Thinking about the Lifecourse

A Psychosocial Introduction

Elizabeth Frost, Stuart McClean

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350312999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialarbeit

How we change over time - who we love, what work we do, how we die - is shaped both by internal, and external influences. This book explores the important subject of human growth and development by combining the social context of how people live with their personal ways of thinking and being. The result is a greater understanding of why people are who they are. Taking a psychosocial approach to exploring human growth and development, this book: - Provides an insightful exploration of the human life course by looking at significant life stages and key themes (such as parenting, ill-health and violence) - Draws on both contemporary and classic research in the fields of psychology and sociology, to deliver an in-depth analysis of issues about self and society - Moves beyond traditional, limiting approaches to understanding people's lives toward an interdisciplinary, psychosocial approach Whether you are studying on a Social Work, Nursing or related Health or Social Care degree, or taking a course in the newly emerging field of Psychosocial Studies, this book is a clear and ground-breaking contribution to the understanding of human growth and development.

1

Psychosocial theory: being and becoming

The issues with which this book concerns itself – of the formation and revision of identity as people experience being in the world; of development, transition and change – are also central to many traditional psychology and sociology texts on the lifecourse and on human development. However, it is not usually the concern of those texts to link the disciplines and ‘connect up’ both psychological and sociological perspectives, for example both the socio-cultural contexts and the psyche, or inner life, of the individual.

In this book, and particularly in this chapter, we explore the central premise that we can better understand who people are, what they can do and be, by integrating knowledge about the social context of how people live their lives, with knowledge about how their personal ways of thinking and being, develop. Or, to put it more strongly, we argue that it is not possible to really understand how people negotiate their lives without understanding that both the unconscious and conscious elements of their personalities, their relationships with other people and the social and cultural environments in which these transactions and understandings take place entwine. Interdisciplinary thinking is invariably at the heart of this approach. Put simply, a psychosocial approach involves integrating what are traditionally seen as psychological and sociological paradigms.

This chapter starts with an illustrative example of what a psychosocial approach looks like; it goes on to discuss the elements that make up this perspective and how we might define psychosocial. It will then present some of the history of these ideas in the twentieth century, and proceed to look at the contemporary process of building a body of psychosocial theory in the UK. Following this there is some consideration of the contribution of some primary disciplinary areas to the psychosocial approach: psychoanalysis and child psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Finally, applied psychodynamic thinking for welfare practice is given some consideration, as is the role of the theorists themselves.

A psychosocial scenario

The short scenario provided in Box 1.1 shows a psychosocial approach ‘in action’ as it were, to demonstrate to the reader what, if we think about a person and/or a situation psychosocially, it might look like. Even this approach – offering a holistic scenario first to mull over, and then considering its elements – fits with ‘psychosocial’. The extract below, then, forms part of a discussion of this tragic murder, taken from a paper by the psychosocial criminologist Professor David Gadd

Box 1.1

A psychosocial scenario

Deep down Stewart must have wanted to change, however much this prospect must have frightened him. No longer a juvenile, the criminal justice system had given up any pretence of being able to settle him back into a law-abiding life. Far from where he had grown up in Manchester, Stewart was friendless in Feltham. In prison his menacing appearance invited ridicule. He had nightmares. He wrote incessantly. He begged his ‘girlfriend’ to forgive him for implicating her in his vile fantasies of miscegenation. Her loss of interest in him can only have underscored what an unlovable person he had become. Even as he became aware of how outrageous his miscegenation fantasies were, Stewart could not let them go. He felt consumed from within and overwhelmed from without. He tried to talk to his cellmate about his girlfriend and – remarkably given how unnerving he found Stewart – Zahid Mubarek tried to listen. We know Stewart saw Mubarek as both a ‘paki’ and someone who was alright and safe with him. Given they were both 19 year olds who had been excluded from school with histories of problematic drug use and involvement in car crime, the two of them did have things in common. In considering this commonality, Mubarek may also have reminded Stewart of everything he would have liked to have been: good-looking, easy going, untroubled by a chaotic love life, and about to be returned to a family who missed him and still loved him dearly in spite of his bad behaviour. But Mubarek could not identify with Stewart’s murderousness, or contain his pain. He was, in Gilroy’s (2004: 137) words ‘half-different’ and ‘partially familiar’, perceived by Stewart as smuggling uncomfortable thoughts into his head, being better than him, judging him, making him feel ‘shitty’, no longer the safe cell-mate but yet another ethnic ‘gangsta’ reminding him how insignificant he was. For Stewart, as for many incarcerated killers, murder was ‘...the ultimate act of self-defense, a last resort against … losing one’s mind’ (Gilligan, cited in Gadd, 2011: 154–5).

