was similar to the sentiments expressed by the older generation of people in the other interviews when they experienced hardship. Although romantic love is not deconstructed by Mr Williams and some of the elements of a romantic narrative (courtship, marriage, long-term relationship, monogamy and exclusivity) are evident in his experience of marriage, some elements of the pure relationship are perhaps discernible in the discourse of intimacy he uses (a sense of democratic rights and reciprocal pleasure). Nevertheless, despite there being a discourse of democratic rather than romantic relating (at least to some extent) in the older interviewees’ narratives, there is not a search for the articulate therapeutic/reflexive self that characterises the model of intimacy to which the younger interviewees aspire. Mr Williams, for example, described his wife as astute when she

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did not ask him about the Second World War. Both Terry and Mr Williams suggested that their marriages were also friendships, but the kinds of marital friendships described were different to those described by Sam, Sarah, Rachel and Zadie, because they were not based on ‘an intense disclosing intimacy’ (Luhmann, 1986). Sam, Rachel and Zadie complained, because men cannot adequately do this.

5. Reflexive love? Although the reflexive project of self and the therapeutic sensibility (see Richards and Brown, 2002, for a discussion of the therapeutic culture hypothesis) might be a late modern phenomenon, we cannot, of course, equate ‘talk’ about love, romance and feeling states with ‘intimacy’. Nevertheless, there is a different cultural expectation between the younger and older interviewees in relation to being emotionally expressive, confessional and articulate, and the vehicle of self-realisation and self-expression seems to be different for these two age groups. Although it is difficult to know if Mrs Frost or Mrs Archer, for example, were more romantically inclined or expressive when they were younger, they were clearly not living in times described as reflexive or therapeutic. Mrs Archer, for example, often described her life as ‘not very eventful’ and it may be that in her, Mrs Frost’s and Mr Williams’s lives, the private world of emotion (‘nerves’, the horror of the Second World War and feelings about one’s partner) was never defined as of intrinsic interest (what people felt or experienced in relationships) and so Mrs Archer wonders what kind of ‘narratives’ she could offer, and repeatedly said ‘You’ve gotta get on with it’ (life) which was possibly in opposition to ‘talking about it’, but it was said with a sad resignation. Equally, Mr Williams said that ‘no-one wants to talk about War, they just walk away’ and he cried quietly as he recounted his experience of liberating Belsen. Perhaps the injunction ‘to get on with it’ for the older generation who had witnessed the horrors of war was also a protective defence mechanism, but the cost of Mrs Archer’s pragmatism, for example, was a possible sense of isolation. That is, this fatalistic discourse might sometimes preclude the kind of deep attachment or rapport that can be experienced when trying to explore the subjectivity of the other. Interestingly, Sam, Rachel and Zadie wanted to explore what Mitchell (2003, p. 81) refers to as ‘the plethora of otherness in us’ and they all referred to their present need for love in terms of their childhoods. Although Mrs Frost (from the older generation of women) referred to her husband’s ‘rotten childhood’, she did not look at how this affected his attachment patterns or needs as an adult, and none of the older interviewees questioned their own ways of relating or choice of partner in terms of their childhoods. Younger interviewees though, to some extent, defined their lives and relationships (however uneventful in a material sense) as of interest,

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because of their material (occupational) and emotional (reflexive, therapeutic) resources. It is also interesting to speculate on what the role of popular culture and the media is in providing a medium for self/other exploration, because the older interviewees did not have the ‘oversupply of (media) options’ (see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, p. 7) available today. Thus we can see the way in which the younger interviewees deconstructed the narrative of romance in both sociological (gender stereotypes, sexual sublimation, marriage vows, and so on) and psychological (e.g., transference love and the compulsion to repeat) terms (without, of course, using these technical terms), thus showing how a transformation of intimacy is conducive to a psychosocial sensibility (and vice versa). The older interviewees’ narratives, by contrast, were informed by a more socio-religious discourse. However, an emotionally expressive, discursively aware culture and/or narrative does not necessarily signify insight, compassion and verve and these reflections are not, therefore, meant to be value judgements. However, we can conclude that a psychosocial imagination was not the ‘intellectual common denominator of the times’7 for the older interviewees. The emergence of psychosocial studies (and the sociology of emotion) is expressive (and constitutive) of cultural changes in which the personal becomes political (see second-wave 1970s feminism), and everyday life is psychologised (see the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’, Rieff, 1966). We see a postmodern challenge to Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment ‘truths’ (Derrida, 1967/1972; Lyotard, 1984). It is not surprising then that we see a psychosocial interrogation of love, relationships and the self in the younger interviewees’ narratives. Despite this, a psychosocial interpretation of what the older interviewees say and why is important, because we can speculate about the psychological effects of material circumstances, class or gender positions, ageing and the future, cultures of inhibition (as oppose to expression) and of a certain type (and benefit) of a fatalistic position.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how we can look at the concept of romantic love from a psychosocial perspective and it has presented love talk from two groups of people demarcated by age. It has used a psychosocial binocular vision to pan out to the macro and back into to the micro in order to show how our private emotional live can be understood psychosocially. It has also pointed to the importance of researchers being aware of the power of the feelings that are possibly being aroused when people are asked to reflect on their emotional lives and experiences (and therefore of the power dynamics in interviewing more generally). Eddie, for example, said that he was on his way to becoming a cabbage before the interviews took place and he put his life before me in the form of plays he had written, press

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cuttings he had gathered, photos of his wife and by telling me about the music that brought tears to his eyes. And as much as I think the interviews did, as he said, give him something to think about (and even he said live for), I think that if I had worked with the idea of psychosocial research as praxis, I might have been able to think more creatively about the therapeutic and/or empowering potential of my research for him. The question that presses for an answer therefore is whether psychosocial research can be used as a kind of ‘transformational object’, or, at least, object of interest, for people in their lived lives as well as an important ‘way of seeing’ (Berger, 1972) for academics in theirs. It seems apt to conclude a chapter on love and histories of intimacy by asking how psychosocial research participants could be given the opportunity to use this approach to think about how they might shape the emotional ‘forces of destiny’ (see Bollas, 1989) in their lives as well as being subject to the power of feeling and fate.

Notes 1. Morgan (1995) writes about projective gridlock (self/other confusion, merger, control, etc.) as a form of projective identification in couple relationships. 2. This, according to Craib, is the interesting sociological question to ask. 3. See Brown (2005). 4. Pseudonyms are used throughout. 5. See Brown (2006b) for a full discussion of sampling criteria and methods. 6. This sample cannot, of course, reflect the Second World War turmoil as a whole. 7. This is Mills’s (1959) term. He argues that in the 1950s the sociological imagination (understanding inner realities in connection with larger social realities [p. 15]) was becoming the intellectual common denominator of the times for novelists, dramatists and poets (p. 18).

References Barthes, R. (1978) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love, Oxford: Polity Press. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: BBC. Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso. Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Unknown, London: Free Association Books. Bollas, C. (1989) Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom, London: Free Association Books. De Botton, A. (1993) Essays in Love, London: Picador. Brown, J. (2005) ‘The Compelling Nature of Romantic Love: A Psychosocial Perspective’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 10, 23–43. Brown, J. (2006a) ‘Reflexivity in the Research Process: Psychoanalytic Observations’, The International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, 9(3), 181–197. Brown, J. (2006b) A Psychosocial Exploration of Love and Intimacy, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Collins, R. (1972) ‘A Conflict Theory of Sexual Stratification’, in Dreitzel, H. P. (ed.) Family, Marriage, and the Struggle of the Sexes, Recent Sociology No. 4, London: Macmillan. Craib, I. (1998) Experiencing Identity, London: Sage. Day Sclater, S. (1999) Divorce: A Psychosocial Perspective, Aldershot: Ashgate. Derrida, J. (1967/1972) Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elam, D. (1992) Romancing the Postmodern, London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1923/1991) The Ego and the Id, London: Penguin – The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 11 (first published 1923). Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy, Oxford: Blackwell. Hochschild, A. R. (1998) ‘The Sociology of Emotion as a Way of Seeing’, in Bendelow, G. and Williams, S. J. (eds) Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues, London: Routledge. Kernberg, O. (1995) Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Klein, M (1963/1975) ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’, in Envy and Gratitude, London: Hogarth Press. Luhmann, N. (1986) Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Oxford: Polity Press. Lyotard J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959/1976) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: OUP (paperback edition used). Mitchell, S. (2003) Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time, London: W.W. Norton and Company. Morgan, M. (1995) ‘The Projective Gridlock: A Form of Projective Identification in Couple Relationships’, in Ruszczynski, S. and Fisher, J. (eds) Intrusiveness and Intimacy in the Couple, London: Karnac. Raphael-Leff, J. (1993) Pregnancy: The Inside Story, London: Sheldon Press. Richards, B. and Brown, J. (2002) ‘The Therapeutic Culture Hypothesis: A Critical Discussion’, in Johansson, T. and Sernhede, O. (eds) Lifestyle, Desire and Politics: Contemporary Identities, Gothenberg: Daidalos. Rieff, P. (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic, London: Penguin. de Rougemont, D. (1940/1983) Love in the Western World, New Jersey: Princeton University. Salecl, R. (1994/1998) Perversions of Love and Hate, London: Verso. Sartre, J. P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge (first English translation in 1958 by Methuen and Co. Ltd. Routledge, 1989 edition used). Storr, A. (1988) Solitude, London: Flamingo. Wolf, N. (1990) The Beauty Myth, London: Vintage.

Part IV Practices, Interventions and Therapies

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13 ‘Be Quiet and Listen’: Emotion, Public Policy and Social Totality Andrew Cooper

Introduction We all inhabit a world of lived experience that is shaped, more or less directly, by policy and policy makers. Our daily experience as commuters, parents, children, citizens, consumers, patients, learners, teachers, neighbours and workers cannot be rendered fully legible without a framework of analysis that discloses its policy-embedded nature. But policy processes have usually not been interrogated for the manner in which they shape and are shaped by the experiences and relationships of policy actors as they trigger, interpret, resist, comply or ignore the currents of policy change that help constitute their own and others’ life worlds. This chapter sketches out a model of policy analysis in which the direct everyday experience of policy actors is the point of departure. In particular, the ‘emotional experience’ of the socially situated subject of policy is assumed to be analytically valid, and capable of disclosing dimensions of policy processes that are illegible or marginalised without attention to this experiential register of analysis. Viewed like this, policy processes generate specific ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1993) that inform political, professional and civic culture and cultural change, constructing and reconstructing our socially situated subjectivity and relationships. Equally, when policy itself is viewed ‘anthropologically’, as an expression of historically specific trends in political culture it may be seen to arise from such structures of feeling, as well as contribute to their formation. Drawing on a blend of psychoanalytic and systemic theory and practice, and on selected resources in social and political theory, this approach to policy analysis is characterised by a concern to interrogate the relationship between ‘surface and depth’ in policy processes, and between ‘wholes and parts’. Policy discourses commonly represent their objects of analysis as inherently unified, conflict-free and fully amenable to change through rationally planned interventions. Frequently, they seem to behave as though they are expressions of a consensual and fully rational social 169

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totality. The analytical effort required to interrogate these productions in terms of what they discursively, epistemologically, emotionally and politically omit, disallow, disavow, obscure or ‘forget’ is considerable, if their tendency to construct a natural and inevitable order of things is to be challenged. The whole/part and surface/depth metaphors aim to capture a ‘vertical’ and a ‘lateral’ dimension for the interrogation of policy processes, in particular of what is absent from their discourses or registers of social engagement. What is ‘swept aside’ (available to be known or understood, but consigned to some other realm of the social whole from whence we have to recover its relevance to the policy process at hand) and what is ‘swept under the carpet’ (suppressed, denied or otherwise rendered unavailable for symbolic elaboration within policy discourse)? These analytical metaphors clearly resemble the psychoanalytic concepts of splitting and repression, but this raises the more important question of whether we have a conceptual language adequate to the task of psychosocial thought – a language that has developed beyond what social or psychological theories alone offer us in our attempt to describe and elaborate the ‘third area’ of the psychosocial in which each of these terms is ‘inscribed’ within the other. Thus, the model developed in this chapter constitutes: A distinctive mode of policy analysis that is inherently critical of more conventional rationalist models A psychosocial methodology for interpreting and situating social experience in so far as this experience is generated in and through policy processes A basis for developing alternative and creative policy behaviour and interventions that rescue policy actors and analysts from the dangers of ‘policy dependency’ A mode of analysis that reconnects with our lived experience, emotionality, critical faculties and capacity to assume authority for interpreting and changing aspects of the world in which we live

Why emotion, why psychosocial? What contribution to policy analysis does a psychosocial focus on emotion offer? Why is it needed? John Simmonds (2008) has characterised the problem of the relationship between policy process and the ‘real world’ mess, pain, trauma, confusion and uncertainty of lived social experience as that of ‘sanitisation’. Emotional realities are routinely sanitised by policy discourse, by models of policy analysis and by policy processes themselves. Sanitisation excludes real world emotionality from influencing policy-makers and policy making, and it denies the subjects of policy true recognition. The result is a form of social and personal alienation that is damaging to our capacity for

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social progress. The model of policy analysis advanced in this chapter is a start at rectifying this state of affairs. Public policy analysis is not a monolithic field of study, but despite a diversity of models and theories the dominant paradigm remains technocratic, rationalist and instrumental. On the basis of studies of how policy processes actually work, Charles Lindblom, a chief critic of rational decision-making in policy and policy analysis, advocated an approach called ‘the science of muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959). If real world processes frequently reveal a muddled and incremental picture of progress towards policy goals, then this is for good reasons; there are absolute limits to the possibility of fully rational, logical planning and decision-making processes in complex societies. Sound method does not abandon rationality and analysis, but it must respect the messiness, recalcitrance and complexity of social processes, and thus the ‘science’ of muddling through is born. The approach is similar to the ‘mixed scanning’ model developed by the communitarian theorist Amati Etzioni (1967), and the two thinkers had a prolonged critical engagement. However, while these rather limited and still instrumental critiques do acknowledge the place of ‘irrational’ and unpredictable forces and processes in social life, suggesting the notion of ‘bounded’ rationality as a basis for decision making, emotion and passion still find no place within their models of policy making or policy analysis. Surely, this is a strange and puzzling omission? Values do enter the analytical picture, but usually only as a variable understood to be guiding decisions in pursuit of specific ends or goals – social ‘goods’. Yet, public policies, and the value positions they embody, are frequently the focus of fierce emotional attachments, passions and private as well as public conflicts. We need only to think of the poll tax riots, airport expansion, congestion charging and university tuition fees. To an important degree, this omission can be ascribed to a distinction, sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit, between the domains of policy and politics. Politics becomes the legitimate site of passion and contestation, policy of instrumental reason and administration. The author was alerted to this as he wrote the present chapter when he was advised by an interested party, anxious that his organisation might come under attack for recent decisions, that a policy seminar he had organised on a topic of current controversy seemed to be ‘more about politics than policy’! If public policy is the continuation of politics by other means, but passions are to be evacuated from policy in the direction of their ‘legitimate’ site – the formal democratic process – we have the beginnings of an understanding of why there is a ‘crisis’ of democracy and participation in formal political processes. Most of what directly affects the lives of citizens as a result of the governments they elect is in fact enacted through ‘policy’ and not the democratic process; yet the dominant paradigms of policy seem to convey the message that these are purely technical or instrumental processes that

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should, at most, engage our disinterest. Suddenly, the presence or absence of emotion and passion as a dimension of policy processes and analysis assumes considerable ideological significance. In contemporary Britain, passionate public debate and active contestation about political alternatives and futures are now muted. There is no single or simple explanation for this change of climate over the last 10 or 20 years, but the striping away of many of the intermediate institutions of civil society that once constituted the collective ‘voice’ of multiple interest groups is surely central (Hutton, 1996; Cooper and Lousada, 2005). This development helped pave the way for a contemporary political ethic of consumerist individualism, and personal ‘responsibilisation’. What was once a social contract in which social collectives – trade unions, professions and democratically led institutions – played a vital negotiative role, now looks more like a contract between government and the private individual as consumer of tax-funded services (Cooper, 2008a). But of course, ‘the social’ in the sense of social relationships has not been dissolved, merely disguised and recast in this new individualistic ideological formation. Psychosocial theory and analysis descriptively capture the new and complex identities and relationships between individuals, groups, social movements and the ‘social totality’ that emerge in the unfamiliar ‘spaces’ afforded by these developments, but also create the opportunity to question, interrogate and critique these same developments, which constitute our emergent psychosocial conditions of existence. If our passionate and emotional connections to each other, and also to the social institutions of which we are members, are indeed obscured or muted in these new life worlds, emotionally grounded psychosocial analysis can return them to us, and us to them. Other contributors to this book have written extensively on the ‘emotionalisation’ of contemporary culture and have made similar points about politics and policy to some of those sketched out above. Barry Richards (2007, and see this volume) notes that While we rightly fear the prospect of social division, and of emotively charged national or religious identities dominating mass opinion, one of the main problems about emotions in politics which has preoccupied researchers in many democratic countries in recent years is not that of demagogic excess. On the contrary it is the problem of an apparent deficit of feeling, manifest in a lack of real engagement with the democratic process. (p. 44) Arguably, the discrete domain of ‘public policy’ analysis has always suffered this deficit, manifesting a peculiar multiple blindness to the reality of emotion at the heart of its object of study. Specifically then, a blindness towards:

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• First, the emotional, as well as the political and pragmatic, sources of most public policy initiatives; often these are disclosed only when the emotionally ‘containing’ function of successful policy implementation breaks down – household rubbish piling up in the streets, vulnerable children in the care of the state needlessly dying, and so on. • Second, the emotional consequences and impact of public policy initiatives on citizens, communities, social groups and workers responsible for enacting policy; the perspectives developed in this chapter rely heavily upon the experiences of professionals – that is a particular class of ‘policy actor’ – responsible for providing services in some of the most obviously emotive of arenas – for example, the protection of vulnerable children and adults. In effect as Hoggett (2005) has argued these workers ‘carry’ the conflicted, ambivalent and contested emotional dimensions of policy on behalf of the wider society. • Finally, the blindness of the ‘rational instrumental’ public policy paradigm extends to its lack of reflexivity about its own assumptions. Emotionality being excluded as either a valid premise or a valid conclusion in the explanatory and interpretive frameworks for understanding policy processes, the traditional ‘model’ takes on the character of a closed intellectual system; the framing of policy problems and research agendas excludes anything that does not fit the model, and the model is thus supported in its own self-perpetuation. There are ‘material’ consequences to this blindness, not just discursive or intellectual ones; policy formulated without attention to its own emotional sources and consequences will produce social effects that are affectively distorting or delimiting. The ‘containing’ function of public policy – in the specific psychoanalytic sense of containment as a transformative process in relation to raw emotional experience in which mean unprocessed affective states are rendered meaningful as a result of mental digestion and thoughtfulness – has been explored in a preliminary way by other writers (Hoggett, 2000; Evans, 2003; Richards, 2007). Evans’s work is perhaps especially telling here; her case study of public vigilantism with respect to anxieties about paedophilia suggests that an attenuated policy ‘container’ may encourage the proliferation of ‘thoughtless’ enactments in the public realm with dangerous consequences for all concerned.

Be quiet and listen The thinking in this chapter is partly informed by the experience of the ‘Tavistock Policy Seminars’. Started in 2004 and subtitled ‘reconnecting public policy and human relationships’ these seminars run to a simple but effective format that models something of this aspiration to ‘reconnect’ policy processes and social relationships. Two speakers present their perspectives

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on the seminar theme, usually but not always involving some degree of tension or difference of stance. After a break, the discussion is thrown open to the floor, and the speakers are asked not to contribute until invited to do so towards the end of the event. This requires the audience to relinquish the familiar pattern of questioning the speakers, agreeing with or opposing them in a binary fashion; rather they are invited to assume responsibility for developing a dialogue among themselves, but in connection with the material presented by the speakers. In turn, it requires speakers to relinquish the expert role – to be quiet and listen. Over the course of an hour complex, layered thinking evolves that contrasts with the familiar linear character of most policy programmes and paradigms. The seminar model perhaps embodies something of the theory of containment with respect to public policy, putting faith in the idea that an unfettered collective thinking space in which many minds can work over the raw material proffered by the speakers will have a transformative effect in the realm of ideas. This non-linear style of practice also informs how we teach and learn about policy processes on some professional post-qualifying programmes at the Tavistock Clinic. The following example of policy analysis, working from individual experience ‘outwards’, is taken from work done on one of these programmes.

‘I am working in a factory . . .’ A social work practitioner1 who works in a local authority child care team opened an exploration of her experience of the impact on her organisation of ‘audit culture’ and the regime of inspection that accompanies the Every Child Matters policy stream (DfES, 2003) as follows: I am working in a factory. I have been working there for the last five years. When I started my job I did not think it was a factory. It didn’t look like a factory, not from the outside and not from the inside. We produce initial and core assessments in our factory. Our management counts the assessments completed on a weekly basis and informs the workers of the results in teams meetings and by emails. The workers don’t seem to care about these numbers but they preoccupy the management. There have been many changes in our factory in the past five years, due to demands from above and competition from other factories. The management has been replaced, the teams were reconstructed, the machinery (workers, forms, IT systems) also saw great changes. I am quite confused about who is my master and who do I need to serve. Is it the customer or is it the government, and do they have conflicting interests? I am thinking of running away from this factory, to look for another job . . . in another factory.

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Later she writes of how: The management measures (in percentages) the reports of initial and core assessments completed on time, and compare these to other teams. When the team manager reports these statistics in team meetings, I can recognise how my body becomes tense and my heart rate increases, and I get very angry. When we do not meet in team meetings, we often receive emails about the statistics, and I have the same bodily reaction. I have voiced my resentment to this ritual, but it was ignored by managers and other colleagues. Speaking of her own organisation, she says: In order to adjust practice to inspection standards our organisation has become: Obsessive about records Obsessive about statistics Manipulative of the statistics Then once again speaking of herself, but now from a more theorised perspective: Throughout the policy process seminar I found I held negative attitudes towards the government and the organisation, their policies and procedures. I now realise that I was caught up in a dynamic process involving the mirroring of defences and anxieties . . . (on the part of) government, the organisation, and practitioners. She describes this dynamic process as a ‘triangle of tension’ in which there is a kind of game of ‘passing the painful parcel’. Government concerns to generate social improvement within self-imposed limited budgets and short time scales dovetail with lack of trust in professionals and target cultures that project anxiety and responsibility downwards onto provider organisations which, fearful about their own ‘performance’ and survival, in turn project these anxieties into staff. The central anxiety for all parties is something like: ‘We will fail, be seen to have failed, and then we will be blamed and annihilated’; the dominant defence is to project responsibility and the associated anxiety about failure, blame and survival downwards, demand that performance be measuarable and measured in order to avoid conditions that produce failure, and then punish failures to meet performance standards. The writer quotes Michael Power’s (1994) observation that ‘Audit creates the pathologies for which it is the prescribed treatment’.

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As an illustration of how to take emotional experience as the point of departure for policy analysis, this is as good as any. Equally, it is not a template. But various features of her account open the door to an appreciation of some of the components that constitute our emerging model of psychosocial policy analysis. We examine some of these in turn.

Emotions: Local intelligence, global significance First, specific social and political relationships are revealed to be inscribed within particular emotional experiences. The meaning of specific feelings and emotional conflicts, in the context of organisational role performance, is illuminated and rendered legible in the light of a theoretically informed reflective analysis. At the same time the immediate, visceral character of lived emotional experience – physical tension, increased heart rate and anger – is not reductively eliminated or explained away. Rather, it becomes available as a vital source of ‘intelligence’, a resource that can inform understanding of the organisational and policy ‘life world’. This viewpoint extends somewhat the work of David Armstrong (2004) on ‘Emotions in organisations: Disturbance or intelligence?’ to include the policy domain, itself of course a key determinant of public-sector organisational processes and cultures. Of organisational life, Armstrong says: No organisation stands alone, insulated from its context, any more than each of us, as individuals, stands alone. While that context is relatively stable or predictable, it may be taken as given, something to which an organisation needs continually to adapt, but without having fundamentally to question either what it does or how it does it. However, few organisations at present, either those we are members of or those we work with, inhabit such a context. Correspondingly our experience in and of organisations now is probably being shaped by challenges from without as much a, if not more than, anxieties from within. Since these challenges are registered emotionally, we suggest that they have to do not only with questions of viability, whether or not the organisation will survive, but equally with the cost of viability, what will and must be risked in the cause of survival. (Armstrong, 2004) At the conclusion of this piece, Armstrong says: No emotional experience in organisational life is a suitable case for treatment. It is rather a resource for thinking, for releasing intelligence. A consistent ‘finding’ of the method of policy analysis outlined in this chapter is that by approaching the emotional experience of policy actors not as

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a ‘symptom’ of either individual psychological functioning, or even exclusively of organisational life, but rather as a registration of the complexities, contradictions, anxieties and defences inherent within policy processes one can move outwards to embrace analysis of the global forces now acting on the inherently ‘unstable’ national policy environment we all inhabit. In this way, moment-by-moment emotional particularities – the very fabric and texture of everyday lived experience – can be located as meaningful registrations of the nature of complex social totalities.

Conflict, critique or resistance? The practitioner finds herself professionally and emotionally conflicted in the face of the policy-driven organisational and professional transformations she experiences and records. There is a suggestion of wanting to challenge and resist, or at least negotiate a different kind of accommodation to these changes, and she notes the emergence of a split between the concerns of managers and of front-line staff like herself. But her attempts to voice her frustration lead nowhere. Audit and inspection regimes are an integral part of the ‘new public sector’, its enactment through the doctrines of ‘new public management’, and are structurally tied to the wider reconstruction of the economics, politics and culture of public policy within emerging ‘market states’ (Cooper, 2008a). From the perspective of everyday lived experience, these are genuinely transformative processes, but not ones in relation to which citizens have really been offered choice, consultation or even much public debate. One can interpret or find meaning in the practitioner’s registration of her conflicted experience in several possible ways. First, it seems to mark how in the absence of strong intermediate collectives capable of engaging with the political process, controversial processes of social change with powerful impacts upon deprived populations and the public services with whom they relate may no longer be an object of public contestation. What might once have registered and been available at the level of social conflict becomes, instead, inscribed as part of subjective experience. Second, the possibility of critique, let alone of action, seems to be muted or suppressed in this individual’s experience. She reports feeling ‘negative’ towards her organisation and towards government, with the implication that this was experienced as a ‘feeling without form’, until she could avail herself of a theory that made sense of her emotional experience. Perhaps this goes to the heart of questions about epistemology and psychosocial ontology implied by this model of policy analysis. Psychosocial experience is taken to precede articulate knowledge of our conditions of existence, as much as to follow from such knowledge or discursive location. This is a realist position, but not a simple one. Real world social processes may be registered as emotional experience, but stand in need of concepts or appropriate categories of

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thought, if they are to become ‘thinkable’, and hence available as a basis for critique or indeed genuine consent. So third, the sense for this individual of being an ‘object’ and not a ‘subject’ of policy becomes associated with a tendency to resist policy-led change rather than engage with it. Elsewhere she makes clear that she does not wholly oppose the aspirations of modern inspection and audit regimes, and for any of us some policy initiatives will be broadly welcome, some not, while to many we will have mixed responses. But as ‘active citizens’ we respond to social change not just as an expression of ‘values’ we hold or oppose, or as instruments guiding us towards ends, but as emotionally meaningful interventions that impact upon our developed sense of what it is to be part of a ‘flourishing social order’. Denied the opportunity, or the public discursive apparatus, to engage with change on the basis of the fullness of our responses we may resist changes we would otherwise welcome, comply resentfully with those we would question or resist, or any perverse combination of these. This is surely bad news for policy makers. The more cynical conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that by enabling fuller engagement and participation in policy processes, policy makers are more likely to ‘get what they want’ whether people ultimately agree with the change process in question or not; more hopefully, a truly flourishing society may be one in which there is more, not less, open social conflict, debate and contestation – although policy-led change may be rather harder to ‘deliver on time’ under such circumstances. Resistance to policy change receives remarkably little attention in the literature. Yet, how and why people resist is of instrumental significance and interest to policy makers, as well as to our critical engagement with policy processes. The naturalistic psychosocial study of policy actors as they negotiate unfolding real world policy conditions would be a significant development in policy studies.

