Report – Queer Encounters with Psychosocial Studies

Event with Dr Marita Vyrgioti (University of Essex) 23 November 2023

125 London Wall, London, UK, and Online

Chaired by Harriet Mossop (University of Essex), Alan Lee (University of Roehampton) and Merry Muschka (University of Essex)

Dr Vyrgioti presented a very engaging talk for around 40 minutes, after which there was a lively discussion in the room and online. She emphasised the importance of transdisciplinarity, ethics, reflexivity, and agency for psychosocial studies, and her talk touched on all of these. The discipline is not just a new perspective, but is perhaps better seen as a new form of knowledge production. Dr Vyrgioti’s own journey as a researcher was relevant in this context: coming from several different disciplines, she felt that she didn’t know the “canon” of critical theory, so it was comforting to work across disciplines in psychosocial studies. 

Psychosocial studies has been described by Dr Magda Schmukalla as an ‘intrusive, impulsive and strange guest you don’t expect and do not really have time to care for. An argument, arranging and exploring fragments of social life, that eats up resources without giving the researcher, publisher or reader an expected output or return that could be turned into some form of intellectual, scientific or monetary profit. Like The Tiger Who Came to Tea (Kerr, 2018) it is a strange, greedy and libidinal type of thinking – without any disciplinary manners, scary yet somehow sympathetic, desirable’ (Schmukalla, 2021). Dr Vyrgoti had experienced this sense of being an unwelcome guest in researching her PhD topic on cannibalism, which often seemed like an obscure, unpalatable topic. She emphasised the possibility of truth emerging in unexpected forms through these unwelcome guests. She went on to talk about aspects of space and time in psychosocial studies. 

Space

Dr Vyrgioti suggested that psychosocial studies presents an opportunity to rethink the dichotomy between the individual and the social. Conventionally, this was seen as the relationship between the individual and society, but different perspectives began to emerge in the UK through the work of Valerie Walkerdine, and in the NHS, through applying psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of social issues, work and organisations, for example, in understanding anxiety at a group level in the NHS. The Frankfurt school of philosophy was also influential. In the 1980s, the University of East London departments of psychology and economics were the nominal home of psychosocial studies; in the 1990s this moved to Birkbeck, and in 2022, the centre of gravity moved towards the University of Essex which is now the only department in the UK to have the name ‘psychosocial’ in its title. 

Dr Vyrgioti took the image of the Moebius strip from mathematics as a metaphor for psychosocial studies, drawing (I think) on Stephen Mitchell’s use of the Moebius strip as a metaphor to explain intersubjectivity in relational psychoanalysis: ‘Interpersonal relational processes generate intrapsychic relational processes which reshape interpersonal processes reshaping intrapsychic processes, and so on in an endless Mobius strip in which internal and external are perpetually regenerating and transforming themselves and each other’ (Mitchell, 2000: 57 quoted in Roseneil, 2013, pp 12-13). This lack of clear boundaries between the individual and society can be disorientating. The unconscious is seen as being formed in these unconscious processes; we are psychosocial because our defences are shaped by material conditions and sources, and the social is also inherently permeated by unconscious mechanisms. Psychosocial studies tries to dismantle the dialectic of the psyche and the social, which can be seen as just the illusion of a threshold. The idea of a bounded, autonomous, rational human therefore disappears, leaving a sense of befuddlement, and a subjectivity that can never be studied in isolation. This can lead to exciting new prospects for research. However, Dr Vyrgioti warned against idealising psychosocial studies. 

Turning to psychoanalysis, Dr Vyrgioti highlighted the tension with psychosocial studies. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the primary archive that we use when thinking about subjectivity. For example, we make interpretations when interviewing for research. Psychoanalysis, when applied to social phenomena, can be seen as a master discourse, a source of truth. But psychosocial psychoanalytic studies fully acknowledges that the social is not an additional layer of the clinic, it is always implicated. This means that we need to rethink the canons of psychoanalysis, which have certainly not always acknowledged this, and the reality of psychic life. For example, Judith Butler has highlighted how people may form a fantasy version of a traumatic experience in the context of their work on power and gender (Butler, 1997). In this new world, there is a hybridity of inside and outside; the subject lives in it, but subjectivity is never wholly internal. 

Dr Vyrgioti exemplified this new way of thinking inner and outer together in Gail Lewis’ paper on being a Black girl in Britain in the 1950s, and how the social context of racism ‘gets inside’ Lewis, her mother, and others (Lewis, 2009). If we accept the proposition that identity can never be fully separated from the social world, psychosocial studies can lead to new forms of knowledge, to effect social and personal change. 