Stewart murdered Mubarek in their shared prison cell in March 2000.

In the above scenario Gadd offers us a disturbing but useful example of thinking about the theme of violence psychosocially, something we return to in Chapter 8. His powerful evocation of a young man whose ‘hatred’ is a product of a socially reinforced sense of worthlessness and his particularly loveless upbringing, the persecuted psychic world through which and within which his racism and pain percolates and the confusion and ambivalence in his thinking and actions, give a strong sense of the highly complex and multilayered subject that psychosocial theory proposes. It demonstrates how a psychosocial approach is useful as a framework for understanding the inner life of people located within their social worlds.

The scenario also to some extent explains the importance of understanding psychosocial approaches to people in their contexts. It is very hard to see how someone like Stewart could be understood without recourse to psychosocial thinking. Sociology, for instance, would allow us to consider the implications of factors such as: he was gendered ‘male’; came from a poor background, a ‘broken home’; was let down by the school system and had been in and out of custodial institutions where aggression can be reinforced. This offers a social context in which violence and hatred might well flourish, but most young people in this context do not murder. Psychology might offer the lack of familial love reinforced by the various rejections and failures producing an unconfident self-critical person with low self-esteem, and that too is helpful. And yet neither of these approaches in isolation provides enough of an understanding of the complexity and is not somehow ‘strong’ enough to make sense of this life situation. Gadd’s evocation drawing on social context, psychoanalytic understanding and positioning the human at the centre of the discussion seems to offer the best possible chance we have of understanding, for example, such extreme violence.

Background to the psychosocial approach

The psychosocial approach this book is offering, including Gadd’s work, is both new and historical, building on a tradition laid down in the mid-twentieth century by a range of European thinkers and social theorists. Thinking first about the historical dimension, it is important that such work came out of the era of the destruction and cruelty of the World Wars and the Holocaust in Europe. In the light of broad concerns with social justice, liberation, truth, understanding of the nature of violence and persecution, and the nature of human ‘depth and surface’ and repression, a group of theorists commonly referred to as ‘critical theorists’, or what has also been known as ‘the Frankfurt school’ established themselves (see Box 1.4 below).

Key thinkers central to this approach and still of importance in contemporary psychosocial studies are Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas, whose attempts to understand human nature and social injustice exactly draw on this unique blend of sociology and psychoanalysis. That such concerns as racism and other forms of social conflict can only be understood as the product of individual affect and social structure (see Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality, 1950) have continued to be a major driver in psychosocial thinking and research (Clarke, 2005; Gadd and Dixon, 2010).

Following on from this tradition, what psychosocial theory does, then, is to strive to understand the human subject and their lived experience, and to make this the starting place, that is to say, the key concern within social theory inquiry.

Whereas psychology traditionally has mostly concerned itself with individuals, taken in isolation, and sociology mostly with the social contexts and institutions surrounding individuals, psychosocial studies argues that you cannot think about individuals without their contexts, or ‘contexts’ without engaging with the person for whom these exist. The individual and their social ‘contexts’ are therefore connected up though thinking through a range of important themes in development. We are thinking, then, about:

Subjects whose inner worlds cannot be understood without knowledge of their experiences in the world, and whose experiences of the world cannot be understood without knowledge of the way in which their inner worlds allow them to experience the outer world (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000: 4).

Psychosocial theory in process

Building psychosocial theory is an ongoing project: unfinished and in the process of identity formation. Psychosocial theory is currently being written and developed, so the edges of what it looks at and what its scope is, are still flexible (although this is true of some other subject areas up to a point – exactly what is in, say, media studies or even geography is not always clear). This tells us something about the transitional nature of boundaries and identities within disciplinary subject areas; psychosocial studies are no different.