Non-linearity Until very recently, the notion of policy implementation as a process of ‘muddling through’ is the nearest that mainstream analysts have come to questioning the ‘linearity’ of policy processes. From a rational linear perspective policy failures are explained in terms of the internal logic of implementation itself, rather than the interaction between implementation and the wider social system in which implementation occurs. Traditional policy analysis still relies upon a machine metaphor to ‘diagnose’ social ills, and ‘treat’ them to effect a ‘cure’; but societies are not machines, and are better conceptualised as complex adaptive systems, or social ecologies, in which the relationship between causes and effects is non-linear, and never fully predictable. Policy processes are systemic interventions, which inevitably generate unanticipated and unpredictable consequences that undermine or

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distort the effort to achieve pre-established goals. Recognising these realities, successful policy implementation is likely to depend upon learning from experience, and reflexive adaptation of processes in response to emerging evidence of the holistic impact of interventions in a complex social totality. This concept of policy processes has been elaborated by Jake Chapman (2004) in a publication aptly titled System Failure: Why Governments must Learn to Think Differently. Resistance to change is as much a ‘natural’ feature of complex human systems as receptivity or compliance, and is essentially emotionally rooted, but to embrace resistance (or ‘make an ally of it’ in psychoanalytic parlance) rather than attempt to over-rule it requires ceding the illusion of absolute control over change processes. The necessity for authentic collaboration enters the picture, and thus also a negotiative, participatory model of social relations to replace the tendency towards ‘command and control’ that remains the default mode of policy conventional policy making.

Death and the mandarin: Social fantasy and the roots of policy Realist social policy analysis locates policy as an aspect of the social totality as it is, not as policy wishes it to be (even if the nature of what ‘is’ continues to be contested, as it surely will be). A systemic stance towards policy enables us to take up a meta-perspective on our own policy-related experience and activity, and situate policy processes in real world understanding. Once this shift of perspective is achieved, policy processes are disclosed as shaped and impelled by many forces beyond those recognised internally by the policy paradigm itself; equally they are revealed to contribute to the emerging character of social relations not apparently primarily driven by policy imperatives. The practitioner quoted above sees inspection and audit regimes as manifestations of governmental and social anxiety, and as processes that shape and intersect with the inherent anxieties of the organisational and professional task of child care social work. The relationship between anxiety and organisational structure, culture and functioning has been fruitfully developed within psychoanalytic practice and theory (Menzies Lyth, 1989; Obholzer and Roberts, 1994), but as with Armstrong’s analysis of emotion in organisations, this can readily be extended to embrace wider social formations. When, for example, we stand back from the sense of political urgency that follows a major public disaster or tragedy, and from the rapid policy prescriptions that normally ensue, it is possible to discern the complex interplay of rationality and irrationality, reason and emotion that structures them. Quality assurance regimes, risk management protocols, public inquiries and standards audits are all, on the face of it, eminently sensible efforts to reduce risk and prevent avoidable future harms. However, a steady focus on what

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lies ‘under the surface’ of these responses can disclose a more complex picture in which deep anxieties about responsibility for damage and death are being ‘rationally managed’ rather than faced and tolerated or ‘worked through socially’. ‘Risk society’ (Beck, 1992) is surely a product of our emotional encounter with new kinds of social ‘dangers’; but the concept of, for example, ‘low probability – high consequence’ risks and their disproportionate impact on universal policy responses despite the small chance of their occurrence alerts us to the difficulty at the level of the ‘social unconscious’ of knowing how to respond rationally to events, and importantly the fear of events, that are almost literally unthinkable. If a fear is unthinkable then it cannot be symbolised within ordinary discourse, or its symbolisation may be so imbued with elements of fantasy and anxiety that the ‘rational’ is massively impregnated by currents of ‘irrationality’. Rational instrumental policy processes generated under such conditions – in the wake of nuclear accident, sadistic child murder, insulin murders by health care staff, organised sexual abuse of children, terrorist attacks and so on – are inscribed with the emotional charge of their origins. Emotional responses to tragic and disturbing events may be individually and socially ‘legible’ but equally they may not, evoking our most primitive anxieties and panicky, inchoate social impulses to defend ourselves. In our work on these matters, we have found that death and the fear of death makes itself known as a frequent and frequently unacknowledged source of policy anxiety. In a striking observation, Obholzer and Roberts (1994, p. 171) characterised the National Health Service as a ‘keep-death-at-bay’ service. But in the context of how prevalent is death as a shaping experience in policy processes, consider Zygmunt Bauman’s thoughts on the question: And there are more than enough reasons for the consciousness of mortality to be traumatic. First and foremost, thinking about death defies thought itself . . . reason’s power is to be a guide to good choice, but death is not a matter of choice. Death is a scandal, the ultimate humiliation of reason. (Bauman, 1992, pp. 14–15) The structuring role of social fantasy in policy making has been explored by Evans (2003) with respect to sexual offenders; Cooper and Lousada (2005) in relation to audit and governance regimes, child abuse and child death; Taylor (2007) in his exploration of NHS clinical governance regimes; and Cooper (2008b) with respect to the public disclosure of murders within health care systems. Showalter (1997) surveys a range of moral panics and phantom epidemics in her wide-ranging study Hystories. If policy programmes are taken to be just a part of life and not an omnipotent solution to all life’s ills and anxieties, then they might succeed more often when their own limits are acknowledged more often and more readily.

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Psychoanalytically we might call this ‘depressive position’ policy making; better perhaps to think of it as common sense policy making.

The critical imagination Without access to this domain of emotional experience, it is hard to imagine how the satirical narrative of ‘factory life’ with which the writer opens her account could have been written. We sometimes speak of satire as ‘biting’, and this reflects the anger, the emotional as well as the intellectual critique that constitutes this literary mode of engagement with experience. If emotional responses can be a form of ‘information’ about our psychosocial conditions of existence then what of imagination? Social facts and methodologically sound analyses of data sets will always be important in good policy analysis – we cannot rationally propose to commit public resources to projects solely on the basis of emotional responses or leaps of social imagination, not least because these can just as easily serve distorting and destructive ends as progressive and creative ones if they are uncoupled from rational inquiry. The organised racist imagination, for example, is nourished by specific ‘material conditions’ of social life such as economic deprivation but misreads, or selectively articulates, the nature of the facts as well as the explanation of these facts. But the strength of a ‘grounded’ imaginative register of engagement with policy processes and political life is to heal the split between the scientistic and the speculative, the so-called subjective and objective registers of analysis.

Conclusion In an era of evidence-based practice and policy making which privileges measurable data suitable for the requirements of audit, rational evaluation and transparency, experiential and qualitative evidence will struggle to achieve impact. But, the exclusion of both from mainstream policy analysis discloses something important about the political times in which we live. Psychosocial work on emotion and public policy aspires to reclaim something of the wholeness of lived experience for the political process; but this means ‘listening’ to our experience in new and perhaps unfamiliar ways, and seeking means by which others can be persuaded to listen differently in turn.

Note 1. This presentation was made in the context of the practitioner’s work on a module titled ‘The Policy Process’ which is part of the University of East London/Tavistock Clinic MA/Professional Doctarate in Advanced Social Work. She did not wish to be named or her organisation to be identified, although she was happy to be cited in this chapter. This decision directly reflects themes discussed above concerning the suppression of critical debate about policy processes in a contemporary ‘survivalist’

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policy culture, as well as the dissolution of institutions that support the voices and interests of groups in civil society impacted by everyday political and policy processes. I am grateful to this colleague for agreeing that her work could be quoted in this chapter.

References Armstrong, D. (2004) ‘Emotions in organisations: Disturbance or intelligence?’, in Huffington et al. (eds) Working Below the Surface: The Emotional Life of Contemporary Organisations. London: Karnac Books. Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Chapman, J. (2004) System Failure: Why Governments Must Learn to Think Differently. 2nd edition. London: Demos. www.demos.co.uk. Cooper, A. (2008a) ‘Welfare: Dead, dying or just transubstantiated?’, Soundings, 38, 29–41. Cooper, A. (2008b) ‘Gods, devils and murderers: Health and welfare in a secular age’, unpublished paper given at the annual regional study day for medical practitioners, Tampere, Finland. Cooper, A. and Lousada, J. (2005) Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling a Modern Welfare. London: Karnac Books. DfES (2003) Every Child Matters. London: The Stationery Office. Etzioni, A. (1967) ‘Mixed scanning: A “third” approach to decision making’, Public Administration Review, 27, 385–392. Evans, J. (2003) ‘Vigilance and vigilantes: Thinking psychoanalytically about antipaedophile action’, Theoretical Criminology, 7(2), 163–189. Hoggett, P (2000) ‘Social policy and the emotions’, in Lewis, G., Gewirtz, S. and Clarke, J. (eds) Rethinking Social Policy. London: Sage, pp. 141–155. Hoggett, P. (2005) ‘A service to the public: The containment of ethical and moral conflicts by public bureaucracies’, in Du Gay, P. (ed.) The Values of Bureaucracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutton, W. (1996) The State We’re In. London: Vintage. Lindblom, C. (1959) ‘The science of muddling through’, Public Administration Review, 19, 78–88. Menzies Lyth, I. (1989) The Dynamics of the Social: Selected Essays of Isabel Menzies Lyth. Volume 2, London: Free Association Books. Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V. (eds) (1994) The Unconscious at Work. London: Routledge. Power, M. (1994) The Audit Explosion. London: Demos. www.demos.co.uk. Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Showalter, E. (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Simmonds, J. (2008) Personal communication. Taylor, D. (2007) ‘What immortal hand or eye?’ Tavistock Clinic Scientific Meeting, Unpublished paper. Williams, R. (1993) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Hogarth Press.

14 Emotions and Contemporary Developments in Criminology Loraine Gelsthorpe

Introduction It can be argued that criminology is a good example of a discipline that might draw considerable benefit from a more psychosocial approach. It is one of the social sciences that has suffered from the rift between social and psychological perspectives which has consequentially left ‘emotions’ quite neglected (Rustin, Jones this volume). Yet criminal activity very often provokes considerable emotion, and arguably much of it has its roots in the world of feelings such as excitement, anger, shame, greed or envy. This chapter focuses on a number of different dimensions of emotion in the criminological field. Firstly, I describe something of the ‘scientisation’ of criminological discourse. There are obvious resonances with earlier chapters here, but it is arguable that if we want to understand the relationship between criminology and emotion we have to delve into the origins of the discipline. Alas, it is a tale of neglect both in the shaping of traditional criminological discourse and in the development of early critical discourses. Early individualistic perspectives searched for the causes of crime within physiology, while sociological approaches tended to focus on functionality and rationality as a field of enquiry and deliberately avoided engagement with emotions. Later critical perspectives in sociology still avoided emotion, this time through a rather romantic identification with offenders that required evasion of the feelings of victims. In the second and major part of the chapter, and as part of a developing critique of the ‘scientisation’ of the discipline, I dwell on the emergence of feminist perspectives within criminology, and their explicit attention to conscious partiality and experience. I then move on to consider criminological developments regarding existentialism and the sensuality of crime in the midst of theorising which tends to focus on individual, family or community ‘pathologies’. By way of conclusion, I look at the emerging re-enchantment of the social and emotion in the criminological field, particularly in relation to expressive justice and restorative justice. 183

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The criminological field is a broad one of course. It ranges from a focus on pathways in to crime: individually based biological and moral factors, family-based factors in terms of inherited or learned criminality, community-based in terms of peer group pressure or social disorganisation, and indeed, socio-structural levels of analysis (poverty, unemployment and factors relating to gender, power and race for example), to pathways out of crime. These include the role of early intervention and support for families, the impact of different penal theories and practice: rehabilitation, restorative justice, deterrence and incapacitation for instance, and the relative merits of different kinds of punishments and other penal interventions (imprisonment, community-based penalties, fines, compensation and so on). Criminology has been described as a ‘rendezvous’ subject given its multi-disciplinary nature (Rock, 2007: 7). It certainly involves subject material which arouses great passion and emotion: fear, anger, disgust, revenge, empathy and sympathy. Moreover, the very nature of the topics of crime and justice captures media and public interest on a daily basis.

Part 1: The scientisation of criminological discourse The origins of criminology From the moment of its inception, criminology has perhaps seen itself as a ‘practical’ or ‘applied’ science, and as a ‘technical’ instrument in the fight against crime. It is not the case that criminologists are ‘reformers’ or ‘technicians’ as such (Walker, 1987), but rather than the discipline serves an instrumental logic. This concern with utility can be discerned by looking at the types of questions which have dominated early (not to mention much contemporary) research. David Garland’s commentary on the development of Criminology as a discipline is instructive here. Garland suggests that the discipline emerged out of a convergence of two strands of thinking or ‘projects’ as he calls them (1994). Firstly, there is what he describes as the ‘Lombrosian’ project. This strand of criminological thought has aimed to develop an aetiological account of criminality which is based on the premise that criminals or offenders are somehow different from non-criminals. Secondly, there is the ‘Governmental project’ – the strand which has attempted to improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system through empirical endeavours and the refinement of policy and practice in the light of empirical findings. Within this, the administration of the various agencies of punishment has been redefined as a ‘scientific’ task, demanding specific knowledge and specific kinds of expertise. It is instructive to place Criminology in historical context. Essentially, modern criminology emerged out of the ‘Age of Reason’ (Paine, 1794, cited in Foner, 2002; see also Garland, 1985; Roshier, 1989; Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973). In a century in which Thomas Paine wrote that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’ (cited in Foner,

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2002), Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 essay on crime and punishment did just that – eventually leading Europe to abolish the death penalty, torture and secret trials. The new ‘science of crime’ which emerged thus tempered the expression and emotion of moral indignation with the economics and rationality of deterrence. Moreover, theorists such as Lombroso, Garafalo and Ferri argued that crime could only be eradicated if only it was studied in a proper scientific manner. Ferri’s first published work, for example, was titled The Denial of Free Will and the Theory of Imputability – and, as the title suggests, it argued that free-will is nothing but a subjective illusion (1901). Making much the same point, Adolphe Quetelet noted that ‘it seems as if free-will exists only in theory’ (cited in Hacking, 1990: 116). Human action was thus re-interpreted as being the result of determinate laws, akin to the laws of nature, and not the result of individual autonomy. The task of criminology was to discover these laws; a task which could only achieved by detailed observation. ‘[T]he experimental method does not admit systems based on mere imagination, or on vague recollections of criminal trials, or on argumentative constructions built up from the systems of others’ (Ferri, 1895: 48). The ‘mere imagination’ and ‘vague recollection’ of classical jurisprudence was to be replaced by a rigorous empiricism. The prison was re-interpreted as a laboratory within which white-coated criminologists could pursue their research as to the causes of crime. Certainly, the belief that the assumptions and techniques so successful in the study of the physical world were appropriate for the study of crime exerted a tremendous influence over early criminology. An objective approach to crime was seen as the way to a solution to the problem of crime. In contrast, the various ‘popular’ discourses on crime were seen as excessively sentimental. The absence of objectivity undermined their value as a form of knowledge in the eyes of the early criminologists. Whereas ‘useful’, ‘true’ knowledge was to be derived from the rigorous and detached application of scientific method, ‘false’ ‘dangerous’ knowledge was associated with the realm of prejudice and emotion (Cocks, 1984; Proctor, 1991).1 Indeed, Enrico Ferri once wrote that ‘[S]ince with the individual, as with humanity, intelligence and sentiment as a general rule advance inversely’ (1895: 10), and the elimination of one (emotion) was necessary for the supremacy of the other (knowledge). The new criminologists of the nineteenth century thus introduced a technical vocabulary and a horror of emotional forces into an area of social life which had previously been dominated by extreme moralising and strongly felt passions. Criminals were to be treated in a manner which self-consciously suspended moral judgement and attempted to provide a rational, empirically grounded explanation of their behaviour. As Garland puts it: Such a development required a level of emotional restraint and detachment on the part of the ‘criminologist’ and, indeed, on the part of the public which was invited to support this approach to an issue which

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was traditionally laden with affects of fear and hostility. The rise of the science of criminology would seem, therefore to have presupposed the development of new kinds of sensibility, at least on the parts of certain groups. (1992: 416) Leaving aside the myriad tales of falsified data and exaggerated findings (see Garland, 1988, on Lombroso, and Hearnshaw, 1979, on the work of Cyril Burt for example) the early scientific approach to crime is exemplified in Charles Goring’s The English Convict, which started in 1901 and finished some 12 years later. It involved carefully measured comparisons of 3000 English convicts with non-criminals, including Oxbridge university undergraduates, hospital patients and military cadets (Goring, 1913). But not only was emotion excluded from the research process, but as an object of enquiry too. The subjective, experiential or existential dimensions of deviant activity were denigrated, leading to an overly simplistic ‘counting of deviant heads’ approach which has perhaps rightly been criticised for ignoring ‘what is really (objectively) going on in those heads’ (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973: 21). Critical Criminology The emergence of Critical Criminology in the post-war period, and in the 1960s in particular, led to a number of challenges to mainstream empirical criminology. Using ‘Critical Criminology’ as a generic term, the challenges came from all directions: labelling theorists, conflict theorists, Marxists, idealists and abolitionists to name but a few. All these approaches were critical in their analyses of previous work on the question of crime and in their proposals for a future agenda. Critical criminologists expressed a dissatisfaction with the conservatism of functionalist and positivist approaches within Criminology (see Cohen, 1974 and de Haan, 1990 for example). They called attention to the utilitarian nature of social research and the system of social control which it served. Moreover, they repudiated what they saw as mainstream criminology’s links with state agencies, and lambasted the empiricist manner in which positivist criminology had ‘probed and prodded the heads and bodies’ of the ‘captive population of prisoners’ (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987: 11). Reflecting the turbulent social and political unrest characteristic of the period (with student unrest in Europe, protests against Vietnam, the rise of Black Power in the deep South in the USA and a questioning of central governmental power and control for instance), a key move of Critical Criminology in the post-war period was to re-politicise the study of crime and deviance; to ‘bring politics back into the discussion of what were previously technical issues’ (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973: 278). In re-introducing the political dimension of crime and punishment, Critical Criminology

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made a significant break with positivist strands of thinking: by questioning the possibility of value-freedom within the social sciences (Gouldner, 1961; Cohen, 1971), by addressing the question of whose side we are on (the ‘we’ who study crime with a supposedly detached objectivity) (Becker, 1967; Reiman, 1984) and by posing questions about knowledge and the ways in which criminology invariably revolved around the crimes of the powerless rather than those committed by governments, white-collar executives and corporations. Perhaps the most famous example of this re-politicisation of crime was the notion that criminal acts are forms of political action and that criminal and deviant activity should be seen as ‘fully authentic action’ and a struggle against ‘normalised repression’ rather than the product of some form of individual or social pathology (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973). Surprisingly, however, this discovery of politics was not combined with the discovery of the importance of emotion. On the contrary, the affective dimension of crime and punishment was also neglected by Critical Criminology. To take but one example, a sensitivity to the emotional dimensions of crime (and victims’ pain and suffering) would surely have problematised such a one-dimensional account: romanticising the criminal is difficult when confronted by the victim.

Part 2: A re-enchantment with the social and emotional dimensions of crime and punishment Experiencing emotion: Feminism and the emergence of feminist perspectives within criminology While the concept of ‘feminism’ is contested and multi-layered (Gelsthorpe, 2002) sensitivity to the importance of the affective dimension of human experience is a recurring and unifying feature of feminist thought. Indeed, despite obvious differences in political direction, feminist writing shares a commitment to the centrality of emotion in social life. It is widely accepted among feminists if not beyond that feminism implies a distinctive approach to social science. Some see this in relatively simplistic terms as a commitment to qualitative as opposed to quantitative methods (see Reinharz, 1979). More typical, however, has been the argument that it is at the level of methodological and epistemological assumptions that the distinctiveness of a feminist approach to research must be located (Harding, 1987; Cain, 1990). This has meant challenging the ‘fantasy’ of value-free research and recognition of ‘subjectivity in the research process’ among other things. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise offer a concise summary of this critique: . . . emotional involvement, the presence of emotions, is taboo; and an ideology exists which states that it is possible, not just preferable, to prevent this from happening. But we say that this is mere mythology. Emotions

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can’t be controlled by mere effort of will, nor can adherence to any sets of techniques or beliefs act as an emotional prophylactic. (1993: 160) The misleading myth of ‘hygienic research’ is thus replaced in feminist thought with the idea of ‘conscious partiality’ (Gelsthorpe, 1990). A political and emotional commitment to bringing about justice for women replaces the possibility of objective truth; feminist scholars look to feelings, personal experience, empathy, emotion, intuition, subjective judgement, imagination, as well as diverse forms of creativity.2 Feminist criminology, therefore, has (in large part) taken the form of a critique in which conventional wisdom on ‘social science’ has been questioned, and with this, the accumulated wisdom on knowledge of ‘women and crime’ which has derived from so-called social scientific approaches. A central theme within feminist criminology has been the importance of women’s experience as the basis for knowledge (Gelsthorpe, 1990, 2002). What is particularly important here is the way in which this goes beyond phenomenological and ethnomethodological approaches to include emotional dimensions of that experience. It is the feelings of anger, pain, loneliness and betrayal – all of which are central to the experience of crime and punishment and all of which, historically, have been ignored. This is perhaps a fairly recent phenomenon, dating from the publication of Carol Smart’s ground-breaking Women, Crime and Criminology in 1976, but the body of work which suggests a focus on experience includes research on various forms of sexism which structure women’s experience of imprisonment and the pains of punishment more generally, exposés of discriminatory practices within the criminal justice system, women’s fear of police brutality, experiences of domestic violence and sexual violence, and women’s direct or indirect experience of violence or danger (see Heidensohn and Gelsthorpe, 2007 for an overview). By introducing ‘lived experience’, questions of emotion are thus placed at the centre of the criminological agenda, questions which for too long have been neglected by positivist criminology’s pursuit of objective truth and Critical Criminology’s fascination with the political dimensions of crime and punishment. Thus feminist criminology has attempted to re-animate a world in which the criminological tradition has artificially constructed as being devoid of feeling. Jack Katz, existentialism and the sensuality of crime There has been further recent interest in the failure of the criminological tradition to consider the various emotions associated with crime and criminality (and to know what is going on in ‘deviant heads’). As Jack Katz (1988) has put it, Criminology’s obsession with those factors which might cause crime has meant that social science has failed to convey what it:

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. . . means, feels, sounds, tastes or looks like to commit a particular crime. Readers of research on homicide and assault do not hear the slaps and curses, see the pushes and the shoves, or feel the humiliation and rage that may build towards the attack, sometimes persisting after the victim’s death. (1988: 3) The ‘live phenomenology of crime’, the various ‘moral emotions’ inscribed in criminality and the fascination for ‘evil’ which men and women have perhaps always had, has arguably been systematically ignored by the positivist criminological tradition. Seemingly obvious facts, like the fact that much crime (joy-riding, computer fraud and shop-lifting, for example) can be a lot of fun for the participants or that crime can be a ‘seductive’ lifestyle choice, have been ignored for the most part (Morrison, 1995). Criminology has arguably repressed the horrors of everyday life, translating them into the sterile platitudes of rational discourse. Perhaps ‘to civilise, to explain, to render transparent and thereby safe, a modern self which contains in its mysterious depths the beingness of evil’ (Morrison, 1995: 357). Katz’s contribution therefore has been a significant one. His argument is that any attempt to understand crime must begin with the passions, with the violent feelings which crime induces in offenders and victims. Katz places emotion at the centre of his analysis and aims to understand the quality of the criminal experience. The ‘central problem’ for the criminologist, Katz suggests, is ‘to understand the mergence of distinctive sensual dynamics’ (1988: 4). Doing evil, he posits, is motivated by a quest for ‘moral selftranscendence’ in the face of boredom, humiliation or even chaos (1988: 10). Deviance has authenticity, an attractiveness that uplifts, excites and purifies (Duncan, 1996). Here, crime and deviance are presented as the existential pursuit of passion, a desperate attempt to escape the humdrum realities of everyday existence. It is partly this aim to look at the foreground of criminal activity and at emotions as a generative force, a force which simultaneously compels and seduces individuals into committing illegal acts, which has prompted psychosocial analysis of crime and victimisation. Gadd and Jefferson (2007) have made important contribution to the rediscovery of the person behind the criminal and victim labels by focusing on levels of subjectivity. Outlining the different ways in which Criminology has conceptualised the individual in very limited terms, Gadd and Jefferson bring together theories about identity, subjectivity and gender to provide a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial discussion of crime and victimisation. Through a series of case studies, ranging from analyses of subjective masculinities in the construction of the individual (for example, Mike Tyson as ‘hard man’ of the 1990s; see Jefferson, 1997), analysis of fear and anxiety about crime on a housing estate which shows how anxiety has roots in both the personal and

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social (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000), through to analyses of perpetrators of racial which go well beyond the simple ‘thrill’, weak or abusive families, poor living conditions and other factors which fuel kinds of nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment within perpetrators’ communities. Rather analysis includes complex emotional needs and unacknowledged feelings about resentment which can shape investment into the culture of hate. Deep-rooted problems of identity thus translate or transform into an acting out of hostilities on groups who present a threat (popularly racialised groups). As Gadd and Jefferson argue, the study of violent racism then perhaps needs to include ‘a more adequately theorised understanding of the emotional and social benefits that accrue to perpetrators of racism and violence, and a greater willingness on the part of criminologists to grapple with the complex, often contradictory aspects of offenders’ subjectivities’ (2007: 123). A word of caution is necessary however. By adopting approaches which are grounded in ‘experience’ and which recognise the affective dimensions of crime, both feminist and existential perspectives perhaps forever run the risk of ignoring the broader structural contexts within which all experience takes place. This is by no means a necessary consequence of focusing on the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of social life, but an ever present danger facing the unwary researcher. Despite claims that ‘the personal is political’ in feminist analyses, and with notable exceptions (Carlen, 1990), it can sometimes appear as if ‘experience’ is privileged over the structural contexts within which these experiences are located (see Jardine, 1985). Katz, for example, makes no attempt to place the subjective experience of crime in a broader social context. Yet the kinds of emotions he describes – humiliation, boredom, helplessness and anger – surely have to be read against a backdrop of contemporary social life. The seemingly inexorable rise in longterm unemployment, inner city decay, the shrinking of the welfare state and the fragmentation of morality and values are all important, say, in generating the social conditions within which the kind of emotions Katz describes proliferates. Gadd and Jefferson (2007) arguably advance thinking by linking inner and outer worlds and experiences. Jones (2008) also puts the case for a psychosocial approach by suggesting links between empirical criminology and clinically based psychoanalytic approaches. Cultural Criminology Developments in Cultural Criminology are also relevant here with their focus on the dynamic nature of experience, meaning, representation and subcultural milieu (Hayward and Young, 2007). Cultural Criminology is a very recent phenomenon within the field of Criminology; it means placing crime and crime control in the context of culture, looking at both these things and their relationship as cultural products. As Hayward and Young put it, ‘Its focus is always upon the continuous generation of meaning