Time

In thinking about time in psychosocial studies, Dr Vyrgioti held that psychoscial studies is not trying to identify what is lacking in psychology or psychoanalysis, but that these disciplines are perhaps in the process of being re-evaluated through active engagement with archives, and reflexive processes, to produce new forms of knowledge. This re-evaluation of established practices and concepts, which reproduces the fiction of the separation of the psyche and social, is a critical process. Psychosocial studies is seeking to make the familiar strange, so that we can encounter the oddness of objects afresh. It welcomes this tension and uncertainty, to bring out what is hidden or repressed. She referenced Lisa Bareitser’s argument that ‘Whether we like it or not, the ‘psychosocial’ is weighed down by a ‘temporal drag’, to borrow Elizabeth Freeman’s term (Freeman, 2011); weighed down by debates that have taken place in a host of disciplines in both their normative and emancipatory forms that do anchor this emerging discipline ‘somewhere’, even if we are not quite sure where that somewhere is’ (Bareitser, 2015). Psychoanalysis itself can be seen as an embarrassment, out of date, with its racist colonial tropes of cannibals and primitivism; when encountering these images, today’s reader either has to read selectively, or to critique the discipline as a whole. Bareitser suggests a third position of staying with the discomfort or embarrassment, to see what new kind of knowledge emerges. In Freudian terms (Nachtraglichkeit), the discomfort of the cannibal troped is deferred, emerging in a different time. 

Dr Vyrgioti moved on to discuss the institutional history and genealogy of psychosocial studies. She highlighted the Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies (Frosh, Vyrgioti and Walsh, 2022), which was created to respond to a need to outline the field, to identify future lines of development and points of tension. Psychosocial studies rejects naturalistic observation, highlighting the active role of the observer in constructing social reality, and has a suspicious stance towards the knowledge it generates. It recognises that we construct reality as we go along, for example, in interviews. Meaning-making has historically been seen as an a priori process, but psychosocial studies disagrees, optimistically; humans can make meaning, but we wish to disregard experiences of self that are stuck, rigid, and psychotic. Dr Vyrgioti highlighted the point of tension in psychoanalysis itself between object relations – where psychic integration and coherence is sought after – and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which accepts subjectivity as naturally alienated from itself. 

Towards the end of her talk, Dr Vyrgoiti discussed the idea of the case study as a demonstration of the fluidity of subjectivity, and the implications for discipline formation. This draws on the work of Forrester (2017), Berlant (2007), Walsh (2020), and others. Psychoanalysis differs from other disciplines in that it structures itself through cases, which can be seen as an incoherent melange. In closing, she suggested that psychosocial studies can be an innovative way of studying lived experience, the relations between subjects, and can result in liberatory knowledge. She asked us to reflect on what sort of impact it can have, and what it feels like to do this sort of radical research in a university. 

References

Baraitser, L. (2015). Temporal Drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Case’ of Psychosocial Studies. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5–6), 207–231. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415592039

Berlant, L. (2007). On the Case. Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 663–672. https://doi.org/10.1086/521564

Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press.

Forrester, J. (2017). Thinking in cases. Polity Press.

Freeman, E. (2010). Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. In Time Binds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822393184

Frosh, S., & Vyrgioti, M. (2022). Handbook of Psychosocial Studies Introduction. In S. Frosh, M. Vyrgioti, & J. Walsh (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies (pp. 1–15). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_60-1

Kerr, J. (2018). The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1st edition). HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks.

Mitchell, S. A. (2004). Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity: 20 (1st edition). Routledge.

Roseneil, S. (2013). Beyond ‘the Relationship between the Individual and Society’: Broadening and Deepening Relational Thinking in Group Analysis. Group Analysis, 46(2), 196–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/0533316412475051

Walsh, J. (2020). Confusing cases: Forrester, Stoller, Agnes, woman. History of the Human Sciences, 33(3–4), 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119897875

Psychosocial texts suggested by Dr Marita Vyrgioti

Baraitser, L. (2015). Temporal Drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Case’ of Psychosocial Studies. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5-6), 207-231. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415592039

Berlant, L. (2007). On the Case. Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 663–672. https://doi.org/10.1086/521564 

Frosh, S., & Baraitser, L. (2008). Psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 13(4), 346–365. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.8

Frosh, Stephen. “Rethinking Psychoanalysis in the Psychosocial.” Psychoanalysis, culture & society 23.1 (2018): 5–14. 

Frosh, Stephen., ed. New Voices in Psychosocial Studies. 1st ed. 2019. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. 

Ffytche, Matt (2019) Real Fantasies: Reinserting the Imaginary in the Scene of Social Encounter. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 24 (4). pp. 394-412. DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-019-00140-w

Giffney, N. (2021). The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis. Routledge, London and New York, 2021

Lewis, G., (2009) “Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others”, Studies in the Maternal 1(1), 1-21. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.112

Posocco, Silvia, and Stephen Frosh. “Psychosocial Research in COVID-19 Times: An Introduction.” Journal of Psychosocial Studies 14.3 (2021): 165–172. 

Schmukalla, Magda. Communist Ghosts : Post-Communist Thresholds, Critical Aesthetics and the Undoing of Modern Europe. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Print. 

Walkerdine, V. (2008) Contextualizing Debates about Psychosocial Studies. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 13, 341–345.  Walsh, J. (2020). Confusing cases: Forrester, Stoller, Agnes, woman. History of the Human Sciences, 33(3-4), 15-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119897875