Over the last two decades, particularly in England and the USA, an interest in psychosocial theory has emerged. In the UK, for example, there is now a UK Psychosocial network, a psychosocial sub-group of the British Sociological Association, and a ‘learned [academic] society’ called The Association for Psychosocial Studies. Core academic journals have been founded such as Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (Palgrave Macmillan) and the online Journal of Psycho-social Studies. Moreover, significant groups of psychosocial theorists, researchers and practitioners can be located at, for example, the Centre for Understanding Social Practices (CUSP) at the University of the West of England; the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London; the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations; the Institute for Education, the Open University, Cardiff University, Brighton University; and the University of East London. Recent years has seen a burgeoning of higher education institutions across the UK engaging in psychosocial studies.

Perhaps even more important is the written contribution of psychosocial theory to understanding contemporary social life. In the UK a substantial body of psychosocial literature and research has been generated from within the disciplines of sociology, criminology, psychology, social policy, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and social work over the last decade or so.

Paul Hoggett and Lynn Froggett, for example, radically introduced the notion of emotion as constitutive of the emerging neo-liberal ‘turn’ in social policy in the twenty-first century (in other words, increased privatization, reduced public services, emphasis on organizational profit not human need). They produced work such as Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare (Hoggett, 2000) and, Love, Hate and Welfare: Psychosocial Approaches to Policy and Practice (Froggett, 2002), and their themes are also developed in Cooper and Lousada’s (2005) Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling in Modern Welfare. The emotions generated by neo-liberalism, for example divisive resentments and populist anti-welfarism, are also being subject to psychosocial analysis (see, for example, Hoggett et al., 2013).

Research methods and research practice have become core topics in the psychosocial approach, for example in terms of theory, such as Hollway and Jefferson’s (2012) revised Doing Qualitative Research Differently: A Psychosocial Approach and Researching Beneath the Surface edited by Clarke and Hoggett (2009). Research-based studies drawing on such approaches have also contributed to how we are able to think psychosocially about the lived experiences of, for example, class and gender, unemployment and ‘shame’, and these original studies have helped to develop the field: for example, Walkerdine et al.’s (2001) study of ‘Growing up girl: psychosocial explorations of gender and class’, and recently, Gender Work and Community after De-industrialisation: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect (Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012). Social problems and social practices have also become of core concern to psychosocial theorists, with racism providing a particularly rich focus, in for example, Clarke’s (2003) Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism, and Gadd and Dixon’s (2010) Losing the Race: Thinking Psychosocially about Racially Motivated Crime.

Box 1.2

Psychosocial research methods: Wendy Hollway

Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson first published Doing Qualitative Research Differently, essentially proposing a form of research that focused on the relational, psychoanalytic and social aspects of the research process.

The interview method developed to facilitate this was the free association narrative interview method, which involved giving the subject a great deal of self-direction in the interview, not offering interpretations but essentially helping the subject to tell their story in their own way.

Analysis of the interview material is conducted in a group, and the focus is on the latent and surface content in the interaction of the interviewer and the interviewee. Social political and ‘under the surface’ material is all considered relevant to the ‘findings’.

Currently Hollway’s exploration of ‘scenic analysis’ as research method is pushing back more frontiers in psychosocial investigation by drawing on the psychoanalyst Lorenzer’s notion of ‘the scenic’, which is the concept he uses to describe how we as babies absorb the undifferentiated totality of our life worlds.

Hollway’s recent research, for example, on young mothers in East London used this technique for data analysis, primarily by offering the researcher a responsive space to make sense of their material affectively and rationally (Hollway, 2011). This means in practice that initially, instead of switching on the tape recorder and asking questions in a research interview, the researcher writes a free-hand descriptive and impressionistic account of the research scenario – the setting, the subject: clothes, demeanour, anything – then returns to it later to see what perhaps less than obvious thinking and understanding it prompts.

A common feature of psychosocial theorizing is its cross-disciplinary approach, which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of boxes and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Psychosocial theory: being and becoming
• 2 How people begin: ‘the child as father to the man’
• 3 How people become: agency and identification
• 4 How people connect: love, marriage and the family
• 5 How people are occupied: school, work and after
• 6 How people thrive: resilience and well-being
• 7 How people struggle: social suffering and ill-being
• 8 How people hurt and hate: violence and bullying
• 9 How people age and die: disengagement, disruption and loss
• Concluding thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index