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around interaction; rules created, rules broken, a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, moral innovation, and transgression’ (2007: 102). There is thus interest in expressive criminality linking the gains of phenomenological sociology with structural analyses of social life and culture which mediates the material predicament of the actors concerned; crime is thus a way of escaping the tribulations and privations of modern life (Ferrell and Sanders, 1995). But this is not simply an individual response; ‘rather than curb the excitement and emotionality that for individuals is the antidote to ontological precariousness’ (Hayward and Young, 2007: 111) the market chooses to commodify and indeed exaggerate these sensations as crime becomes inscribed in numerous forms of media entertainment and performance. Cultural Criminology marks a further move away from sociological and psychological determinism with an emphasis on the existential dimensions of life within a ‘winner-loser’ consumer society (de Haan and Vos, 2003). Emotions and criminal justice Finally, we turn to recent changes in criminal justice which are tantamount to a process of ‘emotionalisation of law’ (Karstedt, 2002). Criminal justice policy in England and Wales since 1980 has been marked by ‘disjuncture and direction and rapid legislative policy change’ (James and Raine, 1998: 3). If modernity and the ‘age of reason’ was about excluding emotions and imposing rationality and creating techniques of control and punishment (marking moves away from public executions, whippings and other bodily and visual humiliations which aroused moral and collective sentiments), emotions are being brought back in to play. Put simply, late modernity3 has brought with it a number of changes which revolve around the decline of rehabilitation, the re-emergence of punitive sanctions, changes in the emotional tone of crime policy, a new ‘populism’, a new and all-pervasive managerialism, the growth of organised forms of crime prevention and community safety and, above all, a perpetual state of crisis. The concepts in vogue are ‘responsibilisation’, and ‘managerialism’ with not only the boundaries between the state and public being eroded, but with criminal justice system agencies being merged in the pursuit of economy and efficiency, if not the rather more elusive effectiveness. A ‘culture of control’ is said to be upon us. The changing contours of criminal justice have also led us to witness both a ‘punitive turn’ (with twice as many offenders in prison now as there were 25 years ago, 50 per cent above the proportionate rate in France and Germany – women and children included) and a ‘victimological turn’ (with increasing recognition of victims’ rights and the emergence of a compensation culture) identified by Garland in The Culture of Control (2001). Combined with other implications of late modernity these policy developments both define and, according to Garland (2001), give rise to a contradictory range of criminal justice system responses, the ‘adaptive’ (rational, pragmatic and instrumental) and the ‘non-adaptive’ (expressive,

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symbolic) or to what Pat O’Malley (1999) describes as ‘volatile and contradictory punishment’. The ‘age of reason’, in terms of punishment, is thus being reshaped to embrace and utilise emotions. This reflects the emotional culture of late modern societies. As Laster and O’Malley (1996) have argued, emotions now pervade penal law and the criminal justice system in the police station, the courts and in prisons; anger, outrage, feelings of vengeance and feelings of moral disgust, as well as compassion and sympathy are all played out within the criminal justice arena. This is not wild and unconstrained emotion, rather emotion which is channelled through the emotionalisation of public discourse about crime and law (orchestrated by the politicians and the media) and through the return of shame and restorative justice. With the politicisation of crime and its control in recent years (Garland, 2001) crime policies are often based on the expression of collective emotions of fear and anger about crime. Politicians of different persuasions compete with each other to ‘address the emotional needs of the public’ (Karstedt, 2002) and in turn mirror these back to the public by stating that ‘the public demand this or that’. Indeed, perceptions of public sentiments (or what Anthony Bottoms has called ‘populist punitiveness’, 1995) have been used to justify increasingly harsh punishments and ever greater use of imprisonment. At the same time, there have been many recent proposals which have focused on the use of shame to achieve compliance with the law. These range from stigmatic shaming (Kahan, 1998) to changing attitudes (Karstedt, 2002) and to offender empathy for victims, as well as victim empathy for offenders (Strang, 2002). ‘Restorative justice’4 has now been extensively reviewed with conclusions that the emotional power of the process of bringing offenders and victims together can prompt change in terms of empathy for each other, and for the offender, a change in attitude that can result in desistance from crime (Van Stokkom, 2002). Unsurprisingly perhaps, restorative justice appears to work best when it involves offences which themselves have an affective dimension (violent offences for example) (Sherman and Strang, 2007). Restorative justice is also close to procedural justice (Tyler, 1990) insofar as it is recognised that the emotional consequences of how criminal justice officials speak to suspects, defendants and offenders may be as important for compliance as the decisions made. The theory and its research base suggest that the manners and emotional overtones of justice officials affect future offending rates as much or more than the formal decisions and severity of punishments (Tyler and Huo, 2002).

Conclusion Emotional aspects of crime, punishment and control have been neglected in criminology over the years (de Haan and Loader, 2002). There have been

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pockets of interest emerging through a feminist focus on ‘personal experience’, through recognition of existential dimensions of crime and, latterly, through the notion of Cultural Criminology. But it is only in the last decade or so that emotions have moved from their peripheral position within theoretical criminology and criminal justice practices following ‘age of reason’ developments which eventually tidied them away (from the public march to the scaffold to the hidden prison cell). That emotions have now come to the fore again is telling of late modern society (Barbalet, 1998; Garland, 2001). Whether or not public emotions are authentic or constitute moral principles, and whether or not they can be ‘captured’, constrained and utilised in the creation and delivery criminal justice in proper fashion will no doubt become a matter of interest for future commentators on crime and punishment. It is to be hoped that criminologists are able to take up theoretical frameworks that will allow engagement with emotions. The psychosocial approaches advocated in this book might be a contribution to such a development.

Notes 1. This distinctly modern separation of truth from emotion and values is clearly illustrated in the works of the founding father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant. 2. In this regard they echo the concerns of many postmodern social scientists, see Fraser, 1984 and Rosenau, 1992, for example. 3. While ‘Modernity’ might be taken to mean the social transformations which emerged out of industrialisation, ‘Late Modernity’ might be taken to mean the period since the 1950s – as we move towards postmodernity (a state in which all certainties concepts and practices become open to scrutiny and change). Postmodernity has connections with a position of relativism however, and arguably we are not there yet, as a culture. Hence the term ‘late modernity’ is used in the context of this chapter to denote a focus on some of the empirical (and observable) transformations presently taking place. 4. Restorative justice is a broad concept. See Marshall (1999) and Dignan (2005) for overviews.

References Barbalet, J. (1998) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Beccaria, C. (1764) On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, translated by R. Davies with V. Cox and R. Bellamy, 1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Becker, H. (1967) ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, 14, 239–247. Bottoms, A. E. (1995) ‘The Philosophy and Politics of Punishment and Sentencing’, in C. Clarkson and R. Morgan (eds) The Politics of Sentencing Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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Cain, M. (1990) ‘Realist Philosophy and Standpoint Epistemologies or Feminist Criminology as a Successor Science’, in L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris (eds) Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Carlen, P. (1990) Alternatives to Women’s Imprisonment (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Cocks, J. (1984) ‘Wordless Emotions: Some Critical Reflections on Radical Feminism’, Politics and Society, 13, 27–57. Cohen, S. (1971) Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Cohen, S. (1974) ‘Criminology and the Sociology of Deviance in Britain’, in P. Rock and M. McIntosh (eds) Deviance and Social Control (London: Tavistock). de Haan, W. (1990) The Politics of Redress: Crime and Punishment and Penal Abolition (London: Unwin Hyman). de Haan, W. and Loader, I. (2002) ‘On the Emotions of Crime, Punishment and Social Control’, Theoretical Criminology, 6(3), 243–253. de Haan, W. and Vos, J. (2003) ‘A Crying Shame: The Over-Rationalised Conception of Man in the Rational Choice Perspective’, Theoretical Criminology, 7(1), 29–54. Dignan, J. (2005) Understanding Victims and Restorative Justice (Cullompton, Devon: Willan). Duncan, M. (1996) Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons (New York: New York University Press). Ferrell, J. and Sanders, C. (1995) (eds) Cultural Criminology (Boston: Northeastern University Press). Ferri, E. (1895) Criminal Sociology (London: T. Fisher Unwin). Ferri, E. (1901) ‘Three Lectures’, in S. Grupp (ed.) The Positive School of Criminology (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). Foner, E. (2002) Thomas Paine (American National Biography Online). Fraser, N. (1984) ‘The French Derrideans: Politicising Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political’, New German Critique, 33, 127–155. Gadd, D. and Jefferson, T. (2007) Psychosocial Criminology: An Introduction (London: Sage). Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower). Garland, D. (1988) ‘British Criminology Before 1935’, in P. Rock (ed.) A History of British Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Garland, D. (1992) ‘Criminological Knowledge and Its Relation to Power: Foucault’s Genealogy and Criminology Today’, British Journal of Criminology, 32, 403–422. Garland, D. (1994) ‘Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (1st Edn Oxford: Clarendon Press). Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gelsthorpe, L. (1990) ‘Feminist Methodologies in Criminology: A New Approach or Old Wine in New Bottles?’, in L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris (eds) Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Gelsthorpe, L. (2002) ‘Feminism and Criminology’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (3rd Edn Oxford: Clarendon Press). Goring, C. (1913) The English Convict: A Statistical Study (London: HM Stationery Office). Gouldner, A. W. (1961) ‘Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology’, Social Problems, 9, 199–213.

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Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Harding, S. (1987) Feminism and Methodology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Hayward, K. and Young, J. (2007) ‘Cultural Criminology’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th Edn Oxford: Clarendon). Hearnshaw, L. S. (1979) Cyril Burt: Psychologist (New York: Cornell University Press). Heidensohn, F. and Gelsthorpe, L. (2007) ‘Gender and Crime’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th Edn Oxford: Clarendon). Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association and the Interview Method (London: Sage). James, A. and Raine, J. (1998) The New Politics of Criminal Justice (London: Longman). Jardine, A. (1985) Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Jefferson, T. (1997) ‘Masculinities and Crime’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2nd Edn Oxford: Clarendon). Jones, D. W. (2008) Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Approaches to Criminality (Cullompton, Devon: Willan). Kahan, D. (1998) ‘The Anatomy of Disgust in Criminal Law’, University of Michigan Law Review, 69, 1621–1657. Karstedt, S. (2002) ‘Emotions and Criminal Justice’, Theoretical Criminology, 6, 299–318. Katz, J. (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books). Laster, K. and O’Malley, P. (1996) ‘Sensitive New-Age Law: The Reassertion of Emotionality in Law’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 24(1), 21–40. Marshall, T. (1999) Restorative Justice: An Overview (London: Home Office Research and Development Statistics Directorate). Morrison, W. (1995) Theoretical Criminology: From Modernity to Post-Modernism (London: Cavendish). O’Malley, P. (1999) ‘Volatile and Contradictory Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, 3(2), 175–196. Paine, T. (1794) The Age of Reason (Reprinted 1924, New York: Putnam). Proctor, R. (1991) Value Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (London: Harvard University Press). Reiman, J. (1984) The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (New York: Wiley). Reinharz, S. (1979) On Becoming a Social Scientist: From Survey Research and Participant Observation to Experiential Analysis (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Rock, P. (2007) ‘Sociological Theories in Crime’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th Edn Oxford: Clarendon). Rosenau, P. (1992) Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Roshier, B. (1989) Controlling Crime: The Classical Perspective in Criminology (Chicago: Lyceum Books). Sherman, L. and Strang, H. (2007) Restorative Justice: The Evidence (London: The Smith Institute). Sim, J., Scraton, P. and Gordon, P. (1987) ‘Introduction: Crime, the State and Critical Analysis’, in P. Scraton (ed.) Law, Order and the Authoritarian State (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Smart, C. (1976) Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London: Routledge).

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Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1993) Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology (2nd Edn London: Routledge). Strang, H. (2002) Restorative Justice and Family Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Taylor, I. Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) For a Social Theory of Deviance (London: Routledge). Tyler, T. (1990) Why People Obey the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press). Tyler, T. and Huo, Y. (2002) Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Co-Operation with the Police and Courts (New York: Russell Sage Foundation). Van Stokkom, B. (2002) ‘Moral Emotions in Restorative Justice Conferences’, Theoretical Criminology, 6(3), 339–360. Walker, N. (1987) Crime and Criminology: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

15 Emotional Literacy in Schools: A Psychosocial Perspective Heather Price

Introduction Daniel Goleman’s (1995) American bestseller, Emotional Intelligence – Why It Can Matter More than IQ, popularized the idea of explicitly teaching ‘emotional literacy’, both in the workplace and in schools. Over the decade and a half since the publication of his book, emotional literacy research and teaching has proliferated and is now widespread, being discussed and taught in such apparently culturally diverse settings as India (Kunnanatt, 2004), Malaysia (Liau et al., 2003) and South Africa (Maree and Eiselen, 2004), although it predominates in North America and Europe. In Britain in 2003, the then Department for Education and Skills1 commissioned a research report into the teaching of emotional literacy in British schools. Commenting that ‘the learning of emotional and social competence is, at its heart, about learning to be a warm, caring and empathic human being who can make worthwhile personal relationships with others’ (Weare and Gray, 2003: 56), the ensuing report argued that emotional literacy could and should be explicitly taught in schools. This led in 2005 to the implementation of a National Curriculum for Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). ‘Antidote’, a UK-based campaign group consulted for the research report, and dedicated to the promotion of emotional literacy in schools, has an opening statement on their Web site as follows: Antidote’s vision is of an emotionally literate society where the facility to handle the complexities of emotional life is as widespread as the capacity to read, write and do arithmetic. (www.antidote.org.uk) The powerful representation of emotional literacy as the ‘fourth “R”’ suggests it is a facility like learning to become literate, and implies that it can be taught and learnt much as ‘literacy’ is taught and learnt. The analogy with 197

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learning to read and write suggests that emotions are analogous to words in text – being able to ‘read’ and express them is like being able to decode and write words. The term ‘emotional literacy’ is also often linked with the term ‘emotional intelligence’. This has been defined as: The ability to perceive accurately, appraise and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings which facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth. (Mayer and Salovey, 1997: 10) The idea conveyed in both these terms is of there being an ‘operating intelligence’ at work upon emotions, which are seen as closed units yielding information when decoded. This way of speaking about emotional life conveys the classic idea of intelligence as a rational lens actively applied to a separate terrain under study: ‘. . . instead of using affect to educate, it [emotional literacy] educates affect itself’ (Goleman, 1995: 262). This chapter explores what ‘emotional literacy’, or ‘social and emotional competence’, is, and how one might teach it or learn about it. It situates emotional literacy teaching and learning in schools in the context of a contemporary preoccupation – personal, organizational and socio-cultural – with the management of emotional life. It asks how this might be conceptualized psychosocially. In doing so, it firstly offers a ‘depth’ theoretical model of the emotions and emotional life, drawing on a philosophical discussion of emotion in Nussbaum (2001), and a sociological characterization of late modern emotional life in Craib (1994). It then goes on to present some contemporary examples of teaching and learning ‘emotional and social competence’ in UK school settings, offering a psychosocial analysis of each setting. The aim is to move between intra-individual, interpersonal and socio-historical levels of analysis, attempting to make links between them, and suggesting in common with other psychosocial researchers that there are complex, mutually constitutive affective relationships between these domains (Clarke, 2003; Froggett, 2002; Hoggett, 2000; Hollway, 2004; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Richards and Brown, 2002).

A psychosocial conceptualization of the management of emotional life In thinking about how individuals manage their emotional lives, Martha Nussbaum starts with a definition of emotions as ‘. . . appraisals or value judgements, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for that person’s own flourishing’ (2001: 4). ‘Flourishing’, or ‘well-being’, is the word she uses to translate the Greek word,

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eudaimonia, which can also be translated as ‘happiness’. While happiness can be rather narrowly associated with contentment or pleasure, or a utilitarian way of thinking about well-being that analyses overall benefit against cost, Nussbaum recalls Austin’s (1970) point that the older use of this English word encompasses fine actions that don’t necessarily bring pleasure. Nussbaum stresses that emotions highlight human vulnerability and interdependence because they are responses to objects outside the subject’s control. She suggests that emotions have a complex cognitive structure ‘part narrative in form’ (2001: 2), because they contain the shadows of the individual’s developmental history, particularly their history of patterns of attachment in early childhood. Her account of emotions frames them as non-linguistic (she argues for a continuity between animal and human emotion) and as socially constructed, because cultural sources such as social norms enter into processes of appraisal or judgement in a constitutive way. However, she suggests there are strong arguments for the universality of early emotions such as love, anger, shame, disgust, fear, joy, jealousy, envy, guilt, compassion and gratitude. The Object Relational psychoanalytic concept of unconscious phantasy is very close to Nussbaum’s definition of emotion. As a result of the Kleinian proposition that there is an evolutionarily pre-given object-related ego or self at birth, and hence some kind of very primitive infantile awareness of need for an object, Susan Isaacs’s (1948) ‘position’ paper on phantasy suggested an innate structure to phantasy life. This involves: a subject; an object which has supposed intentions; and a relationship in which the subject wishes to do things to the object on the basis of the object’s intentions. (Hinshelwood, 1994: 33) The basic structure of primitive emotional thought is of an object evaluated as being ‘bad-to-me’ or ‘good-to-me’, accompanied by reactive feeling and action in the subject. Nussbaum makes particular reference to what she calls ‘the ambivalence crisis’ in early childhood, and the emergence of an ensuing ‘moral defense’ – Fairbairn’s (1952) term. The ambivalence crisis is described as the moment when the young child recognizes that objects of concern to it can be simultaneously ‘bad’ and ‘good’ to it – ‘. . . the very same objects who love and care for her also go away at times and attend to other projects, heedless of her demands’ (1952: 209). Perception of the separate agency of the other, not solely frustration of need, or disappointed desire, is what engenders intense rage and existential fear. This is co-existent with the perception that this is the loved object, and also, with early shame in the face of recognition of neediness, and guilt.

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Following Fairbairn and Winnicott, Nussbaum argues that in an environment where the child’s neediness is typically responded to supportively rather than punitively, the child develops a ‘moral defense’ to assist with resolution of the negative experience of rage and fear, shame, guilt and ‘badness’: ‘. . . a strategy [. . .]: to wipe out bad things with good things, damage with loving deeds’ (2001: 215). Such strategies may be more or less manic, omnipotent and obsessional. Nussbaum argues that phantasies of reparation provoke reparative action and bring relief. In their wake they permit further perception of the other’s agency, and hence of the elaboration of more imaginative forms of empathic identification. Nussbaum notes Fairbairn’s argument that where a child feels particularly ashamed of their neediness and imperfection, strategies of manipulation or placation of the object, designed to bolster illusions of omnipotence, are more likely than a strategy of ‘moral defense’. In thinking about how to characterize late modern emotional life, Ian Craib (1994) prefaces his discussion by reflecting on his own recent experience of serious illness. He considers the fear of death that spurs individual and cultural creative action (Bauman, 1992; Seale, 1998), and comments, ‘. . . life is immensely precious and the links we have with other people, in all their dreadful complexity, are all that we have’ (Craib, 1994: viii). He argues that the popular representation of modern death as ‘taboo’ and hidden is inaccurate, and suggests that in the late twentieth century, death and mourning underwent the same kind of transformation that Foucault (1976) argued sexuality underwent in the late nineteenth century. Death, dying and mourning have become disintegrated from everyday life as a result of the breakdown of traditional social mores. They have become isolated and simultaneously annexed as the focus of specialized knowledge by medical and specialist institutions. Craib takes Murray Parkes’s classic text, Bereavement (1967), as a landmark publication. This, he says, brought the process of mourning within the orbit of professional medicine by classifying it as an illness. The course of the illness is then mapped, and ‘expert systems’ are devised to ‘guide’ individual mourners through the grieving process. One consequence of this, Craib argues, is a sanitization or ‘taming’ (1994: 25) of grief, with states of mind inextricably linked with it such as triumphalism, hatred, terror and the desire to punish being minimized or denied. Craib is at pains to point out that Murray Parkes’s work was not motivated by sinister professional self-interest, but by a desire to ease suffering, and Craib notes that it did, particularly through its contribution to the development of the hospice movement. Craib says: I am trying to portray a situation which has both a ‘dark’ and a ‘light’ side, and these can only be brought together if the whole is looked at from two very different angles. (1994: 20)

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He suggests that Murray Parkes’s highly influential account of mourning exemplified a way of describing the process that shifted attention from an inner life to something exhibited, the emotion of grief. He suggests that a focus on emotion creates a shallower conceptualization. Craib also describes the effects of adding programmes of treatment to the expert maps created of the course of the mourning process. He says that such programmes of treatment for bereavement become products of modernity in two senses. Firstly, the treatment is supposed to produce a positive outcome and subtly becomes a programme for life with the defensive potential to deny the authentic reaction to the reality of death. Secondly, the programme is a product in the sense that professionals may be in competition to sell it; it may have to be marketed, with greater potential for denial: Working in a market means being a particular type of person, one who does not acknowledge what might be thought to be ‘defects’ in the product. (1994: 30) Craib broadens his discussion of programmes of treatment for bereavement to address dimensions of late modernity that produce a fragmented, isolated self defended by a false, ‘positive’ self. Critiques of what has come to be known as ‘therapy culture’ (Furedi, 2003) provide similar commentaries upon the psychocultural consequences of the extreme individualism encouraged by late modern capitalist consumer societies (e.g., Lasch, 1984; Sennett, 1998). Craib describes how such a culture can invite the generation of ‘. . . a vision of the omnipotent, self-constructing self which maintains many of the phantasies of infancy into adult life. Many forms of therapy, including psychoanalytic therapy, try to realize this phantasy’ (1994: 166). Clearly, programmes of emotional literacy, of the development of ‘EQ’ or ‘social and emotional competence’, can invite such a critique in exactly the terms outlined above. For example, the Antidote Web site home page foregrounds the following quotation: ‘Emotional literacy will become as vital to personal and national success in the knowledge economy as traditional definitions of literacy were to previous eras’ Lord Putnam of Queensgate’. A relentless focus on conduct, success and positivity is at risk of denying the inevitability, even potentiality, of failure and ‘bad’ behaviour and the validity of negative emotion. There are risks of encouraging performativity of positive emotion, a kind of ‘method acting’ akin to the unjust and pressuring instrumentalization and commodification of emotion critiqued in Hochschild’s (1983) characterization of ‘emotional labour’. Indeed, research on SEAL suggests that the encouragement of false positivity was identified by teachers as one problem with the curriculum, and ‘talking the talk’ was found to be more likely in girls (see Hallam, Rhamie and Shaw, 2006). One must also ask what might be mobilized at an unconscious, phantasy level,

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by the continuous call to do one’s best morally and emotionally, and strive. Following Nussbaum’s analysis above, undue pressure to live up to an ideal emotionally is likely to produce, through experiences of shame, a falling back on strategies of manipulation or placation rather than genuine efforts at imaginative engagement with the other, or empathy. However, Craib notes his stress on the ‘dark side’ of therapy culture, and does not deny the potential for another angle or dimension to the analysis. Richards’s ‘therapeutic culture’ hypothesis (2004; Richards and Brown, 2002) is more positive. It suggests that the contemporary preoccupation with feeling, particularly where it concerns questions of authenticity and fulfilment, can be read as a positive socio-cultural development. It reflects the growth of ‘emotional’ capital, wider permissiveness and democratization of feeling (see also Giddens, 1992). Nussbaum’s discussion above of the effects of the ‘moral defense’ also suggests that it permits the emergence of an authentic capacity in the young child to realize the separateness of self and others, and to develop a curious and compassionate stance in relation to wishes and feelings, or agency. In the discussion that follows, consideration is given to three vignettes drawn from contemporary school settings, with a view to describing both the ‘dark’ and ‘light’ side of the development of programmes of emotional literacy training for children. The focus is specifically on the use of SEAL with infant classes.

Teaching and learning about social and emotional competence A contemporary Year Two infant classroom (six rising 7 year olds) On the carpet a large rectangular ‘seating area’ for the children has been designated in scarlet tape. It faces three separate ‘white boards’: an easel with a flip chart, on which is written, ‘Monday 30th January. Today we are learning how to decode, understand and alphabetically order words’; an interactive whiteboard with the date and a digital clock face looping continuously; and the largest, wipe-able whiteboard, where the date and the lesson’s learning objective are repeated. On one wall is a large display headed, ‘Can you spot the difference?’ It shows two twin creatures called Chico and Pico. Chico has spots, and around him are cloud-shaped bubbles containing statements like, ‘I ask other people for help!’, ‘If I don’t know something, I ask questions!’, ‘I share ideas with other people!’, ‘I finish my work!’, and ‘I can turn down the noise around me to get on with my work!’ Pico has no spots. His bubbles say things like, ‘I am always quiet’, ‘I never ask questions’, ‘I cannot do my work if people are talking’, and ‘I do not finish my

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work’. Underneath, in large letters, is written, ‘Can you tell who the better learner is?’ The class rules are on another display and also on the back of the door. They say things like, ‘We help each other’ ‘We are kind’ ‘We walk about the school quietly’ ‘We speak quietly’ ‘We listen to each other’. A further display is headed, ‘We are all different but we are all equal’. It shows individual pieces of writing. Each has sentences where the child has written their name, where they are from, their hair and skin and eye colour, their religion, best friends, favourite foods and toys. There are groups of infant tables, each with a box in the centre, containing exercise books; each box’s side has a large piece of laminated card headed, ‘We are VIPs!’ Underneath, it translates: ‘Very Independent People’. A list of statements follows: ‘We can work quickly and quietly’, ‘We can fetch our equipment ourselves’, ‘We can get on by ourselves’, ‘If we don’t know what to do, we can ask someone on our table’, ‘We can check our own work’. The initial impression created for an outsider is of an environment which is forcefully ‘on message’ about how to conduct oneself as a pupil, cognitively, socially and emotionally. Readers of this vignette have suggested there is a coercive rather than permissive quality to the environment. Walkerdine’s Foucauldian analysis of the relations between psychology and schooling suggests that pedagogic practices provide ‘administrative apparatuses for providing techniques of social regulation’ (in Henriques et al., 1984: 163). It is important to note that the ‘bubbles’ surrounding Chico and Pico, and the classroom rules, and the suggestions as to how to be a ‘VIP’, have been generated by the children themselves in classroom discussion. Walkerdine stresses that participants are active in constructing these disciplinary practices, and themselves within them: ‘. . . processes of normalization are not the product of some repressive superpower hell-bent on keeping people in their place. That is, disciplinary power does not function through overt repression but through the covert reproduction of ourselves’ (1984: 196). The force and specificity with which the SEAL guidance spells out the meaning of becoming socially and emotionally competent (in part, as ‘learning outcomes’ a child can grasp and express to themselves) certainly has a disciplinary ring. Subsequent educational commentators (e.g., Ball, 2004) have continued to suggest that schools are a ‘site’ in a Foucauldian sense, for the creation and generation of particular forms of late modern disciplinary regimes of ‘governance’, and in many respects there is a straightforward fit between this analysis and that of Craib’s above. ‘Governmentality’, as Rose (1990) argues, is characteristic of a contemporary advanced liberal form of state government which governs through a process of ‘enabling’. It ‘enables’ rather than simply directs, because of a growing scepticism about direct forms of government. Governmentality achieves ‘the conduct of conduct’

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instead, through ‘. . . programmes, strategies, techniques for acting upon the actions of others towards certain ends’ (Rose, 1990: xxi). Governmentality also draws on what Rose calls the ‘psy (or psychological) sciences’, because he says that these provide an acceptable way of legitimizing the exercise of authority over human conduct. They do so because these ‘engineers of the human soul’ (Rose again) ‘. . . claim to deal truthfully with the real problems of human existence in light of a knowledge of the nature of the individuals who make it up’. At the moment, Rose suggests, this brings about twin processes of ‘autonomization plus responsibilization’ – ‘. . . opening free space for the choices of individual actors whilst enwrapping these autonomized actors within new forms of control’. It is quite easy to see the government’s emotional literacy programme from this perspective. The discursive analysis has considerable power. But in relation to the psychosocial analysis of emotion presented above, it must be asked whether the ‘psy (or psychological) sciences’ are only agents of the social construction of the subject (although they are this, too). The Foucauldian discursive approach has a limited purchase on the (emotional) intentions and potential mindfulness of policy initiators, drafters and researchers,2 and on the agentive experience of teachers and learners in situ. It would seem partial and premature to write SEAL off as only a form of extended and marketized neo-liberal governance. A contemporary Year One class, learning within the SEAL framework in Anti-Bullying Week3 Kay has taken the register – this class sing it – and given the children an opportunity to share ‘news’. Today, as often, this has been largely about events in the playground over lunchtime, and involves responses to reports of physical and verbal aggression. One child reports being punched in the face: ‘He just ran past and he punched me in the face like this.’ Jack demonstrates twice, vigorously. Kay makes a shocked face and says quietly, ‘Oh dear. That must’ve hurt. Did he say sorry?’ ‘No,’ says Jack, ‘I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t even playing with him . . .’ Kay says again, ‘Oh dear. You must’ve felt sad. What did you do?’ ‘I just walked away’, Jack replies quietly. ‘Hmmm,’ says Kay, in an approving way. Two girls are talking in whispers next to Jack about this, and Kay adds to them, ‘Yes, Julie [playground supervisor] did tell me he was in a lot of trouble this lunch time.’ She says to Jack, ‘You didn’t tell anybody?’ Jack says again, ‘No, I just walked away’. Kay looks as if she might say something else, then says, ‘Well, well done, for just walking away.’ The afternoon proceeds with a ‘walking’ game where the children get into different-sized groups when Kay stops and calls out a number. Circle time follows, and children complete a sentence, ‘When I am included I feel . . .’.

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Kay then picks up work from the preceding day, on a version of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ where he has been pushed off the wall and laughed at, and discusses how Humpty felt (‘sad and cross’) and which hurt him more, being pushed or being laughed at. One child suggests the pushing because then he hurt himself; Kay comments that some people might think he was more upset when they laughed at him (‘It’s not nice to be laughed at, is it? Poor Humpty.’) Kay then uses two well-known puppets to think about verbal bullying: The children stir slightly in anticipation as Kay slides one onto each hand and makes them face each other. ‘Hello, Miss Squirrel’ she says brightly. ‘Hello, Mr Hedgehog’, she answers for her. Charlene interrupts eagerly, ‘You know in reception class – now they’ve got Maisie Duck!’ There are smiles of recognition at this and Zachary says, ‘Yea, could Hedgehog and Squirrel go and see her?’ Kay smiles and says, ‘Or maybe she could come and visit us?’ There are pleased smiles, and some children exchange glances and say, ‘Yesss!’ Yusuf adds, ‘Could she come after playtime?’ Kay says, no; but maybe tomorrow. She then makes the puppets say hello again and adds, ‘How would it be if . . . umm . . . if Squirrel said, ‘Oh, Hedgehog . . . You’ve got a funny nose!’ She makes the squirrel puppet laugh. The children look a little uncertain and some half smile. Kay turns to the Hedgehog puppet and makes him say, ‘Oh! Oh . . .’ in a surprised and worried way. She makes him touch his nose and look around at the children. ‘I haven’t,’ she says for him, in an upset voice. She makes the squirrel repeat, ‘You’ve got a funny nose!’ ‘Oh!’ Says Mr Hedgehog again, in a downcast way. Kay turns to the children. ‘What do you think about that?’ Sevin says, ‘She shouldn’t say that . . . just because he’s got a brown nose. And round.’ Kay nods and adds, ‘Should she say that, just because his nose is different from hers?’ Sydney says, ‘No – because people’s noses are not the same, like . . . you’ve got a big long nose, but ours are little . . . and round.’ He looks around the circle. ‘Yes’, says Kay, ‘What could Mr Hedgehog do if Squirrel said more unkind things to him? What could he do then?’ There is a pause and the children are uncertain. Kay adds, ‘Well, if someone said or did unkind things to you, what could you do?’ Again, the children seem a little uncertain but some hands go up, and Kay picks Charise, who says, ‘You could tell your mum . . .’ Kay says, emphatically, ‘Yes! You could tell someone.’ The children then have ‘choosing time’ (a range of free play activities). Four children work with Kay, using mirrors to study their own and each other’s ‘sad’ and ‘happy’ faces. In pairs, one child then paints the other’s ‘sad’ face, and on swopping, the other paints the first child’s ‘happy’ face. The pair observed hold their poses for quite long periods of time, and study each other intently; their paintings are large and accurate.

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Early on in the afternoon session, Jack talks about a child who punched him. His account and body language convey his surprise at the attack, and the teacher, Kay, takes his part. Their ensuing exchange could be read negatively, as an instance of a child being led as to what his responses should have been (‘Did you do anything to provoke it?’ ‘Did you retaliate?’ ‘You felt sad, not enraged and afraid.’ ‘Did you do the right thing and tell someone?’) In fact, the class and teacher are aware of a context – the offender is a younger child new to the school whose command of language is not good and who can often be in this kind of trouble. Kay shows an awareness of what the textbook emotionally literate responses might be, but she also remains in the particular moment, with the particular context, and allows herself to vacillate. When she uses the word, ‘sad’, this might be an appropriate word for a young child experiencing a sense of hurt at being a victim. Kay resists advising that ‘next time, he could tell someone’ and conveys she trusts the child’s own judgement and response. The children are very interested in the puppet play and have an enthusiasm for these SEAL materials – they are not responding dutifully. Miss Squirrel, Mr Hedgehog and Maisie Duck are ‘friends’ in the way that soft toys in earlier childhood are comforting, lively companions, and at this age, the children find the treatment of them as living people entirely plausible. The link to the younger reception class perhaps allows the children to empathize with Mr Hedgehog’s vulnerability at a slight remove. It is not they, but their littler friend who has been hurt by Miss Squirrel’s comments. Protective and empathic feelings can come to the fore. The children’s attention is also captured by the suddenness with which an apparently safe, friendly bond (between Mr Hedgehog and Miss Squirrel) is shattered when the squirrel puppet ‘turns nasty’. This is a familiar experience of suddenly being unsafe. Kay conveys Mr Hedgehog’s hurt and helplessness in this context. Sydney’s response is interesting in that he uses a feature of difference (a longer, bigger nose) to put the powerful teacher in the position of the other, perhaps exploring the way power dynamics can suddenly switch when a strategy of ‘othering’ and humiliation is used. His move also keeps his own position safe (he has the ‘majority’ nose!) The use of the mirrors to make sense of expressions of emotion (again, a SEAL strategy) continues the theme of exploring what people look like and how their faces ‘show’ their inside states and their individuality. The mirrors, the looking, pairing and painting provide a safe context in which to acknowledge that people have very particular features, and that their faces give them away. A contemporary Year Two class during and just after ‘circle time’4 Alison says calmly, ‘Now. I would like everybody to be thinking about what they usually do, and how they usually behave, when we are in circle time’. The children are sitting quietly around the edge of the mat. Three

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or four are sucking thumbs and twiddling hair. Ahmed and Benjamin begin a fight for space and Alison says, ‘I think you need to come out of the circle, Benjamin, like last week, and sit in front of me’. Ahmed puts his arm around Courtney and she snuggles in to him, looking sleepy. Alison points out that Stuart and Ellie are squashed (Stuart looks up, surprised) and the children shuffle round patiently. Helena and Mandy have begun edging forward, each aiming to get in front of the other. Helena is reproved and turns to giggle ostentatiously with Shifa; Mandy then looks to her left and sees Jo deliberately edging ahead of her. She moves forward angrily. Alison says, ‘Oh, stop that, Mandy, sit still!’ Alison puts on a soft felt glove puppet and makes him face the children. She asks them to think about two things they could tell Owl about themselves – perhaps things they like doing, in school, or the playground; or at home, at the weekends; or things they like eating. The children are quiet and expectant. Alison gives Owl to Rukshana, who turns Owl in to face her, strokes his head for a moment, and says, quietly, ‘I like reading and going to see my aunt’. Marjana, next to her, says equally quietly, ‘I like reading and playing with my Barbies’. Jo says, ‘I like drawing and eating chips!’ The children then tend to copy the pattern set by Jo, or they literally copy the previous speaker. Sayed, a new boy who usually says little, says audibly, ‘I like cakes’, and Alison looks at me, pleased. Harvey says loudly he likes football and eating pizza; other boys also speak loudly and proudly. Alison acknowledges each reply with a smile. Kerry speaks loudly too, and says that she likes shopping and spaghetti hoops. As Owl reaches them, a group of boys sat farthest from Alison smirk at each other. They are less audible and giggle, huddling together, as each has their turn. Owl eventually reaches Alison and she says, ‘I like shopping for clothes and eating chocolate’. She turns to me and says, putting Owl away, ‘So there. That’s my secret’. [. . . The next ‘game’ – passing musical instruments silently around the circle – is less successful because the group of boys mentioned earlier, led by Jatinder, begin to surreptitiously fidget and compete to push their hands under the mat. Alison has one eye on them throughout and as the musical instruments game gets under way she reproves them crossly, although when she turns her attention away, the ‘mat’ game builds up again. She finally stops the ‘instruments’ game, saying exasperatedly, ‘We have been sitting around the mat all term without putting our arms underneath it. Why have we suddenly started now?’] Alison notes it is nearly home time. She asks who can tell her what was in the letter that some children have already remembered to bring back to school. One child comments rather nonchalantly, ‘About the trip’. Alison breaks off to tell Jatinder sharply to take his hands out from under the

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mat. She then adds to the previous speaker, ‘Well, that’s not good enough! We’ve read this letter over and over again and spent the best part of an afternoon on it, and I want to know what was in it!’ Ellie says politely that it was about going out to the Museum of London. Alison says firmly, ‘Thank you Ellie. Why are we going?’ Ellie adds, ‘To find out about the fire of London.’ Alison says, ‘Well done, that is exactly right.’ She then adds, ‘You all need to remember to bring back your permission slips, and what else?’ ‘One POUND!’ The children chorus. There is a pause and Jatinder adds, ‘My mum won’t give me a pound. I asked her and she said she hasn’t got it.’ He looks round confidently at the others and Alison adds that if their mum really can’t give them one pound they can bring as near to one pound as they can; maybe 50p. Jatinder continues to subtly shake his head in disagreement, looking at his friends rather importantly. Stuart whispers to Alison, ‘He can’t go on the trip, then!’ Alison adds, ‘I’ll decide who does and doesn’t go on the trip, Stuart.’ Alison begins explaining to me what the school policy is if children cannot afford to pay. Noise on the mat rises. Alison turns back to the children and asks them to settle. She begins to calmly name the restless ones and they settle one by one. Suddenly, she breaks off and says, crossly and tiredly, ‘Oh, I give up. I really give up!’ There are quite powerful indicators in the material above that the circle unconsciously represents belonging in a family group, with Miss Richards bearing a maternal transference. Obholzer and Zagier Roberts (1994) have argued that the education system can function to enable societal members to believe that they belong in the community of learners that echoes the family. In this unconscious family, the other preoccupation running alongside the need to belong is the fear of exclusion. Parental figures, particularly mother, need to hold everyone in mind in order to ensure no one is forgotten or treated with less favour. This can feel like a matter of survival (and we might note that this seems to be the case for Ben and Mandy). It is important to note that the adults present will not be immune to the desire to join in and to have their inner, more impulsive and desirous selves recognized and affirmed. An interesting discussion concerning ways of introducing SEAL (in Coleman and Brooks, 2009) stresses the central importance of teacher well-being, if SEAL is to be used in a genuine way in schools, rather than being an additional curriculum pressure on staff. In settings foregrounding emotion, all the members are likely to be reminded how the group can be family-like, and emotionally and socially supportive or otherwise for members. The teacher is both more vulnerable and more prone to identification with an idealized mother or father figure than in the more defended instructional teaching contexts, and arguably, s/he bears more responsibility (teachers have expressed their concern about having to act as surrogate parents, or about being the recipients of increased numbers of disclosures, concerns that suggest a struggle

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with the blurring of parental and educational responsibility that SEAL fosters). Miss Richards’s reactions to Jatinder, and her snapping at the end, have prompted the suggestion from readers of this vignette that the teacher needs to put her own house in order emotionally. But just what is being asked of teachers in such a judgement? Managing one’s own emotions is hard work; managing others’ emotions is even more so, particularly when one is engaged in processes of conflict and contestation, and overt or covert power struggles (Jatinder bids for alternative leadership and he and his friends will take the risk involved in placing themselves at odds with the teacher). These emotional dynamics can neither be sanitized nor be excised from group life.

Conclusion This chapter debated the phenomenon of the teaching and learning of emotional literacy or ‘social and emotional competence’ as a formal curriculum in schools. Following Craib (1994), the discussion noted both a dark and a light side to the development of programmes of emotional literacy training for children. The analysis of specific instances of the teaching and learning of emotional literacy suggests that it would be a mistake to argue for a general evaluation of such a phenomenon as either positive or negative. Policy and curriculum guidelines are directive in particular ways and do bear down upon and enter into the interpretations and behaviours of social actors on the ground. But social actors themselves are active – they seek agency, resist prescription and want to know more about ‘. . . the links we have with other people, in all their dreadful complexity’ (op. cit.). It is possible to see this from the two ‘live’ vignettes presented from the classroom. Although emotional literacy programmes do present ‘maps’ of an emotional terrain in a way that can be prescriptive, the way that individuals narrativize and make use of such maps also has a high degree of unpredictability. Paradoxically, this is because individuals are seeking to make their own sense of an emotional, intersubjective terrain, while finding common points of orientation within it. A search for individual potency seems characteristic of lively actors. Martin Seligman’s (1974) cognitive behavioural studies on ‘learned helplessness’ noted that if a learner expects that an outcome is independent of their response, this reduces motivation, interferes with learning that one’s response can control outcomes and, in traumatic situations, produces fear and depression. Seligman went on to write extensively on the importance of giving a place to ‘learned optimism’.

Notes 1. Now the Department for Children, Schools and Families or DSCF. 2. There was particularly extensive consultation about SEAL from a very wide range of groups and organizations.

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3. It is worth noting that the activities detailed in this section will have been mirrored in classrooms across the country. 4. ‘Circle time’ is intended to encourage listening to others, and to be democratic and inclusive rather than didactic.

References Austin, J. L. (1970) ‘Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle’, Philosophical Papers, 2nd Edn, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–31. Ball, S. (2004) ‘Performativities and Fabrications in the Education Economy: Towards a Performative Society’, in Ball, S. (ed.) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Sociology of Education, London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Clarke, S. (2003) Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coleman, J. and Brooks, F. (2009) Key Data on Adolescence, 9th Edn, London: Trust for the Study of Adolescence. Craib, I. (1994) The Importance of Disappointment, London: Routledge. Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge. Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality, London: Penguin. Froggett, L. (2002) Love, Hate and Welfare, Bristol: Policy Press. Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy, Oxford: Blackwell. Goleman, D. (1995) Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, New York: Bantam Books. Hallam, S., Rhamie, J. and Shaw, J. (2006) Evaluation of the Primary Behaviour and Attendance Pilot, Research Report RR717, Nottingham: Department for Education and Skills Publications. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1998) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, 2nd edn, London: Routledge (1st edition 1984, Methuen). Hinshelwood, R. (1994) Clinical Klein, London: Karnac. Hochschild, A. R. (1983) The Managed Heart: The Commercialisation of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoggett, P. (2000) Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare, Houndmills: Macmillan. Hollway, W. (2004) ‘An Appropriate Research Paradigm for Evaluating Psychoanalytically-Informed Practices’, International Journal of Infant Observation and Its Applications, 7(2/3), 26–42. Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method, London: Sage. Isaacs, S. (1948) ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’, in King, P. and Steiner, R. (1991) (eds) The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–1945, London: Routledge. Kunnanatt, J. T. (2004) ‘Emotional Intelligence: The New Science of Interpersonal Effectiveness’, Human Resource Development Quarterly, 15(4), 489–495. Lasch, C. (1984) The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, New York: Norton. Liau, W. L., Teoh, G. B. S. and Liau, M. T. L. (2003) ‘The Case for Emotional Literacy: The Influence of Emotional Intelligence on Problem Behaviours in Malaysian Secondary School Students’, Journal of Moral Education, 32(1), 51–66.

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Maree, J. G. and Eiselen, R. J. (2004) ‘The Emotional Intelligence Profile of Academics in a Merger Setting’, Education and Urban Society, 36(4), 482–504. Mayer, J. D. and Salovey, P. (1997) ‘What Is Emotional Intelligence?’, In Salovey, P. and Sluyter, D. (eds) Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications, New York: Basic Books. Murray Parkes, C. (1967) Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, London: Pelican. Nussbaum, M. C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Obholzer, A. and Zagier Roberts, V. (1994) The Unconscious at Work, London: Routledge. Richards, B. (2004) ‘What Is Psychoanalysis for?’ Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 9, 149–158. Richards, B. and Brown, J. (2002) ‘The Therapeutic Culture Hypothesis: A Critical Discussion’, in Johansson, T. and Sernhede, O. (eds) Lifestyle, Desire and Politics: Contemporary Identities, Gothenberg: Daidalos, pp. 97–114. Rose, N. (1990) Governing the Soul, London: Routledge. Seale, C. (1998) Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seligman, M. E. P. (1974) Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death, New York: W. H. Freeman. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character, New York: Norton. Walkerdine, V. (1984/1998) ‘Developmental Psychology and the Child-Centred Pedagogy: The Insertion of Piaget into Early Education’, in J. Henriques et al. (eds) Changing the Subject, London: Macmillan/Routledge. Weare, K. and Gray, G. (2003) What Works in Developing Children’s Emotional and Social Competence and Wellbeing? Research Report RR456, Nottingham: Department for Education and Skills Publications.

16 A Psychosocial Understanding of Personality Disorder: The Historical Problem of Moral Insanity David W. Jones

Various terms such as ‘psychopath’ and ‘antisocial personality disorder’ have been used at different times to describe individuals who act, with no apparent remorse, with great callousness causing disruption and distress around them. Despite being formally described within medical texts for many years the status of these diagnoses remains highly contested both within and outside of psychiatry. It will be argued that a psychosocial perspective can firstly help us to understand why these and related categories of mental disorder have been so contentious and secondly may also point us towards more useful ways of understanding the phenomena. Two points about a psychosocial perspective are raised in this chapter. Firstly, consistent with the premise of this book there is the engagement with the social and cultural significance of emotion. Secondly there is the need to cross disciplinary fissures; not only trying to bridge the most obvious gaps between the psychological and the sociological, between the individual and the cultural, but also most notably in this case the analysis benefits from historical context. It can be argued that the set of problems that are described by the varieties of ‘personality disorders’ (such as borderline, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders) have, despite the great controversy about their status and validity, been visible in slightly different guises since at least the beginning of the 19th century when the term ‘moral insanity’ had some currency (e.g., Prichard 1835). While that particular diagnosis had lost much of its influence by the latter half of the 19th century, the diagnosis of ‘psychopath’ (used to describe someone whose behaviour was profoundly antisocial) appeared in the early decades of the 20th century and received legislative recognition in the UK (in the Mental Health Acts of 1959 and 1983) and in the USA (through various ‘Sexual Psychopath Laws’ that appeared in different States during the 1950s). The term ‘psychopath’ has also now largely fallen out of favour and various versions of ‘personality disorder’ are recognised by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association) and 212

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International Classification of Disease (ICD, published by WHO) systems of classification, and have been subject to considerable attention from the UK government since the late 1990s. This chapter will briefly describe the contemporary controversies that surround personality disorder in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century. It will then move back in time to explore the emergence of the diagnosis of ‘moral insanity’ in the early decades of the 19th century. In both cases the arena into which the diagnoses have emerged and have been debated was formed at the join of ‘psychiatry’ and the criminal justice system. The historical context is important because it sheds light on the processes that have put these diagnoses into liminal psychiatric territory. Meaning on the one hand they are viewed as not being legitimate forms of ‘madness’, yet on the other hand neither have they been completely expelled from the psychiatric domain but have continued to lurk on the fringes, morphing slightly over time, but consistently demanding attention. It will be argued that these disorders are not well apprehended either by legal discourses of responsibility or by contemporary psychiatric and psychological models of identity and agency. A historical perspective helps us understand these difficulties as products of particular ways of construing the relationship of individual identity and the social body. The questions posed by this group of people are particularly challenging for us, most specifically they are problematic thanks to the disciplinary schisms in the human sciences that have allowed such a gap to appear between psychological and social explanations of human phenomena. They expose deep controversies about the nature of the individual, of selfhood and the relationship between emotion, thought and the social world.

Contemporary controversies In 2007 the UK Government introduced the Mental Health (Amendment) Act (DOH 2007), which represented the final admission that they had failed to produce a new Mental Health Act (MHA) after 8 years of effort. This occurred despite widespread agreement that this legislation needed to be renewed. After all, the 1983 MHA itself was largely a re-drafting of the 1959 MHA. Given the enormous shifts in health and welfare policies, alongside changing ideas about diagnosis and treatment within psychiatry and related professions, the notion that it needed to be renewed was uncontested. One of the main reasons for the failure to agree a new Act was the issue of ‘personality disorders’ and how they should be managed by the National Health Service. Government interest in personality disorder was prompted by the murder investigations that eventually led to the conviction of Michael Stone (Jones 2008: 61–62), who had previously been diagnosed as suffering from a personality disorder. In July 1996 Lin Russell and her two daughters had been

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walking home along a quiet country lane in Kent from a school swimming gala. At some point they were tied up and attacked. Lin and her elder daughter were killed, while 9-year-old Josie was left for dead. The extent of the injuries made it clear that this was a brutal and murderous attack and her subsequent survival was heralded in the press as miraculous. The occurrence of the attack in broad daylight in a picturesque rural area of the ‘Garden of England’ was no doubt part of the reason for the public attention and outrage that led to the government’s interest in the case. There were no moral ambiguities here. The Russells were clearly innocent victims and the attack appeared truly ‘monstrous’. The absence of any tangible motivation for the attack coupled with the lack of witnesses made the case difficult to prosecute, however. A year after the attack, following a national television appeal for information, Michael Stone emerged as a suspect. The lack of forensic or witness evidence, or indeed ostensible motive, meant that Stone’s eventual conviction has been contested (the conviction has been quashed once, only to be re-instated at the subsequent re-trial). It came to light that Stone not only had a history of violence, but he was well known to psychiatric services having been seen as suffering from a ‘personality disorder’. The report1 into Stone’s care quotes from a psychiatric assessment made in January 1995 some 18 months before the killings: A tough minded man . . . [who] . . . at no point displayed any features of a psychotic illness. He had credible explanations for apparently psychotic episodes . . . [and] . . . denied ever hearing voices. The most striking abnormality was his extremely callous attitude towards victims and anger and contempt towards several professionals involved with him. . . . My impression is that he has committed major violent crimes in the past and is likely to do so in the future . . . He fulfills the criteria for anti-social personality disorder and there may also be a paranoid mental illness. (p. 196) The psychiatrist argued that Stone’s detention under the MHA was ‘highly inappropriate’ and that ‘it does not appear appropriate to offer [Mr. Stone] a bed as firstly he is no longer mentally ill and secondly he is unlikely to respond to a graded rehabilitation package’. The fact that psychiatrists were allowed by the MHA to distinguish between ‘mental illness’ and the kinds of difficulties that Stone exhibited came to be a target of Government attention. Although personality disorder did not feature in the 1983 MHA, its diagnostic cousin ‘psychopathy’ did, having found a place in the 1959 MHA as a distinct category of mental disorder (the other three being mental illness, mental deficiency and ‘other’). Psychopathy was defined as ‘a persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including subnormality of intelligence) which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct’. The inclusion of psychopathy was controversial (Ramon 1986), with the majority of psychiatrists being reluctant to recognise such problems

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as falling within their domain. A small but vocal group of psychoanalytically inclined psychiatrists, notably David Henderson at the Tavistock Clinic, had advocated for the diagnosis (Henderson 1939). The UK Government has been much exorcised by the distinction made between mental illness and ‘psychopathy’ so clearly evident in the treatment of Michael Stone. They argued that personality disorders ought to be recognised and treated by the National Health Service just like other disorders such as depression and schizophrenia (DOH 2003). They wanted a new MHA that would not only dissolve the distinction that was being made between ‘psychopathy’ and ‘mental illness’ but that could also be used to take pre-emptive action against those who might fall within such categories and who might offer a threat to the public (DOH 2006). Their efforts to do this faced a barrage of criticism from civil liberty groups (see Liberty 2000,2 for example), mental health lobby groups (such as MIND3 ) and from within psychiatry (Buchanan and Leese 2001). It will be argued here that to understand why this continues to be such a contentious category we need to explore the history of the problem.

Insanity and crime The belief that leniency ought be shown to those people who committed offences when they were believed to be ‘insane’ has a long history with good evidence of provisions being made in English law for many centuries (Reznek 1997; Walker 1968). Certainly by the end of the 18th century courts in England were well used to hearing and accepting the plea of ‘insanity’ in murder trials (Eigen 2004; Walker 1968). The nascent psychiatric profession began entering the courts as witnesses in some numbers towards the end of the 18th century for both prosecution and defence (Smith 1981). They were being asked to give ‘expert evidence’ about the sanity of defendants. It was around this time, and largely within debates about criminal responsibility, that attempts to define ‘moral insanity’ were made.

Moral insanity A small group of clinicians during the 19th century in different countries began to concern themselves with people who seemed not to have totally lost their reason but could act in very antisocial and often aggressive ways. Working from asylums in France Pinel (1806) is credited with the first formal written account of ‘mania without delirium’ (‘manie sans delire’). This might be an intermittent or continuous state, notable for there being ‘no sensible change in the functions of the understanding; but perversion of the active faculties, marked by abstract and sanguinary fury, with a blind propensity to acts of violence’ (Pinel 1806: 156). While Pinel’s work was clearly located in criminological concerns, as witnessed by the fact that he analysed a number of notorious murder cases, many of the cases that the British medic Prichard

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described as ‘moral insanity’ are taken to be the first published definitions of more general personality disorders (Elliott and Gillet 1992: 53). Prichard was describing people who seemed to have normal intellectual functioning (similar to Pinel’s cases, they were not suffering from delusions or disorders of perception) but their behaviour was clearly abnormally antisocial. In a famous and often quoted passage Prichard (1835) described ‘moral insanity’ in the following terms: A form of mental derangement in which the intellectual faculties appear to have sustained little or no injury, while the disorder is manifested principally or alone, in the state of the feelings, temper, or habits. . . . [T]he moral and active principles of the mind are strangely perverted and depraved; the power of self government is lost or greatly impaired; and the individual is found to be incapable, not of talking or reasoning upon any subject proposed to him, for this he will often do with great shrewdness and volubility, but of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the business of life. (Prichard 1835: 4) While with hindsight some of the cases described by Prichard might nowadays receive rather different diagnoses such as ‘bipolar affective disorder’, there is little doubt that some of the characteristics highlighted by Prichard are consistent with some of the cases of psychopathy described a hundred years later who might be quite successful, but ruthless, in their careers, for example (Cleckley 1941; Hare 1993). Prichard’s arguments about ‘moral insanity’ were taking place within debates about capital punishment. Prichard argued that sufferers of ‘moral insanity’ who committed murder ought to escape the gallows and be treated in hospital. Similarly in the USA Isaac Ray was directly concerned with the legal definitions of insanity in arguing that cases of ‘moral mania’ and ‘partial moral mania’ should be recognised. Ray argued that types of partial moral mania included compulsive stealing, lying, erotomania, destructiveness and also ‘homicidal insanity’ (Ray 1838: 264). The notion of ‘moral insanity’ began to gather critics, particularly within the medical, and nascent psychiatric, professions. Support collected around an opposing cognitive view of insanity (i.e., one that accepts only disturbances in the capacity of the mind to perceive and comprehend the world in a rational manner as being legitimate cases of insanity, Robinson 1999). This line of thinking found concrete expression in the legal definition of insanity that was enshrined by the M’Naghten rules of 1844. Daniel M’Naghten and the insanity defence Daniel M’Naghten was a Scot who came to believe that he was, thanks to his interest in Scottish nationalism, being persecuted by the Prime Minister

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Robert Peel. By early 1843, M’Naghten had determined to assassinate Peel. He came to believe that Peel’s secretary Drummond was actually the Prime Minister and on 20 January 1843 he followed Drummond up Whitehall and shot him fatally in the back. Had M’Naghten not attempted to take the life of the Prime Minister he would have, as was customary, appeared in court in a matter of days (and quite possibly he would have been dispatched from the gallows a couple of days after that). As his crime was considered to be one of treason, there was a delay while evidence was collected, witnesses were sought and the trial became a much grander and drawn out affair. At the trial medical testimony and evidence from those who had known M’Naghten before the event were sufficient to convince the jury that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. M’Naghten therefore, instead of being executed, was transferred to Bethlem Lunatic Asylum. Twenty years later he was moved to Broadmoor which was opened specifically to cater for the apparently growing numbers of ‘criminal lunatics’ where he died (Allderidge 1974). Despite the fact that the precedence for this outcome was already well established (witnesses were describing M’Naghten having delusions of persecution that would very conceivably be consistent with a contemporary diagnosis of schizophrenia), the high profile and political impact of the case drew a great deal of attention to the verdict. There was public outcry, fanned perhaps by Queen Victoria’s alleged dismay about the apparent leniency of the outcome, which led to a legal review (Walker 1968). The result of this review were the so-called M’Naghten rules which aimed to spell out what conditions had to be met for someone to be able to have their behaviour excused by reason of insanity. For the insanity defence to be applicable, it would have to be established that: at the time of the committing of the act, the defendant was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know what the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did not know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong. Thus for insanity to be recognised it would have to be proven that the defendant did not ‘know’ the difference between right and wrong. So long as an individual had a rational view of the world around them, undistorted by delusions, then they were sane. The notion that someone might not be able to control their actions, or may not comprehend their own or others feelings, or could have no grasp of the meaning of the distress they caused to others, for example, were ruled as outside of this definition of insanity. Thus the ‘moral insanity’ diagnosis which supposed individuals to have a rational perception of the world, unimpeded by delusions, was clearly excluded. This might well have been the end of the story for moral insanity, but instead it has re-emerged in rather different forms over the past hundred or so years, firstly as psychopathy and then as various forms of personality disorder.

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Considered separately each of the categories of moral insanity, psychopathy and personality disorder might well fit alongside Hacking’s (1998) examples of ‘transient mental illnesses’ (such as ‘fugues’) which need to be understood as interesting phenomena that exist perhaps fleetingly in the very particular niches created at the vectors of various social, historical, cultural and psychological ‘forces’. It can be argued, however, that there are common threads between each of these three categories, and there is thus some longevity to this particular niche. This is interesting as these medical categories have survived despite little support, and indeed often great scepticism from medical colleagues (Arieff and Rotman 1948), the legal professions (Hakeem 1958; Hall Williams, Gibbens and Jennings 1960) and academia (Pilgrim 2001). It will be argued that we need to look beyond the discussions of professionals in order to understand the persistence of these diagnoses. Through understanding the forces that have created and sustained these categories a better understanding of current dilemmas can be built. It is argued that three overlapping explanations for the emergence of the category of ‘moral insanity’ can be identified. Each of these help our understanding, but the third, the psychosocial explanation, is necessary for providing a fuller picture. Firstly, there is the largely sociological notion that the diagnosis emerged from concern with social control within a society that was seeking out new ways to isolate and therefore control deviancy. Secondly, there is the idea that the dispute over the category grew from philosophical and, more specifically, psychological debate over the constitution of human nature. While both theories have validity, it will be argued here that a third more psychosocial line of exploration is the most productive. This raises the question of the relation of the individual to the social body and it is here that the benefits of a psychosocial approach become clear.

1. New forms of social control: Morality and the criminal justice system Ramon (1986) argued that the interest in ‘moral insanity’ was in keeping with the more general tendency to try and differentiate, and therefore segregate, forms of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. It is certainly the case that the 19th century witnessed the birth of psychiatry and the mushrooming of asylums for the insane (Jones 1972; Scull 1979) alongside the development of prisons (Gatrell, Lenman and Parker 1980). Rimke and Hunt (2002) also suggest there were parallels between 19th century moral concerns (over sexual promiscuity, for example) and the development of such diagnoses. Supporting this argument are the facts that the emergence of moral insanity was tied directly to concern with criminality; indeed Rafter (2004) refers to the medical interest in ‘moral insanity’ as representing a pre-history of criminology. In France Pinel (1806) analysed many cases involving serious violence as he sought to establish the diagnosis of manie sans delire. Eigen (2004) plots

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some of the arguments between lawyers and medical witnesses in London about insanity between 1825 and 1843 using court records. The prominence of the criminal justice system (CJS) should not make us think that the issue was simply confined to debates about the nature of criminality, however. It can be argued that the CJS itself was a crucible within which wider concerns about the nature of ‘society’ and of ‘selfhood’ were being analysed. The CJS has been described as being in a state of ferment through this period (Gatrell, Lenman and Parker 1980; Hay 1980), witnessing disputes of authority between juries and judges (Wiener 1999), and between medical men and lawyers (Smith 1981). In part these were perhaps battles of professional power, but they were also taking place within debates about the nature of individual agency.

2. Shifting notions of self and personality Another framework, therefore, for understanding the emergence of ‘moral insanity’, and the subsequent resistance to acceptance of its existence, is that provided by philosophical debates about the nature of humanity. There were two related aspects to this debate. Firstly, there is the question of the coherence of human consciousness. Are human minds better understood as having a unitary coherence or are we better understood as being made up of a number of separate faculties? Debates over moral insanity were entangled with those over ‘partial insanity’ (the premise being that there might be aspects of an individual’s mind that were insane while others were not) and also ‘temporary insanity’, where an individual might lose their sanity in particular circumstances only. Secondly, there was the issue of the relation between emotion and reason. Are human beings better defined by their capacity to experience emotion, or their capacity for rational thought? An influential line of argument has taken the view that ‘the Enlightenment’ privileged rational thought, and that this had huge implications for perceptions and treatment of the insane (Foucault 1967; Hodgkin 2007). The hallmark of humanity became the ability to use reason to control the emotions. If an individual appeared to have reason, then it was assumed they could control their passions. Such a view of the nature of insanity had been influentially formalised by John Locke who argued that insanity was caused by mis-associations being made in the mind between sense data and ideas (Porter 2002, for example). The notion of an insanity that affected only the feelings or morals, while leaving reasoning intact, was therefore largely anathema. In contrast was the belief (exemplified by the various ‘Romantic’ schools in art, music and literature) that it was human beings’ capacity to feel that raised us above other species. To feel love, to act upon feelings of care, altruism, imagination or even hatred were the truly important human capacities (Eichner 1982). Within this framework it is possible to understand

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why Prichard might envisage ‘moral insanity’ as caused by deficits in these ‘higher’ emotional capacities. The victory of scientific rationalism as the 19th century progressed has been very clear, however. An unfortunate sideeffect of that victory has been the difficulty of apprehending the emotions and their significance at all (see Rustin, this volume). 3. The psychosocial perspective: The relationship between selfhood and the social body A third explanation that can be explored here is that debates over moral insanity were exposing newly emerging puzzles about the relations not only between right and wrong, and between rationality and emotionality, but also the problem of the relationship between these individual characteristics and the social body. Notions of personality, how individuals related to one another were coming to be seen, and would come to be seen as ever more significant to how society functioned (Giddens 1991; Morris 1991). One plane of this debate was a metaphysical one (Augstein 1996; Glannon 1997). Augstein (1996) suggests that Prichard was motivated by his own religious beliefs to argue that will and morality could not be simply considered as products of brain functions, nor of human reasoning. He was, Augstein suggests, in arguing for ‘moral insanity’ defending the notion of the human soul – autonomous from the brain and from rational thought. Another plane of debate can be understood as consisting of nascent ‘social theory’. Most of what can with hindsight be identified as early social theory that emerged from Enlightenment thinking can be summarised as containing a mechanistic view of the relationship between individuals and the social world (Morris 1991). Beccaria’s (1764) blueprint for the discipline of criminology provides a good example of this view. Beccaria assumed that individuals were rational calculating creatures, who weighed up the possible benefits of crime against the likely punishment. The idea of the calculating criminal, with the route to controlling crime through gauging crimes and their punishments, was extremely influential (Hopkins Burke 2005; Gelsthorpe, this volume). Very different schools of thought were, of course, being developed but they were strikingly less successful in achieving influence. One notable set of ideas came from Bernard Mandeville (1725, 1732) whose contentious view was that society was driven and held together not by rationality at all but by feelings such as pride, shame, envy and greed. The hostility to his views about the significance of feelings to the social world, that challenged the mechanistic one, is highly illuminating. Norman Wilde, writing at the end of the 19th century, describes him as ‘one of the best hated writers of the [18th] century’ (Wilde 1898: 219). His work was condemned by Rousseau, ritually burned by the public hangman in France, and considered by the Grand Jury of Middlesex for offences against public morality (Hundert 1994).

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Despite the apparent philosophical dominance of the mechanistic view of personality and its relation to society, the social demands for a different kind of individual were, however, becoming visible. This demand was emerging in the CJS, as recent scholarly work on gender and criminality has noted. Shoemaker (2001), for example, argues that shifting expectations of masculine behaviour led to a reduction in levels of violence over the 18th century in London. Wiener (2004) also argues that there was a re-conceptualisation of masculinity that began in the 18th century which became ever more overt in the courts through the 19th century. Wiener plots in detail the way that courts showed increasing disapproval of both public and private violence. Men were seen as ‘more than ever in need of external disciplines and, most of all, of self-discipline’ (2004: 2). Thus the demands for different types of personality, with the control of emotions being salient were becoming overt, in line with arguments made by Elias (1994/1939) and Stearns (1993) about ‘civilising’ processes. As a consequence of this the demand for ideas that helped explain and even control ‘personality’ grew (Rose 1989). The exploration of the emergence of ‘moral insanity’, and the challenges it faced can be used to inform analysis of the emergence of the related concepts of psychopathy and personality disorder which can only be dealt with briefly here.

Psychopathy and personality disorder Although the term ‘psychopathy’ was first used to describe general mental sickness, and was associated with ideas of congenital mental defects, the development of the concept of ‘psychopathy’ being used to describe those who demonstrated emotional or ethical failings became closely tied to psychoanalytic thought. The publication of Henderson’s overtly psychoanalytic work (Henderson 1939) influenced professional practice, but it was Cleckley’s (1941) far more accessibly written book that had the more enduring impact in establishing the idea of the rational but ruthlessly amoral personality type. The influence of psychoanalytic thought on psychiatry and wider culture was important in two ways for creating space for discourse about this type of personality. Firstly, Freudian thought was premised on the idea the mind could be divided into different faculties that were capable of autonomous action and influence. Secondly, psychoanalytic thought privileged emotion, most particularly the significance of sexuality, as being fundamental to identity and relationships. The emergence of the category of psychopathy alongside anxiety and interest in the significance of sexuality was quite clear in the USA as many states adopted ‘Sexual Psychopath Laws’ (Guttmacher and Weihofen 1952; Sutherland 1950). Freedman (1987) argues that these laws were symptomatic of a society both perplexed and fascinated by the possibilities of sexual ‘liberation’. Meanwhile in England and Wales

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the term psychopath appeared as a category in the 1959 MHA. Although there was no formal link to sexual behaviour, aberrant sexual behaviour loomed large in use of the concept. For example, ‘psychopathic personality’ was successfully used in court for the first time as part of a defence of ‘diminished responsibility’ in the trial of R. vs Matheson who had ‘a long history of extreme sexual abnormality’ and was accused of the murder of a young boy who he had been sexually abusing (Hall Williams, Gibbens and Jennings 1960; Walker and McCabe 1973: 216). Thus the notion of ‘psychopathy’ received sufficient support from psychoanalytically influenced psychiatry to enter legislation both in Britain and in the USA. It remained relatively marginal within mainstream psychiatry (most notably in Britain where psychoanalytic ideas did not have as wide as acceptance as in US psychiatry). While the term ‘psychopathy’ still survived in the Mental Health Act of England and Wales until 2007, its use in the clinical world had become far less fashionable by the 1970s. The Butler Committee (DSS 1975) recommended that the term be replaced with that of ‘personality disorder’. Although this did not happen, and the category of ‘psychopathy’ remained in the 1983 Act, there are now a plethora of Personality Disorder diagnoses recognised by DSM and ICD. At the heart of the diagnosis is the existence of disturbance of affect and personal relationships. In the UK, government interest in the diagnosis has led to considerable research effort that has attempted to trace the best treatments and most likely causes (Moran and Hagell 2001, for example). While it would be impossible to summarise this work, nevertheless one or two issues are worth highlighting. While definitions are still contentious it is becoming clear that the difficulties that people experience (that are consistent with these diagnoses) have usually to be understood in terms of their life histories (Jones 2008). Clinical studies that have looked specifically at personality disorders emphasise the association with negative life events (Pagano, Skodol and Stout 2004) and deprived childhoods in particular (Bandelow et al. 2005). Hodges (2003) goes as far as to argue that ‘borderline personality disorder’ might be understood in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder, since those individuals are so likely to have experienced trauma. Looking more widely there is a significant body of criminological literature that has taken a longitudinal approach to understanding the development of criminal and antisocial behaviour. This work points clearly to the roots of behaviour and characteristics that are consistent with personality disorder diagnoses often lying deep within experiences of emotional and social deprivation in childhood, with disrupted family relationships being prominent (Jones 2008). Recent psychoanalytically informed work on the development of such problems also points the significance of early relationships. Fonagy et al. (2003) have argued that the ability to make sense of emotion is a developmental achievement, occurring in the early years of life. Without this capacity individuals are left only with the ability to experience and react to emotion rather than reflect and

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think about emotion. The unpredictable behaviour, the erratic emotional responses and the difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships are not only the obvious consequences of such disabilities, but they are also the cornerstone of the diagnosis of personality disorder. The developmental achievement that Fonagy et al. emphasise is the ability to ‘mentalise’, that is, to create a model of the self in the mind. This, they argue, is an ability that can only be built through close empathic relationships with others. In this formulation the difficulties of personality disorder emerge as truly psychosocial disorders that not only manifest within distorted and dysfunctional relationships with others, but have their beginnings in the emotional timbre of early relationships. It is entirely conceivable that such ‘disorders’ are becoming more visible as society demands ever more reflexivity and management of the self as many commentators have suggested (Giddens 1991; Rose 1989; Wouters 1999). Such an understanding challenges the more traditional focus of psychiatry that has sought to understand the pathologies of an individual that exist autonomously within that individual. The socalled personality disorders are truly psychosocial disorders that can only be perceived in the interaction between an individual psyche and their particular social relationships; they often seem to have their roots in adverse emotional experiences within childhood. The early life of Michael Stone is certainly consistent with this pattern, being characterised by high levels of disruption. His father and mother had a stormy relationship with a number of splits and reconciliations. His mother remarried another man, and then quickly divorced. He was placed in temporary care at age seven; the case notes from the time contained ‘repeated descriptions of Michael being exposed to violence within the home’ (see endnote 1, p. 47) including witnessing his father attack another man with an axe. Stone’s first appearance in court was at age 12, after which he was put into care. Substantial parts of his teen years were spent in various institutions for youth offenders. His first sentence to an adult prison was at age 17; at age 19 he was convicted for robbery and grievous bodily harm. Even if Stone had not met the Russel family in that country lane in Kent, all the signs were that Stone’s life was going to reach another calamitous conclusion. The problem remains about how to understand and intervene in such chaotic lives. As Scanlon and Adlam (2008) argue the difficulties ‘we’ have in engaging with the ‘difficult people’ who have often been physically and psychically rejected and who now refuse ‘our’ attempts to help and engage with them are immense.

Conclusion The category of personality disorder remains a terribly problematic one. It is still not entirely accepted that the personality disorders are really psychiatric disorders. Yet it is a category that has persisted for over 200 years. Taken on their own each of the diagnostic categories of moral insanity,

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psychopathy and personality disorder might well fit with Hacking’s descriptions of ‘transient’ mental states. A historical perspective helps us to see that these categories are more enduring, that they are arising from real needs to understand and get to grips with particularly problematic phenomena – that of individuals who have good cognitive awareness of the world around them but who are poorly equipped to operate at an affective level in human society. It has been argued here that they are problematic for a culture that has privileged rationality and has assumed that emotions belong to a separate and less significant domain. Psychoanalysis has been a language that has allowed for exploration of the experiences of people whose behaviour falls into these categories. Psychoanalysis, though, needs the psychosocial dimension so that the relationship between the inner worlds of individuals and how those worlds interact with the social body and clash and fail our expectations of selfhood can more properly be grasped.

Notes 1. The Report of the Independent Inquiry into the care and treatment of Michael Stone (2006) South East Coast Strategic Health Authority, Kent County Council, Kent Probation Area. 2. Liberty (2000) Managing People with Severe Personality Disorder: Response to Government Consultation. January. 3. MIND (2004) Submission to the Joint Committee on the Draft Mental Health Bill.

References Allderidge, P. (1974) ‘Criminal Insanity: Bethlem to Broadmoor.’ History of Medicine 67, 897–904. Arieff, A. and Rotman, D. B. (1948) ‘Psychopathic Personality: Some Social and Psychiatric Aspects.’ Journal of Criminal Law 39(2), 158–166. Augstein, H. F. (1996) ‘J C Prichard’s Concept of Moral Insanity – A Medical Theory of the Corruption of Human Nature.’ Medical History 40, 311–343. Bandelow, B., Krause, J., Wedekind, D., Broocks, A., Hajak, G. and Ruther, E. (2005) ‘Early Traumatic Life Events, Parental Attitudes, Family History, and Birth Risk Factors in Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and Healthy Controls.’ Psychiatry Research 134, 169–179. Beccaria, C. (1764) An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, Second American edition published in 1819 by Philip H. Nicklin, Philadelphia. Buchanan, A. and Leese, M. (2001) ‘Detention of People with Dangerous Severe Personality Disorders: A Systematic Review.’ Lancet 358, December 8, 1955–1959. Cleckley, H. (1941) The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Re-Interpret the Social Psychopathic Personality. Henry Kimpton: London. DOH (2003) Personality Disorder: No Longer a Diagnosis of Exclusion. Department of Health: London. DOH (2006) The Mental Health Bill: Plans to Amend the Mental Health Act 1983. Department of Health: London. DOH (2007) Mental Health (Amendment) Act. HMSO: London.

David W. Jones 225 DSS (1975) Report of the Committee on the Mentally Abnormal Offenders. (Butler) HMSO: London. Eichner, E. (1982) ‘The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism.’ PMLA 97(1), 8–30. Eigen, P. J. (2004) ‘Delusion’s Odyssey: Charting the Course of Victorian Forensic Psychiatry.’ International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27, 395–412. Elias, N. (1994/1939) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigation. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Blackwell: Oxford. Elliott, C. and Gillett, G. (1992) ‘Moral Insanity and Practical Reason.’ Philosophical Psychology 5(1), 53–64. Fonagy, P., Target, M., Gergely, G., Allenn, J. and Batemen, A. (2003) ‘The Developmental Roots of Borderline Personality Disorder in Early Attachment Relationships: A Theory and Some Evidence.’ Psychoanalytic Enquiry 23(3), 412–459. Foucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Tavistock: London. Freedman, E. B. (1987) ‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960.’ The Journal of American History 74(1), 83–106. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B. and Parker, G. (1980) Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500. Europa Productions: London. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press: Cambridge. Glannon, W. (1997) ‘Psychopathy and Responsibility.’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 14(3), 263–275. Guttmacher, M. and Weihofen, H. (1952) ‘Sex Offenses.’ The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 43(2), 153–175. Hacking, I. (1998) Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville and London. Hakeem, M. (1958) ‘A Critique of the Psychiatric Approach to Crime and Correction.’ Law and Contemporary Problems 23(4), 650–682. Hall Williams, J. M. E., Gibbens, T. C. N. and Jennings, R. (1960) ‘The Mental Health Act, 1959.’ The Modern Law Review 23(4), 410–424. Hare, R. (1993) Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Amongst Us. The Guilford Press: New York. Hay, D. (1980) ‘Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England.’ Crime and Justice 2, 45–84. Henderson, D. K. (1939) Psychopathic States. Chapman and Hall: London. Hodges, S. (2003) ‘Borderline Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Time for Integration.’ Journal of Counselling and Development 81, 409–417. Hodgkin, K. (2007) Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Hopkins Burke, R. (2005) An Introduction to Criminological Theory. Willan Press: Cullompton. Hundert, E. G. (1994) The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Jones, D. W. (2008) Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Perspectives in Criminality. Willan Press: Cullompton, Devon. Jones, K. (1972) A History of the Mental Health Services. 2nd ed. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London. Mandeville, B. (1725) The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 4th ed. John Johnson: London.

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Mandeville, B. (1732) An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. John Brotherton: London. Moran, P. and Hagell, A. (2001) Intervening to Prevent Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Scoping Review. Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate: London. Morris, B. (1991) Western Conceptions of the Individual. Berg: New York Pagano, M. E., Skodol, A. E. and Stout, R. L. (2004) ‘Stressful Life Events as Predictors of Functioning: Findings from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study.’ Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 110, 421–429. Pilgrim, D. (2001) ‘Disordered Personalities and Disordered Concepts.’ Journal of Mental Health 10(3), 253–265. Pinel, P. H. (1806) A Treatise on Insanity. Translated by D. D. Davis, W. Todd for Calwell and Davis: London. Porter, R. (2002) A Brief History of Madness. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Prichard, J. C. (1835) A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper: London. Rafter, N. (2004) ‘The Unrepentant Horse-Slasher: Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminological Thought.’ Criminology 42(4), 979–1008. Ramon, S. (1986) ‘Psychopathy: Its Professional and Social Context in Britain.’ In Miller, P. and Rose, N. (eds) The Power of Psychiatry. Polity Press: Cambridge. Ray, I. (1838) A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity. Charles, Little and Brown: Boston. Reznek, L. (1997) Evil or Ill? Justifying the Insanity Defence. Routledge: London. Rimke, H. and Hunt, A. (2002) ‘From Sinners to De-generates: The Medicalization of Morality in the 19th Century.’ History of the Human Sciences 15(1), 59–88. Robinson, C. L. (1999) ‘Observations on Cognition and Insanity.’ American Journal of Forensic Psychology 17(4), 63–75. Rose, N. (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. Routledge: London. Scanlon, C. and Adlam, J. (2008) ‘Refusal, Social Exclusion and the Cycle of Rejection: A Cynical Analysis?’ Critical Social Policy 28, 529–549. Scull, A. (1979) Museums of Madness. Allen Lane: London. Shoemaker, R. (2001) ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in EighteenthCentury London.’ Social History 26(2), 190–208. Smith, R. (1981) Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. Stearns, P. N. (1993) ‘Girls, Boys and Emotions: Redefinitions and Historical Change.’ The Journal of American History June, 36–74. Sutherland, E. D. (1950) ‘The Sexual Psychopath Laws.’ Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 40(5), 543–554. Walker, N. (1968) Crime and Insanity in England: Volume One: The Historical Perspectives. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. Walker, N. and McCabe, S. (1973) Crime and Insanity in England: Volume Two: New Solutions and New Problems. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. Wiener, M, J. (1999) ‘Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth Century England.’ Law and History Review 17(3), 467–506. Wiener, M. J. (2004) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit; 1850–1980. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Wilde, N. (1898) ‘Mandeville’s Place in English thought.’ Mind, New Series 7(26), 219–232. Wouters, C. (1999) ‘Changing Patterns of Social Controls and Self-Controls.’ British Journal of Criminology 39(3), 416–432.

17 Between the Body and Social Trauma: Working with the Aftermath of Torture Nicola Diamond

Introduction Psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the internal world has struggled with the relation between the psychic and the social; this is in spite of the fact that psychoanalysis emerged in the context of war, immigration and refugee plight. Following the Freud–Klein controversies 1941–1945 in which debate around the role of the social and the political in psychic life raged, there has been the emergence of relational psychoanalysis resulting in a flourish of writings, technique and research. This chapter in offering a psychosocial perspective goes beyond microrelations, linking affective bodily experience with macro-relations, in the cultural and political arena. It will identify how social relations and political trauma are expressed in affective somatic states and have an impact on what goes on in the therapeutic context. There has been growing attention to the power of the social field to mobilize our affective experience and bodily responses; the fascinating and varied chapters in this volume are testimony to the focus on affect. Brian Massumi’s (2002) contribution on the body has been seminal, in describing affect as intensity, as visceral and as transmitted between persons.1 Foucault (1977) points out how power relations do not have to penetrate consciousness but, instead, directly affect the body. The body acts and is regulated or deregulated, is organized/disorganized and re-organized. I explore, in the therapeutic domain, the idea that what is witnessed in the aftermath of torture is the way power relations live on in the tortured body. Working with somatic states in cases of abuse and torture makes explicit how the social enters the consulting room and bodies. Emotion in this context is the bodily expression and is constituted between persons in socio-cultural relations. I will focus on work with refugee and asylum seekers and how inter-personal relations including intergenerational transmission get written 227

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into the skin and viscera literally and metaphorically – get under our skins. Analytic techniques and ways of thinking get pulled out of shape in the process. As is a tradition in psychoanalysis I adopt the idea of learning from the extremes of distress some truths about the so-called normal and the everyday. In the situation of torture what becomes unbearable and unthinkable is the external social reality itself which brings about states of bodily/self disintegration. Whereas certain psychoanalytic approaches argue that what we evade most are experiences of internal reality, in contrast this chapter argues that foregrounding intra-psychic reality can be a way: of giving us a false sense of being able to change what in fact we cannot control; of avoiding unbearable truths about painful social and inter-personal realities. For when such realities are encountered they can bring about a total state of helplessness that cannot be affectively born or effectively altered. There is a degree of disavowal present in certain psychoanalytic literature and application that focuses on an ‘inner world’ as intra-psychic, which not only suffers from ‘over-individualism’ per se, but also can result in a denial of the affective pain that is engendered by social relations. In consequence the links between the social and the effects on the psyche-soma are either ignored or fail to be adequately addressed. This chapter explores the extreme horror of social reality and how states of ‘nameless dread’ are produced by social relations. It will draw on a number of vignettes with survivors seen in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.2 The central psychosocial argument made in the chapter is that what is unbearable is affectively transmitted in an inter-social space, between the abuser and the abused. What will be demonstrated is the way the relationship is inter-corporeal, whereby unthinkable experiences of annihilation and the destruction of a body ego/corporeal subjectivity is transmitted in the act of inflicting unbearable affective somatic states in the other. I shall further argue that this inter-corporeal experience lives on as the torturer/abuser continues to exist by inhabiting the tortured body after the act. The intercorporeal basis of this experience is further reconfigured and embodied in the therapeutic relationship. The emphasis on inter-corporeality and the inter-social that exists between persons renders the dichotomy of external and internal world no longer ontologically correct or descriptively useful.

The somatic body as the inter-corporeal body What is known from cases of gross sexual abuse and of torture is that somatic states live on, continually activating the trauma, well after the act(s). Pain is real, even if there is no identified organic pathology; however alterations in somatic functioning can occur, as can changes in autonomic nervous function, hormone levels, sensation, organ function and body motility. For

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example, migraines, back pains, musculoskeletal pain, disturbances in skin boundary/sensation and function, to name but a few. How can biology, the body and social relations interrelate? In order to account for the way the torturer/abuser can affect the body directly – enter the skin, the viscera and sensory states – what is required is a model of the body that is inter-personal and open to the affect of the other. The move in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, developmental psychology and the neurosciences to a two-person and multi-personal psychology makes explicit the ‘inter-corporeal’ nature of experience. Although the literature focuses mainly on early development, what this shows is how the body from the first is radically open to the affective other. Furthermore, that the profound affectivity of social relations continues throughout the life cycle, embedded in the flesh until we die. Affective neuroscience shows how social relations directly interact on biology and that affect and the neurological are co-terminus. Social interaction alters affective-neurological processes in both parties, resulting in co-regulation or de-regulation. Negative affect can produce high levels of cortisol and adrenaline, as well as intense states of hyper-arousal and hypoarousal. It is the case that traumatic abuse in later life can produce such effects on the body (Rothschild, 2000; Schore, 1994, 2003a, 2003b; Van der Kolk, 1994; Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, 1989). Later excess trauma can counteract earlier developmental stability. Trauma occurs at the overlapping interface of body and other (Diamond, 2003, p. 413). Clearly in abuse and torture, it is the breach of the skin surface, orifices and internal organs, without regard for the feelings of the other, or/and the act is exercised with the explicit intent to annihilate and destroy body-ego integrity. Freud’s (1923) famous phrase, ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego’ and is a ‘projection of a body surface’, is important in its most general sense. The term bodily ego implies the experience of the body as a unit with boundaries, and as a projected surface, suggests that the body surface is literally projected outwards into a situation with/for others. Freud notes the ego has to develop and in regards to the skin as a surface, it requires inter-personal construction. The skin is initially dependent on the style of holding and affective communication derived from the other (Bick, 1968; Anzieu, 1989). In this sense the skin surface as a projection is related to its emergence from a form derived from the other. When there is a lack of affective holding in the case of a withdrawn and unavailable other or in incidences of massive intrusive abuse, there will be disturbances in the function of the skin as a boundary. Federn (1952) noted ‘psycho-somatic’ disturbances in the sensation of a skin boundary, in cases where there had been a failure or breakdown in an experience of body-ego integrity – as in psychosis. He found that there was a lack of a skin ‘cathexis’, an absence of sensation so there was no feeling of a skin

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boundary – that alive feeling. Anzieu (1989) identified what he terms a porous skin which failed to act as a protective shield. He sees this as rooted in intrusive experiences that had affected the bodily experience during childhood. Dinora Pines (1980) refers to the skin as a means of communication and how exciting and soothing the skin transmits affect between persons. She noted that skin eczema can express conflict in relations somatically. She found that when working as a dermatologist touch, but most importantly, the transference–counter-transference relationship, could sooth away the conflict and the rash. Tactility is increasingly recognized as a sense that transmits affect and becomes associated with powerful emotional states. Touch in attachment research is key to bonding and in co-regulation of affective/somatic states between carer and infant and continues throughout the life cycle in both caring and sexual/intimate relations. Abusive touch can likewise be the means of creating dysregulation in affective/somatic states as occurs in torture/abuse by creating high states of hyper-arousal/hypo-arousal and changes in hormonal, neurological, nervous and brain function. Touch provides essential sensory information to brain and body; however, as a means of communication touch can be considered capable of a diacritic of sensibility (see Diamond, 2007). In this chapter I consider how touch can develop as a form of language. I note how Helen Keller learned language via touch on her skin, not through the other simply tracing the outlines of words and objects on the skin, but, most importantly, through developing an understanding of the differences between one kind of mark and another, by forming a repertoire of small differences that eventually build into patterns of sense (Diamond, 2007, p. 87). Physical pressure upon the skin can not, in fact, leave signifying marks. Likewise, it is not the electronic impulses impressed on the skin that enables blind people to receive messages in the form of Braille. The alphabet is not transmitted via electronic impulses per se, but rather by the rhythmic discontinuity, this enables a relation of pulses. These rhythmic modes form styles and patterns that convey specific meaning. (Diamond, 2007, p. 88) I suggest that discriminatory touch operates in a similar manner and is established through the construction of subtle differences between types of touch. Correspondingly, I would argue that torture and abuse results in a reversal of this process, whereby subtle differences between types of touch are eventually broken down. Gross and abusive touch annuls discreet discrimination between touches. Ferenczi (1955) notes ‘the confusion in tongues’, where there is a confounding of the language of affection (attachment) with the language of passion (sexuality). In all cases of gross childhood sexual abuse I have found this to be so: an affectionate touch is immediately sexualized and can be experienced as intrusive and overwhelming. Likewise extreme

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abuse and torture at any point in the life cycle works to undo the subtlety of touch, and put in its place indescribable pain which becomes all consuming. Elaine Scarry (1985) explores how excruciating pain unmakes the relation to world and selfhood and obliterates all other sensibilities, rendering the person literally speechless, only capable of inarticulate howls. Tactility as an inter-personal phenomenon is accompanied by the visual sense. In Lacan’s (1977) ‘mirror phase’ the mirror provides the image of the intact body surface, and this contrasts with the baby’s lack of motor co-ordination and neurological development. The body surface is derived from how others mirror us back. It is the mirroring that importantly contributes to our sense of having a body, and this body image is simultaneously also kinaesthetic and lived in body motility (Schilder, 1935); furthermore, social images inform body image. The sensory motor cortex strip in the brain – ‘the homunculus’ – produces images of the body and these are structured by social mirroring and bodily habit; these body maps are expressed in body sensation and movement. From the first internal sensations such as hunger pangs, thirst, bowel movements or the urge to urinate pass through an inter-subjective interchange, where the other responds by feeding, changing nappies, offering a potty or introducing regulatory rearing practices. Interaction with the other in the feeding relation lays down memory traces which are re-evoked in every repetition of the need (Glover in Hayman, 1994). The trace of the other is part and parcel of the somatic process. Bodily memory has been identified as procedural memory in contrast to declarative memory (cognitive, linguistic and chronological memory). Procedural memory is an action-based memory that is remembered in the doing and importantly relates to what I will refer to as bodily enactment. Procedural memory is not conscious in origin. In dancing or driving the person does not have to consciously think in order to remember how to do the actions. They rather are engaged in habit – ‘know how based memory’, likewise when there are disturbances expressed in ‘acting out’ behaviour or/and body symptoms – these occur automatically without conscious control, and again procedural action-based memory appears to be activated. Mollon (1998) describes how procedural memory can be accessed through actions in the sessions, as shown in the body and in the doing (bodily enactments). Mollon notes how a child who has been abused and can not verbalize what the experience is, acts it out instead. I suggest procedural action is a communication and this is what is seen in the somatic states that people communicate in the consulting room. I will be exploring later in this chapter how body symptoms articulate the effect of environmental and inter-personal relations and tell a story of the relation with the other, the disturbance therein and the impact on bodily ego integrity. This ‘know how’ involves inter-personal affective learning and this ‘learning’ can be destructive and perverse, a form of ‘anti-knowledge’. It is unconscious, in so far as the meaning is not known to the conscious

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subject nor does the narrative have to go through an act of consciousness but directly impacts the body. In other words a story is told in the body before words are found and before the subject puts feeling into thought or speech. Here affect is bodily, embedded in somatic experience and involves a semiotic process.

The body of torture/abuse in the modern day In Discipline and Punish, Foucault opens with a graphic description of torture ‘the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms and thighs and calves with redhot pincers . . . and then his body drawn and quartered’ (1977, p. 3). Foucault displays the public spectacle of the day and how torturing the body is an end in itself. This is contrasted with the decline of public display and a move away from the body altogether, into a regulating of thoughts and conducts. The target becomes changing and reforming the soul. Torture continues to this day and ‘directly affect(s) the body’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 11) but in its modern form removes the body from general public display to behind closed doors. Torture takes place in secret, no one else will know or believe all the atrocities (likewise in abuse) and this has a precise purpose – to annihilate any legitimation of the subject: the right to claim knowledge, experience or reality. The body is the focus – but not for the end result in death alone but to keep the body still alive – enough to feel the excruciating pain and to never forget to live after the act in continual torment. In the process of torture, all that is ordinarily contained overspills. Bodily boundaries are transgressed, violated. Skin is punctured, ripped off, burned and tattooed – scarred and forever brandished. The body in this context is also a means to an end – for by breaking down the body, the aim is to destroy the soul of the person. As Foucault notes, it is the soul which is the ultimate target, but in this case, not to reform, but to break. Torture is designed to destroy all sense of personhood and targets the body as the means to this end. Abuse and torture is always about power, both the abuser’s power to dominate sexually/physically and also the power to dictate the way reality is perceived and to destroy the possibility of subjective body truth. Referring to Foucault again, torture as the destruction of soul works so powerfully by breaking down any claims to legitimacy of self-truth, secrecy ensures that there is no other who can act as ‘moral’ witness.

Witnessing The role of witness is crucial. In the process of bearing witness to painful experiences it is important that the therapist affirms a position of solidarity with the person, conveying an understanding of the fundamental injustice

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of the situation. The therapist will join politically and in ethical stance with the person in treatment, acknowledging gross human rights violation and the act of bearing witness will often involve the therapist entering the prison cell, the torture chamber, the brothel bedroom, the back seat of the car or the mound of dead bodies under which the survivor has taken refuge. However the therapist must also recognize that she/he was not actually there. At the time when a witness and rescuer was most needed there was no one. As Holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel says, ‘remember, never forget, but at the same time you will never know.’ This enigmatic and profound statement also indicates: The paradox of trauma . . . that the closest encounter with it often results in a ‘belatedness’ of seeing or in not seeing at all, so that the imperative of witnessing is passed along to another as trauma’s legacy. (Caruth, 1996, p. 92) These events are transmitted through images, words, affects and performances, and are unfolded in to the body along with traces of their contexts (Massumi, 2002). The experience at the time can be so unbearable that the person cannot encounter it directly; they can either actively forget, or the memory is subject to a process of delay (deferred action) and only activated at a later date, or most commonly there is a fundamental disturbance in the laying down of memory itself. The affective-neurobiological effects on memory and body are well documented (Schore, 1994, 2003a, 2003b; Van der Kolk, 1996; Yovell, 2000). The flooding of stress hormones released in a state of shock knocks declarative memory (chronological recall of events), situated at the hippocampus, out of action, whereas the amygdala is intensely activated, which elicits a fear response, without a memory of the event. Dissociation is frequent, coupled with high levels of arousal, a fight–flight state, rendering the trauma unassimilated; it thus remains ‘a speechless terror’ (Alter to Van der Kolk, 1996). An amnesiac lack of recall is the result. The experience can be so overwhelming that all one can be left with is chaotic fragmented images, somatic affects and bodily enactments. Experientially, the persons themselves do not quite witness what has happened because the moment as such, in some important sense, is missed and only later relived. Additionally, most commonly we are dealing with accumulative trauma. What is being witnessed is the temporal constellation of the aftermath, rather than isolated acts. When Nina began seeing me she could not remember anything. She would wear a blank expression and would speak with little affect. In these sessions I would feel drowsy and find it hard to keep awake. I noted that it related to

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Nina’s flatness of affect. In the somatic counter-transference (inter-corporeal) I was responding to her disassociated state by likewise cutting myself off from engagement. I raised this aspect of interaction with her and encouraged her to address this ‘numbing herself off’ so ‘she will not feel or know anything’. Then on seeing a man pass her by as she entered the door to the clinic she experienced a flashing image and a ‘creepy-crawly’ sensation on her skin. On entering the consulting room the sensory-images came in rushes, too fast to see, and a terrible cramp in her leg transfixed her pose. ‘Do you believe me something is happening’, ‘yes I believe you it is real’ I said. She burst into tears. ‘I have never been believed, I was told – it was not done to me and I must have provoked it’. I am confused. In the next session she said: ‘He said [trafficker] I had insects and if they were not taken out they would eat away my insides, another man came into the room and I felt this jolting movement, I screamed and struggled, “shut up – be a good girl we are making it better”, I tensed up and then gave up – perhaps I blacked out – I cannot remember, did it happen or not. I know I was prostituted [trafficked] as a child but I cannot remember, everything rolls in to one – past present and future’. What neuroscientific description cannot fully grasp is the experience of the phenomena itself. The memory cannot be cogently recalled and lives on as a ghost haunting the body with perturbing sensations, muscular spasms and visual-sensory apparitions. The unspeakable acts are transmitted not by words – but by bodily gestures and acts in interaction with others. In the next generation the legacy lives on somatically, transmitted in the coderegulation between bodies of parent and sibling, in the inter-corporeal transmission (Schore, 2003a, 2003b). The task of the next generations – to try and make sense – can be played by the role of the therapist. She/he likewise can witness and attempt to piece together the somatic states into a coherent narrative, which can then be reflected on as a co-created truth. For witnessing, the other is required to validate the experience as a shared social reality. In the case of torture what one is up against is the torturers’ attempts to ensure that the person tortured cannot validate their own experience, for they will be disbelieved and most of all will no longer believe in themselves. Torture in being the systematic destruction of the body/‘self’, and in ensuring that the function of witness will be erased from the scene, the atrocities will be experienced but not validated as known. There are many styles of torture to induce most pain but to show none or minimal traces of evidence on the body. Maxima was multiply raped, beaten and physically abused in ‘the torture cell’: ‘they would say to me – no one will believe what we are doing to you it will be too unimaginable – that you will not believe it – it is too

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impossible – no one will know. And they would say this to each other – as if I was not there. If I screamed it would get worse and my cries would not be heard – in the end I became silent’. Therapist ‘It seems that your choking in the throat that you complain of now is like a stifled scream’. Maxima – ‘yes that’s it – it is like a terrible build up of tension and I can imagine screaming but it would be a terrible wailing and I can not do it because I can not show my baby’. Maxima has a baby of 6 months. She, like so many who have been through such experiences, tries to hide any signs of her history, the suffering and the terrible unresolved shame. (This shame is a marked feature in the Middle East. A high value is placed on virginity before marriage and many women who have been raped feel they are polluted and shamed by the act.) She always tries to show a cheery face; however, the baby will be left witnessing fragments of behaviour that induce distress in him, but are as yet incomprehensible. Those gestures seep out nevertheless, as the mother sweats with anxiety and transmits a state of hyper-arousal as she touches and feeds her infant, or when she grimaces for moments and buckles up her body in pain, or sits with glazed expression for minutes just staring into space.

Social relations and bodily enactment Earlier it was noted that in somatic states, the enactment produces and expresses a rudimentary meaning. The story expresses the fundamental perturbation of relation, where the torturer or abuser actively annihilates the space for body and subjective being. This occurs in the body-based action well before any experience can be put into words. Flashbacks in the form of bodily sensations or/and image sensory based are a vivid living of the scene in which agency is annulled. The somatic sensation ‘does it to you’. Freud (1920) observed the compulsion to repeat painful experiences. He hypothesized this was done in order to master such experiences. In the case of abuse and torture, the painful experiences are relived as a situation that renders the subject helpless, with no control and no mastery. There is a painful repetition of being taken over. The narrative of the traumatic memory dictates the subject. Freud in his paper on The Uncanny (1919) refers to the state of unheimlich – not being at home with oneself, the sense of estrangement, an experience of the most unfamiliar in the most familiar. Papadopoulos (2002) argues that what asylum seekers and refugees share is the loss of home and a nostalgia for it – ‘nostalgic disorientation’. I would suggest that a loss of home can be most powerfully felt in the state of not being at home in one’s own body, ‘a radical state of embodied unheimlich’, which is fundamentally disorientating.

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This experience is close to the phenomena of depersonalization and can involve a disassociated state. The abuse/torture has fundamentally disrupted embodied being. I feel other to myself, a usurping other lives on eroding any familiarity and sensory states are all estranged. Am I awake – is this real, what is real? When pushed to its limit the body lives on the borders of the human where all boundaries seem to collapse into un-decidability; is it my body or the others? Am I ‘I’, human/ not human, alive or dead, object or machine? The relation between active and passive entirely breaks down. In these states, having a body that belongs to me ceases to exist (see Diamond, 2003). What will follow is a series of vignettes that illustrate the phenomena of bodily enactment. They will demonstrate the way the abuser/torturer lives on inhabiting the body of the person suffering. The body ‘symptoms’ that exist well after the event(s)/act(s) are an inter-corporeal phenomenon. Their inter-corporeal basis is further re-enacted with the therapist in the embodied transference and counter-transference communications.

Daniel had developed a symptom; he would lose his balance and fall over, no medical condition could be identified (Diamond, 2003). Once in therapy Daniel had a flashback of abuse. He said that thinking about the abuse made him feel his brain and body would explode and he would collapse. The bodily ego disintegration that the memory of the abuse threatened had already been enacted – in his initial body symptom of losing balance and literally toppling over – before the words were known. Furthermore before conscious recall in detail of the abuse, Daniel would see himself as his brother (the abuser) in the mirror; sensations would happen to him, taking him by surprise, occurring in his anus and in his mouth. The implantation by the other and the scene bodily enacted happened prior to the experience being put into words. At times he would go round the consulting room in an uncontrolled state; later when he could put this in his own words, he described it as: ‘fucking bottles, tables whatever’. I would feel in a high state of hyper-arousal and yet still – as if in a state of ‘fight or flight’ myself. I forced myself to be there, present, to bear and face the reckless behavior and the excruciating pain that lay underneath. The terror of madness and of going mad reigned while it was happening, was it my fear or did it belong to him? This felt undecidable in the moment. There was something very nameless and dreaded for me and in him as it was happening. This was the closest to going mad and I had to confront what it made me fear in myself in order to keep with him. There was the fear that self/body fragmentation would prevail and I had to calm myself down, saying to myself, he feels it will go on forever but I know it will not be the end of the world. I was thinking of the function of the maternal container that Bion describes and how

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by me facing the fear and trying to process it was a form of non-verbal containment for Daniel. In such moments, all capacity of differentiation had broken down. When there is no discrimination between body, object and things, Daniel for this time bordered on the non-human, there being no discrimination, where all boundaries collapse. This can be seen as the height of disintegration in the destruction of embodied subjectivity. In this profound perturbation, the relation between abuse and torture is clear – the complete disintegration of body integrity and boundaries between human and the non-human. Daniel on repeating these enactments became increasingly aware of my presence, his behavior gradually modified and one day he burst into floods of tears; cupped his face in his hands, expressing a form of shame. In sharing the affective state with me he gradually felt less burdened, but in becoming increasingly conscious of me as a witness, a sense of humiliation overcame him. With his face still buried in his hands he began to put some of the experience into words. He said he felt ‘like his brother had taken over his body, that “he had become him”, it was terrible’. In the bodily enactments, there appears to be an imposition of the abuser who entirely usurps the body space of Daniel, takes possession of it. I would call this a state of radical ‘unheimlich’ – when ones’ own body has become entirely alien and other, with an affect of profound disorientation in place and time. Daniel felt weird and strange. Lilly was exposed to radical female circumcision in an African village. Before her turn, a younger girl of 10 was operated on. Something went wrong. There was howling, Lily fled. Walking the roads she met a man who said he could pay for her transport to England where she could find work. As soon as she arrived she was locked in a small bedsit and drugged. Lily had been trafficked from age 11 and managed to escape at 19. When she walked the streets, she felt everyone looked at her and saw her as a ‘whore’. In this instant, the body image derived from the other, in the mirror phase, is an absolute imposition from the other which literally supplants and usurps the body space. The trafficker’s implanted image would dictate her as if it was plastered like a stamp on to her skin, entirely suffocating. Lilly would suffer as if from a skin allergy with reddened outbreaks on the skin. This reminded me of Pines’s paper on ‘Skin Communication’, where perturbing relations with others would result in skin outbreaks. Lilly who had already come from a culture which had controlled female sexuality by circumcision and who had been trafficked from a young age, felt profoundly appropriated by the other, her sense of annihilation repeated every time a passer-by gave her what she experienced as

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the defining look; the story of perturbed relations with the trafficker expressed in her bodily being. Hamid from Iran has a history of multiple detentions and horrific torture including routine sexual torture and multiple rapes, Palestinian hanging, lashings, burning and forced stress positions. He suffered from severe musculoskeletal pain, consistent with the effects of Palestinian hanging. He was also regularly self-harming (cutting and burning). He was unable to sit in the company of another for any longer than 10 minutes. In the initial months of therapy he would burst out of the room, and expressed a desire never to return. In these moments, I would feel this curiosity to find out more and ‘get inside the matter’. This made me feel physically uncomfortable and somewhat excited at the same time. It then dawned on me – we were reliving the torturer–torturer situation: I was perversely investigatory, wanting to penetrate him so to speak and he was feeling readily invaded and it was so overwhelming he had to get out of the room. There has been an embodied re-enactment in his body and between us. He felt penetrated just being in the room with me, as if I could get right inside and he was terrified I would see all. As he put this into words I sensed a terrible feeling of shame. He would feel when in proximity with others invaded. There was no sense of a skin boundary. He would feel porous and penetrated. This is something seen in many severe cases of sexual abuse, where the relation between self/other, my body/your body breaks down. Before words were found, the body enacted the perverse relation of torturer to his body, and the aftermath of the loss of body integrity, a lack of a skin boundary lived out. The self-harming made him feel that his skin was present, functioning like a pinch. Bick (1968) notes how a sense of a skin boundary has to be created in a relationship and Federn (1952) observes how in extreme cases there can be a lack of a skin cathexis. It is possible in later life for devastating relational events to destruct the constructed skin boundary. Adriana had been violently tortured and sexually abused. Since coming to England, having escaped, she complained of strange physical sensations/pain. On first meeting ‘What is it’ I asked. ‘It hurts so bad’, pointing to where the heart is. ‘What does it feel like?’, ‘like a big wound’. ‘Your heart is bleeding’, I said. ‘Yes’ Adriana brightened up. ‘Does it hurt now’, ‘no it has stopped’ she looked surprised. The emotional pain had been acknowledged by another and heard, then pain relief. Then she exclaimed ‘It is this terrible smell that comes from my back. It is like pooh’. ‘People react in the streets’, she grimaces showing me how they look. It was imperative that the smell be taken seriously and also that I was not going to shy away or repudiate its meaning.

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I asked her when it started, and she described how it began when she became ostracized in England by the community who came from the same region in Africa. (In cultures where shame is a key issue, shame is intensified when there is the terrible fear that everybody from the same community will find out.) She said ‘May be I am cursed’. Through a joint reconstruction of her life and hence indirectly the meaning of the symptom, we discovered together how the smell stood for the shame she felt, the bad smells that had been put inside her by the bad deeds that had been done to her – that indeed involved male sperm, saliva and excreta, which had made her feel bad and dirty inside. She felt contaminated and that badness radiated out – people could smell it on her, how she was rotting inside. The smell was the legacy of the torturer under her skin, produced by her sweat glands. At times the smell was a real smell. The terrible odours had been implanted in her body. The smell had got under her skin and was exuded by it. They had put bad things inside her – sperm which had mingled with her pooh and excreta. They had got inside, implanted in her body space. They did things from behind, and she did not want to see what had happened, but other people could see what she did not want to see – they could sniff it out. The most disturbing experience had been multiple anal penetrations. Her body told the story before she could put it into words. In this sense ‘the body keeps the score’ (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, 1989) and betrays her consciousness – by telling all. Again the cultural experience of intense shame, Adriana felt utterly exposed to the gaze of others. The smell is a socio somatic creation. Anzieu (1989) describes the case of the Olfactory Envelope, where a male patient had evoked his grandmother’s smell to create a protective skin. Whenever he got anxious, he would sweat and get excited, and the combination of genital secretions and sweat would produce the smell. It is evident that this goes well beyond a mental representation. There are social relations with others that directly impact on the body, involving changes in body function. When body image is involved, it is lived as body and beliefs can alter body image. In the case of the woman’s smell emanating from her back, the beliefs about being cursed relate to her culture and are very powerful. Wolley and Hirst (1982) note the power of beliefs on biology, referring to how the belief in voodoo can lead to voodoo death. In other words beliefs can kill; they can also play a part in producing body states. In parts of Africa it is common to belief in the power of curse. The belief system passed down from family and neighbourhood gets re-activated in the aftermath of torture. It is not easy to work with different cultural belief systems, in so far as beliefs are legitimate, but can militate against Western psychoanalytic notions of insight. The belief in feeling fated can keep the person stuck as nothing can be done. How I dealt with it was not to challenge

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the belief system, but rather to open up the various meanings of the smell and all the feelings that it evoked.

Conclusion The consulting room is inevitably breached by social relations. It is evident that there are more than two bodies in the consulting room; to quote Foulkes (1990) ‘the individual [body]’ ‘is an artificial abstraction’ and is nothing other than ‘a nodal point in a network of [social] relations’ (p. 227), and Fiumara (1991) notes that affective-neurological relations are inter-corporeal communications in the group matrix. In the therapeutic setting, the suffering body expresses the potential network of bio-social relations and this intersects with the therapist’s body and the relations she/he embodies. This can include the torturers as a group, the organized abuse rings, perverse group relations and there is the culture, the beliefs, family and ‘community’. The therapeutic and political role of witnessing – to make what has been invalidated and almost obliterated into a memory that can be shared and hence legitimated as reality – can take the form of individual and group work, the latter effective in collective co-construction of memory (Mollica, 2008). Social movements can form as a result. It is for the following generations to take witnessing as both individuals and collectively as their task. With social conscience thinking is possible and the impetus to change is born.

Notes 1. Affect in this chapter also includes popular usage of the term and the way body states are concretely experienced and lived. 2. I will be protecting confidentiality of persons, by offering ‘bricolage’ case studies. The term ‘bricolage’ is from Levi Strauss and Foucault; here it is used to refer to creatively selecting and combining a variety of sources. The vignettes are composed of an ensemble of elements from different cases, while at the same time there is the attempt to preserve a cogency in and integrity to the material.

References Anzieu, D. (1989) The Skin Ego, Trans. Chris Turner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Bick, E. (1968) ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 484. Caruth, C. (ed.) (1996) Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press). Diamond, N. (2003) ‘Attachment, Trauma and the Body’, in Attachment and the Psychoanalytic Process, Eds Cortina, M. and Marrone, M. (London, Philadelphia: Whurr Publishers).

Nicola Diamond 241 Diamond, N. (2007) ‘Between Touches’, in Touch Papers: Dialogues on Touch in the Psychoanalytic Space, Ed. Galton, G. (London: Karnac Books). Federn, P. (1952) Ego Psychology and the Psychosis (New York: Basic Books). Ferenczi, S. (1955) ‘Confusions of Tongues Between Adult and Child’, in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis (Original publication 1932) (London: Hogarth Press). Fiumara, R. (1991) ‘Brain, Body and Matrix,’ Journal of Group Analysis, 24, 409–418. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). Foulkes, S. H. (1990) Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis, Ed. Foulkes, E. (London: Karnac Books). Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny SE 17 (London: Hogarth Press). Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle SE 18 (London: Hogarth Press). Freud, S. (1923) The Ego and the Id SE 18 (London: Hogarth Press). Hayman, A. (1994) ‘Some Remarks About the Controversial Discussions,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 343–358. Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits, Trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications). Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Mollica, R. (2008) Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World (Nashville, Tenessee: Vanderbilt University Press). Mollon, P. (1998) Remembering Trauma: A Psychotherapists Guide to Memory and Illusion (London, Philadelphia: Whurr Publishers). Papadopoulos, R. (ed.) (2002) Therapeutic Care for Refugees: No Place like Home (London: Tavistock Publications). Pines, D. (1980) ‘Skin Communication: Early Skin Disorders and Their Effect on Transference and Counter-transference,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 61, 315–323. Rothschild, B. (2000) The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (New York: W.W. Norton). Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press). Schilder, P. (1935) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (New York: International Universities Press). Schore, A. (1994) Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self (Hillsdale, New Jersey, Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum). Schore, A. (2003a) Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (New York, London: W.W. Norton). Schore, A. (2003b) Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (New York, London: W.W. Norton). Van der Kolk, B.A. (1994) ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stess,’ Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1(5), 253–265. Van der Kolk, B.A. (1996) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society (New York: Guildford Press). Van der Kolk, B.A. and Van der Hart, O. (1989) ‘Pierre Janet and the Breakdown of Adaptation in Psychological Trauma,’ American Journal of Psychiatry, 146(12), 1530–1540. Wolley, P. and Hirst, P. (1982) Social Relations and Human Attributes (London: Tavistock). Yovell, Y. (2000) ‘From Hysteria to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Psychoanalysis and the Neurobiology of Traumatic Memories,’ Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis, 2, 171–181.

18 Conclusions: Psychosocial Studies – A Therapeutic Project? Barry Richards, David W. Jones, Candida Yates, Heather Price and Shelley Day Sclater

The essays in this book show in different ways and in a wide range of contexts how emotion is implicated in every area of our personal and public lives, relationships and institutions. Various psychosocial theories and perspectives have been deployed by the contributors to examine the different ways in which emotion provides a psychosocial bridge between the inner and outer worlds, binding them together, through the shifting processes of history, discourse and unconscious phantasy.1 Clearly there are many ‘psychosocial’ approaches. They vary in the kind of psychology being deployed, as illustrated by the various forms of psychoanalytic psychology, identity theory and biographic narrative approaches to be found here, and the wider range to be found elsewhere. Along with this diversity in their models of the ‘psycho’, psychosocial approaches also vary in the ways that the ‘social’ can be theoretically and/or empirically present, with sociological theory (Rustin, Chapter 2), politics (Evans, Chapter 6; Yates, Chapter 7) and history (Jones, Chapter 16), cultural forms and artefacts (Powell, Chapter 8), policy studies (Cooper, Chapter 13), criminology (Gelsthorpe, Chapter 14) and education policy (Price, Chapter 15) being among the ways in which the ‘social’ has been presented to readers of this book. The scope of topics covered here suggests that there are few limits to the empirical application of psychosocial analysis. As an academic specialism in the UK it has focussed primarily on topics concerning care and welfare, and popular culture and identity, these being the domains of professional practice and of everyday life where the importance of both subjective experience and societal constraint is perhaps most unavoidable. There is also a considerable and growing body of work, represented in this volume, on the psychosocial studies of politics, and it would be antithetical to suggest that academic psychosocial work would not also have useful insight into the worlds of industry, business and finance. Throughout this book, psychoanalytic ideas have been used to explore the irrational affective aspects of psychosocial experience in the different 242

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contexts and settings of contemporary socio-cultural life. To some this will be troubling. Nolan (1998, p. 7), for example, suggests that psychoanalytic practitioners are a part of ‘the new priestly elite’ of a ‘therapeutic culture’ that offers little hope of progressive transformation as distress and protest is pathologised, and discussions of material inequality and structural violence become marginalised (Roberts, 2009). Indeed it is suggested that far from being a useful tool to understand current social conditions, psychoanalysis can be used oppressively to shape, manage and control subjectivities so they are governed more efficiently (Rose, 1989). Similarly psychoanalysis can be accused of reducing the analysis of culture to explanations that privilege individual feelings through universalist notions of ‘the unconscious’ and ‘phantasy’. We suggest however that psychoanalytic concepts have been used throughout the book in nuanced, psychosocial fashions that bring together in various ways the socio-cultural and historical specificities of the research contexts under discussion. We contend that when brought together with more sociological discourses at our disposal, psychoanalytic language is an invaluable tool in the exploration of the irrational aspects of emotional experience. These are continually shaped by a combination of unconscious, biographical, social, cultural and political forces, all permanently in tension with one another. Frosh (2007, p. 4) gestures towards the criticisms of ‘therapeutic culture’ and casts doubt on the capacity of much of the psychosocial project to manage the tension of holding in mind the inseparability of the internal and the cultural: Much of the time, I think, we do not manage this difficulty, but instead present psychosocial studies as a mode of personalizing or humanising opposition to the industrial-military complex as it rolls over the last vestiges of human feeling. I wonder if we are in danger of becoming too humanistically social scientific in our methods (for instance giving to much weight to the speaking of the story-telling subject), too individualistic despite our Foucauldian reading lists, too therapeutic in our attitudes? Is it time for the psychosocial to become more hard-edged and disruptive, more stony in its response to appeals to emotion, less willing to valorise anything remotely relational? At first glance the uses of psychoanalytic thought in this psychosocial book might appear to be the target of Frosh’s warning. We argue, however, that the use of psychoanalysis can sharpen our psychosocial analysis of the roles, functions and understandings of emotions that help us provide a ‘stony’ response to the consistent moves to divide the human world between individuals and their cultures. To explore this further in this concluding chapter we firstly use a psychoanalytic lens to question the limits, and perhaps viability, of psychosocial studies as a coherent discipline. Secondly, we use the historical specificity

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of the psychosocial project to question how much the field of study can stand apart and examine the culture from which it has grown. Put bluntly, can the field of psychosocial investigation offer insight into contemporary dilemmas or is it simply a symptom of current social conditions that is more a part of the problem, than a solution? The third and fourth sections go on to suggest that a psychosocial approach can help us to understand two related, and controversial, aspects of that the contemporary scene – the phenomenon of ‘therapeutic culture’ itself and the argument that we live in a culture of narcissism whose tide of individualism, some argue, is sweeping away any hope of individual resistance to, or collective action against, the force of ‘liberal-capitalism’ (Hall, Winlow and Ancrum, 2008; Nolan, 1998).

The ambivalent ‘discipline’ of psychosocial studies It may seem from the diversity that is apparent in work that identifies itself as psychosocial, that this is not in any sense a unified field. Indeed there may be deep differences, or at best little obvious common ground, between – for example – psychosocial studies as a creative niche within cultural studies and as a source of inputs to the training of social workers, nurses or teachers. There are certainly important differences between those who want it to be a ‘critical’ discipline, in the sense of one which always or characteristically assumes a dissenting or ‘radical’ stance, and those for whom it should be a field of inquiry that has more pragmatic and reformist aims. The psychoanalytic Marxism which was prominent in the emergence of the psychosocial agenda 30 years ago is very different from the pluralistic or open-ended approaches which are more typical today. However, there are arguably some deeper meanings for the psychosocial studies project, which may be shared by some of its protagonists underneath more visible differences. These meanings are not directly linked to any specific intellectual content. Rather, perhaps they reside in the nature of psychosocial studies as an integrative project. A characteristic of those who see themselves as ‘psychosocial’ is to cross disciplinary boundaries, making links between apparently opposing theories, reconciling alienated viewpoints, translating from one framework to another and re-joining things which seem to have been taken apart. It might be helpful here to turn a psychoanalytic lens on to psychosocial studies itself, in particular, one that draws on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and in particular her concept of ‘reparation’ (1952, 1957). Klein’s formulation of the appearance of feelings of reparation suggests that these are triggered when an infant begins to understand that the world is a complex place: that it is not always possible to drive a sure wedge between good and bad (Klein, 1952). Most specifically, as their understanding of the world grows they have to come to terms with the fact that their assumption that ‘the mother’ who did not feed them when they wanted, who

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left them to cry on their own, was the same one who did feed and love them. They have to grieve the simpler and therefore more comforting world they have left and also they will feel guilt about the hatred that they have directed towards their one flawed – good and bad – mother. Thus unconscious phantasies echoing this need to make reparation may re-occur. An obvious example would be the phantasy of bringing together two parents who are experienced as estranged from each other. It could however be of healing some other rift, or overcoming some failure to relate or to live in creative collaboration. The same could perhaps be said of many interdisciplinary projects insofar as they are imbued with a reparative wish, as they often are, to make good some deficit embodied in the stand-alone discipline. In the case of psychosocial studies we can suggest that there is potential for a more specific meaning of the integrative ambition. Perhaps it is not about repairing a damaged relationship but about establishing a kind of existential coherence. It is about linking the internal and the external worlds, and making sense of each in relation to the other. It might more often be described in terms of linking the individual and social frames of reference, but for much of the work conducted in the name of the ‘psychosocial’, the ‘individual’ means fundamentally the internal world of the individual. Moreover, as this volume has shown, it very often means the emotional world of the individual, and as Diamond (Chapter 17, this volume) so forcefully reminds us it also means the body. So one could argue that psychosocial studies is a therapeutic project, a prospectus for confronting and overcoming splits in the mind between its own inner ‘truths’ and the ‘realities’ of the external world. As such it might be seen as an intellectualised expression of an antidote for many ailments of the psyche, that include on the one hand attempts to evade or ignore internal reality and conflict, and on the other struggles to reject external reality. However, we must remember that for Klein (1952) such reparative phantasies are beset with ambivalence. Might it be admitted that to be drawn to cross-disciplinary boundaries is to be fascinated by the schism? To be interested in a bringing together of seemingly opposing ideas, there must be a keen interest in opposition? Certainly within the Kleinian framework the pursuit of reparation is born of guilt emanating from the phantasy of harm done. Thus, we would argue the psychosocial project itself is arguably characterised by ambivalence. As Mitchell (Chapter 4, this volume) points out Winnicott used the slightly stronger term ‘paradox’ to denote the seemingly ‘impossible’ task of creative thought in the face of inevitable and yet irreconcilable feelings. At its best it can be a highly creative tolerance of paradox; one that tries to hold in mind both the internal and external, the social and the psychological without collapsing one into the other. Furthermore, a toleration of the ambivalence of knowing that there can be value in apparently very different ideas, and that within theories and ideologies, just as within

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individuals, there can be both good and bad. Our assessment of psychoanalysis itself is a case in point. In its various institutional manifestations, it can be authoritarian, conservative and oppressive, but it can also be liberating, radical and insightful.

The emergence of psychosocial studies and ‘therapeutic culture’ An important and substantial criticism of the psychosocial project is that it is simply another manifestation of ‘therapeutic culture’, a development that has often been seen in negative terms (Furedi, 2003; Lasch, 1980; Nolan, 1998). Nolan (1998, p. 6) summarises the political problem: ‘though the therapeutic ethos (and the emotivist ethic in particular) represents an attempt to break out of the Weberian “iron cage” – out of the alienating existence of life in the machine – it does so without referencing back to the traditional cultural systems and without challenging the fundamental structure of the capitalist order’. To explore this further we employ a psychosocial lens to examine the emergence of the psychosocial project itself. It must surely indeed be seen as an aspect of the rise of therapeutic culture, central to which is a focus on inner, subjective realities and truths, which have been hitherto neglected or obscured in social science (Richards and Brown, 2001). Teaching and research agendas in pursuit of the psychosocial are arguably an academic element in the extension of therapeutic outlooks across society. These developments can be usefully put into historical context, albeit one that involves making some generalisations about cultural change and the impact of those changes on subjectivities. Much has been written about shifting requirements of selfhood in late modernity (Frosh, 1991; Giddens, 1991). Wouters (1999), for example, has argued that until around the middle of the 20th century people were generally asked to ‘know their place’. Social structures were made visible in the dress codes and manners of social classes between which the boundaries were quite rigid. The social hierarchy, where authority flowed downwards, was mirrored in the psychic structure of individuals. People were brought up to automatically know right from wrong; they did not have to think about or deny many feelings and desires. Observation of social boundaries thus became ‘second nature’. Wouters (1999) argues that conditions of high modernity brought with them the requirements of different kinds of consciousness. The boundaries between social groups and classes became less certain, individuals were expected to be able to access and reflect on their own feelings and desires – the pursuit of desire being so central to a consumer society. Thus socialisation processes were increasingly no longer creating subjectivities that felt themselves to simply belong in their environments of origin, their ‘ascribed’ places in society and culture. The self became a project that the individual had to maintain (Beck,

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1992; Giddens, 1991). In addition it can be argued that a sense of difference, or cultural dislocation, of having an inner life which was not necessarily recognised or endorsed in the outer world, became commonplace. Whereas it might once have been the experience only of bohemian minorities or exceptional individuals, in the latter part of the last century this experience was ‘democratised’. As popular and consumer culture increasingly gave licence to the exploration and expression of polymorphous desire, more young people came to identify within themselves an interiority which was at odds with the external world, of family, work and social life. Thus perhaps from this experience might arise the aim of reconciling internal and external worlds, and while there are many ways – in creative work and in leisure – of seeking to do this, for those in academia, including of course the students drawn to it, the synthesising ambitions of the psychosocial agenda offer a particularly clear prospect of reconciliation (Richards, 2007b). Despite the criticisms of therapeutic culture and the assumption of its dominance, Cooper (Chapter 13) reminds us that contemporary social policy initiatives are often formulated without thought about the feelings involved – regardless of the fact that emotions are fundamentally the drivers for policy change and that the implementation of those policies has major emotional consequences (see also Froggett, 2002). Cooper argues that policy makers need to be able to reflect on the feelings involved in the work they do, and suggests a model that can hope to contain the feelings that are around. Brown (Chapter 12) did find predictable differences in the expectations of younger generations in terms of their expectations for ‘intimacy’ and emotional expression (see also Bornat et al., 1999). Of course, for some like Furedi (2003), such moves need to be read not in emancipatory terms as a drive towards integration, but rather as a historical move towards greater social and cultural regulation and emotional management (Craib, 1995; Furedi, 2003; Lasch, 1979). Indeed, from a Foucauldian perspective, any notion of the social management or containment of emotions connotes the kind of regulatory practices and ‘psy’ discourses associated with repressive regimes of power (Rose, 1999). Yet within the Kleinian psychoanalytic framework (also applied by Richards, this volume, and Richards, 2007a), for example, the notion of containment can be applied in a more benign sense to mean the creation of both real and symbolic spaces that enable some working through of painful emotions such as humiliation and narcissistic rage. There is thus an ambivalence towards therapeutic cultures evident in this book. The themes of ‘emotional management’ and ‘psychological containment’ are examined in a number of chapters. Drawing on the work of Sennett (1977), Evans’s ‘take’ on the notion of therapeutic culture is sceptical (Chapter 6, this volume), focussing as it does on the ‘ideology of intimacy’ and its key role within contemporary processes of mediated communication, particularly within the sphere of celebrity culture. Evans suggests that

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the ways in which emotions are increasingly managed through the ideology of emotion and through identification with celebrities create an imagined feeling of connection and a fictional intimacy of audiences with celebrities. Evans draws attention to how such cultural shifts may impact very differently according to gender. She argues that cultural expectations and psychosocial meanings of femininity create difficult dilemmas for women in the celebrity limelight, particularly those like politicians who want to be taken seriously. Elsewhere, Becker (2005) points out how both the advocates and critics of therapeutic culture have tended to underplay the role that women play. Women have been historically more involved in emotional labour than men, so the shift towards a more therapeutic culture in one sense might well offer hope of that labour being revealed and more substantially shared. Becker is not particularly optimistic about this, suggesting that the burden of ever more raised expectations of fulfilment and happiness tends to fall on individual women’s shoulders. Swan (2008, p. 103) on the other hand takes a slightly different feminist perspective and while acknowledging the political ambiguities of therapeutic culture suggests that some of the criticisms ‘demonstrate anxiety about the risk to middle-class, masculine, rational, self controlled self from the inter-subjectivity of emotions, and the disruption caused by what are seen as culturally traditional feminine emotions’. Yates (this volume) points towards the progressive potential for more ‘feminised’ modes of communication in politics and this is discussed further below. The use of therapeutic thinking in education has been one of the favourite targets of criticism (Furedi, 2003; Nolan, 1998). Price (this volume) suggests that a reading of educational policies in relation to the promotion of strategies to improve emotional intelligence in schools would suggest that these are indeed governmentally inspired strategies to shape, pacify and control the subjectivities of its citizens. Price’s observation of actual practice in schools, however, suggests a rather different picture of not only the children but also teachers resisting the prescriptions of how to act, but still using the space being provided to explore and seek better understanding of the emotional terrain around them. The chapters by Hollway and Jefferson, Urwin, and Clarke all illustrate how much consideration of the individual is crucial to understanding such social and cultural phenomena. Thus the important contribution that a psychosocial understanding can bring here is that it is not possible to comprehend ‘therapeutic culture’ as a monolithic entity that exists somehow autonomously apart from the individuals, groups and subcultures who make up that culture. We all have agency, interior worlds and distinct biographies that mean that we may stand in very varied relations to those processes which contribute to the shaping of subjectivities in those particular social and cultural formations. This insight is particularly helpful in discussions about how contemporary culture can also be considered to be one of ‘narcissism’.

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A culture of narcissism? As Lasch argued in 1979, the preoccupation with the self in modern Western societies can be characterised as being linked to the emergence of an increasingly narcissistic culture. Lasch’s thesis has been enormously influential in the emergence of psychosocial studies as a discipline, the development of which can be viewed within that therapeutic cultural context, as being linked to an interest in questions of selfhood, emotions and the reparative desire for therapeutic intervention. Yet, as readers of his work will know, Lasch was sceptical about the value of therapy culture, and his belief in its apparent superficiality underlies much of his critique of the psychosocial phenomena of contemporary narcissism. Lasch argued that a range of social and cultural forces2 have created weak narcissistic personalities that are prone to psychological anxiety, grandiosity and illusion.3 More recently links have recently been made between Lasch’s notion of narcissism, consumer culture and criminality. Most overtly Hall, Winlow and Ancrum (2008) wrote a book with the title: Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. They are not the first criminologists to draw attention to the significance of consumer culture to crime (Hayward, 2004; Young, 2003). Hall and colleagues’ book is a raging protest at what they feel to have been the damage done by ‘liberal-capitalism’ to working-class culture. They argue that the chaotic and crime-dominated lives of the people that they observe and interview need to be understood as creations of narcissistic consumerism. Their lives, Hall et al. argue, are subjugated by the pursuit of the spoils of consumerism – the designer clothes, flash cars, the hollow surface of success, rather than the more durable rewards to be won through commitment to relationships and the progression of collective benefit. Although Hall et al. acknowledge Lasch’s work on narcissism, there is no engagement with the psychological theorisation in which Lasch roots his arguments.4 Lasch used the descriptions of personality disorders that were formulated in object relations terms by those such as Kernberg (1975). To Lasch it was impoverished internal worlds (produced by weak family and community bonds) that enabled consumerism to take hold on people’s psyches and identities. The depleted family lives of the participants of Hall et al.’s study are mentioned in passing (the abandonments, the abuse, the bereavements and the time spent in the care of local authorities), but they are not brought into the analysis. It is as though ‘consumer culture’ can simply exist autonomously from the individuals who in reality both contain and constitute that culture. Jones (Chapter 16, this volume) draws attention to how the ‘problem’ of personality disorder (or what he argues are its various historical manifestations with particular reference to apparently antisocial personalities) cannot be understood as social constructs nor simply as psychological disorders,

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but are instead psychosocial disorders. They need to be understood as ‘failures’ of emotional connection to the social body that can only begin to be grasped in terms of the individual’s experiences of relationships that occur in specific historical contexts. Richards makes a similar point when he argues (in Chapter 5) in his discussion of jihadi terrorism and media narratives of humiliation that feelings of humiliation evoked by images of Muslims in the global media and in jihadi recruitment videos may also be linked to the narcissistic wounds of infancy and the need to work through the more destructive ‘phantasies’ experienced during that early period of development. In keeping with the ambivalence of psychosocial studies other chapters provide a more ambiguous reading of narcissism and its relationship to emotion as a psycho-cultural phenomenon. Yates, for example (in Chapter 7, this volume), in her discussion of ‘flirtation’ in politics, suggests that the narcissistic nature of promotional culture provides a context for a ‘flirtatious’ turn in politics where ‘emotions’ are being mobilised in the search for the votes of undecided ‘floating’ voters. Yates acknowledges that one psychoanalytic reading of this development suggests the superficiality and the fear of commitment to anything ‘real’ which is consistent with the negative view of narcissistic culture. However, Yates also points to how shifts in contemporary media culture associated with the fluidity of post-modern communication signal a potential lessening of patriarchal hegemonic power and the potential for more playful modes of masculinity to emerge, which refuse the old patriarchal codes of mastery. Thus it is possible to argue against the pessimism of Lasch’s thesis on narcissism to provide a more complex and nuanced reading of contemporary popular and media culture as creating a range of potential spaces for this emotional work to take place. As Powell (this volume) suggests, the psychosocial engagement with advertising imagery provides a case in point. The appeal of advertising depends largely upon our unconscious engagement with the product and the routes to identity that it offers, and advertisements play a significant role in the modulation of our emotional relations towards the world of symbolic goods. They address our unconscious needs and wishes. In short, advertising plays with our narcissism, transporting us into a kind of transitional space where the ambiguities of self and product are ‘held’ in creative tension, and narcissistic phantasies of wholeness, omnipotence and perfection are played out, but where some resolutions of ambivalence or containment of anxiety may also be achieved.

Summary: The paradoxical psychosocial project We suggest that the psychosocial project offers the hope of a mode of engagement which acknowledges the contradictions and tensions of relating to the internal world and to the environment in everyday life, thus

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providing a non-defensive model for the student or scholar. From a psychosocial studies perspective, it is possible to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to research that does not close down the space for the engagement with a range of theories and methods from the social sciences and humanities, but, rather, creates a space for exploration. To draw on the language of Winnicott (1991/1967), the psychosocial space can be seen as a ‘transitional space’ that is neither internal nor external but is ‘a third space’ where the objects or subjects of analysis may be examined in ways that acknowledge the mutual constitution of the individual and the social. But working psychosocially with concepts such as ‘transitional space’ also opens up new perspectives on old problems: for example, on questions of subjectivity (Day Sclater, 1998, 2003) and issues of methodology, including the affective dimensions of the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Such transitional psychosocial space of course is not necessarily an always comfortable environment, constituted as it is from unconscious phantasies that inevitably (as Mitchell describes, Chapter 4, this volume) include hatred, greed and envy, in addition to the various competing disciplinary and institutional claims.5 As mentioned earlier Winnicott’s use of the term paradox to highlight the ‘impossibility’ of holding together creative thought in the face of the inevitability of psychic conflict seems apt here. The psychosocial project is perhaps about learning to live with such tensions. It is also helpful perhaps to emphasise the notion of psychosocial studies as a verb rather than a noun, as always in process, or in more philosophical terms, as an open-ended process of ‘becoming’.6 Politically, this vision of psychosocial studies can also be seen a feminist move, as refusing the rigidity of masculine academic boundaries associated with the old patriarchal order (Braidotti, 2002; Yates, 2001). In an age where the impulse for order and scientific rationality provides a reactionary if seductive solution for the uncertainties of late modernity (Keller, 1992), the project of psychosocial studies with its refusal of the old codes and boundaries (which can also paradoxically be found in the more oppressive aspects of so-called therapy culture as defined by Furedi, 2003) provides a significant counterdiscourse to such trends. In the world of politics, in the ongoing global War on Terror, the emotionally driven phantasy of a them-and-us mentality combines with a powerful political rhetoric whose effects, as we know to our cost, are only too real. This is one of many examples in the psychosocial project where psychoanalysis has something very important to say about the workings of groups, institutions, cultures and whole societies as well as individuals. The economics and politics of universities, research councils and funding streams suggest we need a certain amount of organisation and institutional backing in order to institutionally survive. However we suggest that the psychosocial project needs to try and hold the ambivalent position of recognising the utility of a certain amount of discipline building, while at the

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same time seeking to avoid the reification of those boundaries. The boundaries within academia should not reified and nor should those between academia and the rest of the world. The contributions to this book demonstrate that alongside an intensive interest in internal world matters, such as the role of unconscious phantasy, there can nonetheless be a commitment to understanding and engaging with the world that surrounds us.

Notes 1. For an extended definition of the term ‘phantasy’, see Hinshelwood (1991, p. 32). 2. Which include the rise of a superficial therapy culture, growth of consumerism, the loss of family life and the lack of paternal authority. 3. His views have been contested on a number of fronts, not least, for the implied nostalgia of his account for a mode of Oedipal morality associated with more traditional forms paternal authority (Yates, 2007). 4. Hall, Winlow and Ancrum (2008) instead use Lacanian concepts which have very different implications compared to the ‘object relations’ theory used by Lasch. The use is indeed perhaps ironic given the authors’ hopes for more solid and mature individuals. 5. The sometimes ill-tempered debate about the nature of the psychosocial project in the special issue of the Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society devoted to ‘British psychosocial studies’ (Walkerdine, 2008) is perhaps witness to how contested that space can be. 6. See for instance, Grosz (1999).

References Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage). Becker, D. (2005) The Myth of Empowerment: Women and the Therapeutic Culture in America (New York: NYU Press). Bornat, J., Dimmock, B., Jones, D. and Peace, S. (1999) ‘Generational Ties in the “New” Family: Changing Contexts for Traditional Obligations.’ In Silva, E. B. and Smart, C. (eds) The New Family? (London: Sage). Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses, Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press). Craib, I. (1995) The Importance of Disappointment (London: Routledge). Day Sclater, S. (1998) ‘Creating the Self: Stories as Transitional Phenomena’, Auto/biography, 6: 85–92. Day Sclater, S. (2003) ‘What Is the Subject?’, Narrative Inquiry, 13(2): 317–330. Froggett, L. (2002) Love, Hate and Welfare: Psychosocial Approaches to Policy and Practice (Bristol: Policy Press). Frosh, S. (1991) Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Frosh, S. (2007) Paper to Opening Session of Conference on ‘The Psychosocial Turn’, Birkbeck College, London, 17 December 2007. Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge).

Barry Richards et al. 253 Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press). Grosz, E. (1999) Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, C. (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism (Cullompton: Willan Press). Hayward, K. J. (2004) City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience (London: Glasshouse Press). Hinshelwood, R. D. (1991) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 2nd Edn. (London: Free Association Press). Keller, E. F. (1992) Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Science and Culture (London: Routledge). Kernberg, O. (1975) Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissisms (New York: Jason Aronson). Klein, M. (1952/1957) ‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant.’ In Klein, M. (ed.) Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works (1988) (London: Virago). Klein, M. (1957) Envy and Gratitude (London: Tavistock). Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton Paperbacks). Lasch, C. (1980) ‘Life in the Therapeutic State’, New York Review of Books, 27(10). Nolan, J. L. (1998) The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (London, New York: University Press). Richards, B. (2007a) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Richards, B. (2007b) ‘Psychosocial Studies as a Therapeutic Project.’ Paper to Opening Session of Conference on ‘The Psychosocial Turn’, Birkbeck College, London, 17 December 2007. Richards, B. and Brown, J. (2001) ‘The Therapeutic Culture Hypothesis.’ In Johansson, T. and Sernhede, O. (eds) Lifestyle, Desire, Politics: Contemporary Identities, pp. 97–114 (Gothenburg: Daidalos). Roberts, J. (2009) ‘Structural Violence and Emotional Health: A Message from Easington, a Former Mining Community in Northern England’, Anthropology & Medicine, 16(1): 37–48. Rose, N. (1989) Governing the Soul: Shaping of The Private Self (London: Routledge). Rose, N. (1999) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Associations Books). Sennett, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton). Swan, E. (2008) ‘“You make me feel like a woman”: Therapeutic Cultures and the Contagion of Feminity’, Gender, Work and Organization, 15(1), January 2008, 88–107. Walkerdine, V. (2008) ‘Introduction: Contextualising Debates About Psychosocial Studies’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 13, 341–345. Winnicott, D. W. (1991/1967) ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge). First published in 1967 in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48(3). Wouters, C. (1999) ‘Changing Patterns of Social Controls and Self-Controls’, British Journal of Criminology, 39(3): 416–432.

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Yates, C. (2001) ‘Teaching Psychoanalytic Studies: Towards a New Culture of Learning in Higher Education’, Psychoanalytic Studies, 314(3): 333–347. Yates, C. (2007) Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Young, J. (2003) ‘Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure: The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Criminology of Transgression’, Theoretical Criminology, 7(3): 389–414.

Index Adlam, J., 223 Adorno, T., 112–13 advertising, 3, 90, 97, 250 affective turn in, 8 appeal of, 3, 250 celebrities in, 101–3 dynamics of, 3 imagery, 6, 250 modulating emotion, 3, 250 affect bodily, 232 compared with emotion, 123 integral to experience, 124–37 psychoanalytic accounts of, 4 and representation, 36–45 and somatic states, 227–40 see also emotion agency, psychosocial analysis of, 123–37, 213 Allderidge, P., 217 ambivalence, 199, 245, 247, 250 Anderson, B., 112 Andrews, M., 3 anger, 199 annihilation, 228, 237 anxiety, social, 179, 190 Anzieu, D., 229, 230, 239 Arieff, A., 218 Armstrong, D., 11, 176 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 22 Augstein, H. F., 220 Austin, J. L., 199 Austin, R. R., 20 Awan, A. N., 67 Ayers, A. J., 20 Back, L., 118 Bainbridge, C., 85, 87 Baker, S., 92 Ball, S., 203 Bandelow, B., 222 Barbalet, J., 25, 193 Barnett, S., 90

Barthes, R., 8, 104, 156 Bauman, Z., 24, 139, 180, 200 beauty myth, 157 Beccaria, C., 220 Beck, U., 101, 164, 180, 246–7 Becker, D., 248 Becker, H., 187 Beck-Gernsheim, E., 164 belonging, 3 Benjamin, W., 74, 86, 87 Bennett, D., 99 Berger, J., 165 Berman, M., 155 Bick, E., 141, 229, 238 Bion, W., 236 bipolar affective disorder, 216 Blackman, L., 1, 9, 123, 125 Blumler, J. G., 74 body, the, 227–40 body image, 231, 237 Bollas, C., 10, 155, 156, 165 Boorstin, D., 76 Bornat, J., 247 Bottoms, A., 192 Bourdieu, P., 31 Bowlby, J., 22, 47, 100 branding, 98 emotional branding, 98, 100–1, 105 brand loyalty, 8 Brenman, E., 49 Brooks, F., 208 Brown, J., 2, 3, 10, 12, 153–65, 198, 202, 246, 247 Bruner, J., 124 Buchanan, A., 215 Burke, P., 76 Burt, C., 186 Butler, T., 2 Cain, M., 187 Caldwell, L., 5 Campbell, B., 129 Campbell, C., 8, 101, 106 capital punishment, 216 255

256

Index

Carlen, P., 190 Castell, M., 74 Castoriadis, C., 36, 37, 41, 42–3 celebrification, 7, 60, 72–82 celebrities, politicians as, 72 celebrity celebrity culture, 6, 72, 247 politicians as celebrities, 72–82 power, 76 and the psychosocial, 75–6 use of, in promotional strategies, 97, 101–3, 105–7 Chapman, J., 179 Clarke, S., 3, 9, 111–2, 198, 248 Cleckley, H., 216, 221 Cockerell, M., 91, 92 Cocks, J., 185 Cohen, S., 186, 187 Coleman, J., 208 Collins, R., 157, 158 Connell, R. W., 88 consumer culture, affective turn in, 8, 97 consumer identity, psychosocial shaping of, 8 consumer motivation, 98–9 containment, emotional, 173, 236–7, 247, 250 Cooper, A., 6, 11, 13, 169–82, 242, 247 Corner, J., 72, 73 corporeality, see body, the countertransference, 125, 137, 230, 234, 236 Cowen, T., 102 Craib, I., 10, 12, 86, 87, 154, 198, 200–1, 202, 203, 209, 247 Crenshaw, K., 65 crime, 3 and consumer culture, 249 emotional aspects of, 183–9 and insanity, 214–2 as lifestyle choice, 189 phenomenology of, 189 politicisation of, 187, 192 psychoanalytic view, 189 criminology, 11, 242 contemporary developments in, 183–93 critical, 186–7 cultural, 190–1, 193 feminist perspectives, 183, 187–8

origins of, 184–6, 218, 220 scientisation of, 183, 184–6 Cromby, J., 1, 9, 123, 125 culture feminisation of, 87 mediatisation of, 6 Dalal, F., 114 Damasio, A., 21 Darwin, C., 20, 22 Davies, M. J., 88, 94 Day, D., 100 Day Sclater, S., 3, 10, 155, 242, 251 death, 200 de Botton, A., 160 de Haan, W., 186, 191, 192 depressive concern, 162 depressive position, 181 de Rougemont, D., 156 Derrida, J., 164 desire, 36, 39, 40, 98, 246 regulation of, 24 for vengeance, 66 destructiveness, 162, 216 Diamond, N., 13, 227–40, 245 difference, psychosocial approach to, 111–2 diminished responsibility, 222 disappointment, 86 discourse of advertising, 102 analysis, 204 cognitive, 106 criminological, 184 hailed by, 10, 155 of intimacy, 154, 161 legal, 12, 213 of love, 156 medical, 12 social, 124 social class, 132 sociological, 4 theory, 3 therapeutic, 87 discursive position, 9, 124 disgust, 199 dissociation, 233, 234, 236 divorce, psychosocial study of, 3 Dixon, T., 25 Doane, M. A., 103

Index dreams, see Freud Duncan, M., 189 Durkheim, E., 23 Duval Smith, A., 89, 90 Dyer, R., 102 Eade, J., 2 education, 3, 12, 197–210, 242, 248 Edwards, H., 100 Eichner, E., 219 Eigen, P. J., 215, 218 Eiselen, R. J., 197 Elam, D., 156 Elias, N., 4, 24, 25, 27, 221 Elliott, A., 4, 5, 36–45, 87, 124 Elliott, C., 216 Elshtain, J., 77, 80 emotion anthropologists’ interest in, 23 as bodily state, 20, 227–40 and capitalism, 23, 26 and community, 111–21 and consumer culture, 25, 29, 97–107 containment of, 28, 60, 92 and crime, 183–9, 212–24 and criminology, 183–9 definition of, 9 and ethnicity, 30, 111–21 gendered nature of, 7, 29 as ‘hard-wired’, 21–2 historical construction of, 24, 27 as integral to mind, 21 as linked to reason, 22 management of, 6, 24, 29, 96, 209, 243, see also emotional governance in political communication, 84–95 and politics, 72–82 and public policy, 169–82 regimes of, 4–5, 26, 27, 28, 29 as signifier, 89 and social class, 31 social construction of, 26, 27 and social regulation, see emotional governance in social science, 19–32 and social transition, 24 toxic emotion, 6, 60 see also containment, emotional emotional capital, 70, 202

257

emotional competence, 198–210 emotional governance, 6, 24–5, 26, 27, 60, 69–70, 203–4, 221, 222, 243, 247 emotional intelligence, 13, 20, 197, 198 emotionalisation of contemporary life, 12, 30, 172, 190 emotional labour, 28, 60, 97, 201, 248 emotional life, management of, 198–202 see also emotional governance emotional literacy, 197–210 envy, 199, 220, 251 Etzioni, A., 171 Evans, J., 6, 7, 8, 60, 72–82, 98, 173, 180, 242, 247 Every Child Matters, 174 evil, 189 Ewen, S., 101, 106 Fairbairn, W. R. D., 199 Fanon, F., 113, 118 fantasy, 89, 97, 102, 103, 114, 121, 243, 250, 251 fantasies, collective, 76 fantasies, romantic, 158 fantasies, social, 179, 180 of intimacy, 72–82 of masculinity, 7 in political contexts, 72–82 of value-free research, 187 see also unconscious fantasy Federn, P., 229, 238 feeling, democratisation of, 202 Ferenczi, S., 230 Ferrell, J., 191 Ferri, E., 185 Figlio, K., 76 Fiumara, R., 240 Fleming, A., 93 flirtation, 7, 81, 85–95, 250 gendered aspects, 92–3 as postmodern communication, 93 Fonagy, P., 222–3 Foner, E., 184 Fontan, V., 66 Foucault, M., 11, 13, 25, 200, 203, 219, 227, 232, 247 Foulkes, S. H., 240 Frankfurt School, 25 free association, 126

258

Index

Freud, S., 24, 25, 27, 36, 37, 150–1, 160, 221 on bodily ego, 229 on cathexis, 76 on disavowal, 73 on dreams, 39, 100 on ego-libido, 53 on flirtation, 87–8 Freud/Klein controversy, 227 on projection, 99 on repetition compulsion, 235 on representational process, 40 on sexuality, 51 structural model of the mind, 154 theory of the unconscious, 37–9 on the uncanny, 113, 235 Froggett, L., 198, 247 Frosh, S., 124, 243, 246 fugue, 218 fundamentalism, 63 Furedi, F., 3, 10, 12, 70, 201, 246, 247, 248, 251 Gaber, I., 90 Gadd, D., 11, 189, 190 Garland, D., 184, 191, 193 Gatrell, V. A. C, 218, 219 Geertz, C., 23 Gelsthorpe, L., 11, 183–9, 220, 242 gender, 86–8 development, 5 expectations of love, 157, 161 experience of intimacy, 154 identity, 6 unconscious dynamics of, 5, 51–5, 124 Gergen, K., 124 Gerhardt, S., 22 Giddens, A., 10, 101, 124, 154, 157, 159, 202, 220, 223, 246, 247 Gilbert, J., 103 Gillett, G., 216 Gilligan, C., 30 Gilmore, D., 129 Glannon, W., 220 globalisation, of news media, 68 Gobé, M., 100 Goffman, E., 29 Goleman, D., 20, 197, 198 Goodfellow, J., 105, 106 Gordon, P., 186

Goring, C., 186 Gorz, A., 129 Gouldner, A. W., 187 Gould, P., 91 Gow, J., 67 Gray, G., 197 Greco, M., 1 grief, management of, 200 guilt, 199 Gurevitch, M., 74 habitus, 31 Hacking, I., 185, 218, 224 Hagell, A., 222 Hakeem, M., 218 Hall, S., 139, 249 Hall Williams, J. M. E., 218, 222 happiness, 199 Harding, S., 187 Hare, R., 216 Harré, R., 23, 124 Harris, M., 139 Hayward, K., 190, 191 Hearnshaw, L. S., 186 Heidensohn, F., 11, 188 Henderson, D. K., 12, 215, 221 Henriques, J., 3, 203 Hinshelwood, R. D., 99, 104, 199 Hirschman, A. O., 4, 24, 25, 27 Hochschild, A., 28, 97, 160, 201 Hodges, S., 222 Hodgkin, K., 219 Hoggett, P., 5, 119, 173, 198 Hollway, W., 3, 9, 116, 120, 123–37, 190, 198, 248 Hopkins Burke, R., 220 Horgan, J., 65 Horkheimer, M., 112–13 Horton, D., 74 Huizinga, J., 24, 25, 27 humiliation, 6, 59–71, 190, 237, 247, 250 consequences of, 63–7 dynamics of, 67 and the media, 67–70 unconscious roots of, 7 humility compared with humiliation, 61–2 Hundert, E. G., 220 Hunt, A., 218

Index Huo, Y., 192 Hutton, W., 172 hysteria, 49 idealisation, in romantic love, 156 identity, 3, 9, 111–2, 213, 221, 242 and crime, 190 identity work, 101 as mother, 139–51 identity politics, 81–2 individualisation, 19 insanity, 212–24 cognitive view of, 216 and crime, 215–24 legal definitions of, 216 moral insanity, 12, 212–24 partial insanity, 219 temporary insanity, 219 insanity defence, see insanity plea insanity plea, in murder trails, 215, 216–18 intentionality, 21 intersubjectivity, 125 intimacy, 153–65, 247 discourse of, 154, 157 fantasy of, 72–82 transformation of, 10, 155, 157, 164 introjection, 104 Isaacs, S., 199 James, A., 191 James, W., 20 Jardine, A., 190 jealousy, 21, 87, 91, 199 Jefferson, T., 3, 9, 11, 116, 123–37, 189, 190, 198, 248 Jones, D., 3, 9, 11, 12, 183, 190, 212–24, 242, 249 Jones, K., 218 joy, 199 justice criminal, 11, 25, 191, 213, 214, 218–19 expressive, 183 procedural, 192 restorative, 183, 184, 192 therapeutic, 11 Kahan, D., 192 Karstedt, S., 191, 192 Katz, J., 11, 188–90

259

Kaye, R. A., 85–6, 93 Keller, H., 230 Kennedy, D. B., 65 Kenny, A., 21 Kernberg, O., 156, 249 Klein, M., 2, 8, 43, 46, 99, 103, 104, 114, 160, 199, 227, 244, 245, 247 Knorr Cetina, K., 67 Kristeva, J., 5, 36, 37, 43–4 Kunnanat, J. T., 197 Lacan, J., 5 jouissance, 53–4 linguistic reformulation of Freud, 37 mirror phase, 231 see also psychoanalysis, Lacanian Lamb, C., 91 Lasch, C., 11, 86, 201, 246, 247, 249 Lash, S., 72 Laster, K., 192 law, emotionalisation of, 191 Layton, L., 13 Layton, S., 145 LeDoux, J., 21–2 Leese, M., 215 Liau, A. K., 197 Lindblom, C., 171 Lindner, E., 67 Loader, I., 192 Locke, J., 219 Lousada, J., 6, 172, 180 love, 153–65, 199 confluent love, 157 reflexive love, 163–4 romantic love, 8, 10, 156–8, 162, 164, 165 Lucey, H., 116 Lupton, D., 99 Lury, A., 99 Lury, C., 99, 102 Lyotard, J. F., 164 Mac an Ghaill, M., 129 McCann, G., 73 Macey, D., 41, 114 Malinowski, B., 23 Mandeville, B., 220 Marcuse, H., 25–6, 27 Maree, J. G., 197 marketing, emotional aspects of, 60

260

Index

Marshall, P. D., 72, 102 masculinity, 7, 12, 81, 84–93, 130, 250 and crime, 188–90 crisis of, 85, 87, 88, 129 fictions of, 88 hegemonic shift in, 8, 88–90 images of, 89–90 reconceptualisation of, 221 masquerade, 81, 158 Massumi, B., 227, 233 Mayer, J. D., 198 Mayer, M., 99 Melody, J., 116 Mental Health Act 1959, 213, 222 Mental Health Act 1983, 213 Mental Health (Amendment) Act 2007, 213 Menzies Lyth, E., 28, 179 methodology, 3, 10, 12, 251 in advertising, 99 in criminology, 187 narrative methodology, 3, 126, 155 see also psychosocial methodology Miller, D., 85, 93 Minsky, R., 100 Mitchell, J., 4, 5, 6, 46–55, 104, 245, 251 Mitchell, S., 156, 160 M’Naghten rules, 216–18 Mollica, R., 240 Mollon, P., 62, 231 Moran, P., 222 Morris, B., 220 Morrison, W., 189 Moss, K., 8, 104–5 motherhood, 8, 139–51 myth of, 160 Murphy, J., 89 narcissism, 6, 61, 77, 86–7, 94, 247, 248, 249–50 narcissistic wound, 7, 250 Nava, M., 3 Newbury, R., 93 Nolan, J. L., 243, 246, 248 nostalgia, 235 Nussbaum, M., 198, 199, 200, 202 Obholzer, A., 179, 180, 208 Object relations, see psychoanalysis Oedipus complex, 5, 6, 44, 51, 52, 88, 94

O’Malley, P., 192 omnipotence, 61–2, 63, 180, 200, 201, 250 Pagano, M. E., 222 Paine, T., 184 Panksepp, J., 22 Papadopoulos, R., 235 paranoia, 214 Parkes, M., 200–1 Parsons, T., 25 Partington, A., 101, 102 Pels, D., 72, 73 Perri, 4 personality capital, 77 personality disorder, 12, 212–24, 249 antisocial, 212, 214 borderline, 212, 222 narcissistic, 212 psychopathic, 222 see also psychopathy persona, mediated, 72–82 phantasy, see fantasy Phillips, A., 85, 88, 94 Phoenix, A., 124 Pilgrim, D., 218 Pinel, P. H., 215, 218 Pines, D., 230 policy, public, 169–82, 247 and child protection, 11 containing function of, 173 emotional responses to, 11 policy analysis, 169–82 policy making, 11 political communication, 72–82, 85–95 politics, emotional turn in, 91 Porter, R., 219 post traumatic stress disorder, 222 Potter, J., 124 Powell, H., 6, 8, 60, 90, 97–107, 242, 250 Power, M., 175 Price, H., 2, 3, 5, 10, 12, 197–210, 242, 248 Prichard, J. C., 212, 216, 220 primary maternal preoccupation, 46 Pringle, H., 102, 106 Prior, M., 90 private sphere, emotions in, 8 Proctor, R., 185 projection, 27, 99, 101, 105, 113–14, 120

Index projective identification, 78, 88, 103, 104, 114, 120 promotional culture, 8, 90, 97 emotionalisation of, 8, 97–107 role of celebrities in, 8, 101–3 psychoanalysis Lacanian, 4, 8, 36–45, 99, 106, 156; dominance in the academy, 36; Lacanian turn in social theory, 41 as language, 224, 243 Object Relations tradition, 2, 3, 4, 5, 46, 88, 99, 106, 156, 199, 249 observational methodology, 9, 10, 12, 140, 141 psychoanalytic ideas, 2, 27, 222, 242 psychology developmental, 22 and emotion, 19, 20 psychopathy, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 224 psychosis, 214, 229 psychosocial imagination, 3–4, 164 psychosocial methodology, 3, 116, 125–6, 170 and free association, 126 see also methodology psychosocial phenomena emotions as, 1, 4 psychosocial research, 2, 10, 153–65 psychosocial sensibility, 10, 164 psychosocial studies, 1, 111, 164, 243, 244, 246, 249 BA degree in, 2 as praxis, 3, 10, 165 programme, 2 and therapeutic culture, 3 as therapeutic project, 245 psychosocial theory, 2, 172 psychosocial therapies, 10 public relations, 90–1, 94 public sphere emotional, 6, 59, 67 mediated, 72–82 mediatised, 59 Quetelet, A., 185 Quintanilha, S, 104 racism, 8, 112, 113–14, 190 Radstone, S., 13

261

Rafter, N., 218 Raine, J., 191 Ramon, S., 214, 218 Raphael-Leff, J., 160 Ray, I., 216 Reddy, W. M., 4, 25, 27 reflexivity, 8, 111, 125, 156, 222 Reiman, J., 187 Reinharz, S., 187 Reisman, D., 77 reparation, 244–5, 249 representation and affect, 5, 37–45 of political figures, 8, 72–3 repression, 28, 38, 55, 170, 187 Reznek, L., 215 Richards, B., 3, 6, 7, 12, 26, 59–71, 75, 76, 87, 99, 105, 155, 172, 198, 202, 242, 246, 247, 250 Rieff, P., 164 Rimke, H., 218 Rivière, J., 81 Roberts, J., 243 Roberts, K., 100, 106 Roberts, V., 179, 180 Robinson, C. L., 216 Robinson, N., 92 Rodman, F. R., 53 Rojek, C., 102, 106 Rorty, R., 20 Rose, N., 26, 75, 203–4, 221, 223, 243 Roseneil, S., 6 Roshier, B., 184 Rothschild, B., 229 Rotman, D. B., 218 Rustin, M., 4–5, 19–32, 119, 183, 220, 242 Salecl, R., 156 Salovey, P., 198 Sanders, C., 191 Sartre, J.-P., 156 Scanlon, C., 223 Scarry, E., 231 Scheff, T., 28 Schilder, P., 231 Schore, A., 229, 233, 234 Scraton, P., 186 Scull, A., 218 Seabrook, J., 119

262

Index

Seale, C., 200 Searle, J. R., 20 self-harm, 238 Seligman, M., 209 Sennett, R., 7, 76–7, 201, 247 separation, psychological, 140 shame, 28, 62–3, 87, 159, 192, 199, 220, 235, 237, 239 Shengold, L., 88 Sherman, L., 192 Shoemaker, R., 221 Showalter, E., 180 siblings, 5, 6, 49–55 Silke, A., 65 Sim, J., 186 Simmel, G., 23, 86 Simmonds, J., 170 Smart, C., 11, 25, 188 Smith, P., 28 Smith, R., 215, 219 social policy, see policy sociological imagination, 3 sociology of consumption, 3 of emotion, 4, 23, 164 psychoanalytic, 111 Solomon, R., 25 Souza, M., 104 splitting, 170 Stacey, J., 102 Stanley, L., 187 Stearns, P. N., 221 Stenner, P., 1 Stern, B., 98 Stern, D., 22 Stets, J. E., 25 Stoller, R., 50 Strang, H., 192 subject as defended, 123–37 desiring subject, 5, see also desire theory of, 36–45 subjectivity, 3, 26, 251 destruction of, 228 embodied, 237 Freudian analysis of, 37 and offending behaviour, 189–90 psychoanalytic approach to, 76, 126 socially situated, 169 unspeakable stories of, 139

sublimation, 24 supermodel, 8 Swan, E., 248 systemic theory, 169 tactility, 230, 231 Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, 2, 173, 174, 215 Taylor, D., 180 Taylor, I., 184, 186, 187 Telhami, S., 66 terror, 233 terrorism, 6, 65–71, 250 therapeutic culture, 3, 11, 12, 26, 69–70, 155, 163, 201, 202, 243, 244, 246, 248, 249 therapy culture, see therapeutic culture Thompson, J., 74 Thorp, J., 148 Todd, C., 81 torture, 13, 227–40 touch, 229–30 trafficking, 13, 234, 237 transdisciplinarity, 1 transference, 101, 133, 137, 164, 208, 230, 236 transitional object, transitional phenomena, see Winnicott trauma, 222, 227–40 Trevarthen, C., 22 Turner, J. H., 25 Tyler, T., 192 unconscious conflicts, 124–37 and consumer motivation, 98–9 desire, 98, see also desire fantasy, 6, 39–41, 43, 63, 199, 252; of reparation, 199; of revenge, 64, see also fantasy sexual difference, and, 6 structured like a language, 5 unconscious representation, 37 see also Freud, theory of the unconscious University of East London, 2, 3 Urwin, C., 9, 10, 139–51, 248 Van der Hart, O., 229, 239 Van der Kolk, B. A., 229, 233, 239

Index Van Stokkom, B., 192 Volkan, V., 7, 64, 66 Vos, J., 191 Walkerdine, V., 2, 116, 203 Walker, N., 184, 215 Walton, P., 184, 186, 187 Weare, K., 197 Weber, M., 23, 72 Wernick, A., 88, 90, 91 Wetherell, M., 124 Whillock, R. K., 77 Wiener, M. J., 219, 221 Wilde, N., 220 Williams, R., 23, 169 Wilmott, P., 2 Winnicott, D. W., 5, 6, 46–55, 62, 200, 245, 251 as psychosocial, 46 transitional object, 48

263

transitional phenomena, 46 transitional space, 88, 250, 251 use of an object, 49–51 Wise, S., 187 Wittgenstein, L., 20 Wohl, R., 74 Wolf, N., 157 Wouters, C., 77, 223, 246 Wright, E., 99 Wright Mills, C., 3 Yates, C., 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 60, 81, 84–95, 98, 242, 248, 250 Young, J., 184, 186, 187, 190, 191 Young, M., 2 Yovell, Y., 233 Zagier Roberts, V., 208 Zambardino, A., 105, 106 Zizek, S., 114–15, 119