Co m m e n t a r y : a re p l y
O N N E G AT I V E C R I T I Q U E : A R E P LY S t e p h e n Fr o s h * School of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK *Correspondence: School of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK E-mail:
[email protected]
A b s t ra c t This paper responds to issues raised by those commentators adopting a ‘‘British School’’ psychoanalytic perspective for psychosocial studies (Hollway, Hoggett, Jefferson, and Rustin). Our focus on Wendy Hollway’s work is explained, and the logic of our discussion of reflexivity is clarified. The response examines five further issues: psychosocial studies as a discipline, psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, the discursive turn, ‘‘Lacan vs Klein’’, and ‘‘inner’’ vs ‘‘outer’’ worlds. The paper concludes with a reiteration of the value of ‘‘negative’’ critique.
Ke y wo rds psychosocial studies; reflexivity; negativity; applied psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2008) 13, 416–422. doi:10.1057/pcs.2008.28
I n tr oduc ti on
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erhaps it is unfortunate that this issue of PCS, devoted to some debates about the place of psychoanalysis within British psychosocial studies, should have so much agitation in it. I think it is important to begin with a personal disclaimer, which relates mostly to Wendy Hollway’s response, but also to that of her colleague, Tony Jefferson. Wendy writes about our paper as if it were accusatory of her, an attack on her work that comes unexpectedly and has the force of a betrayal, given the long history she and I have as friends working in alliance against the tide of mainstream academic psychology. The paper was not meant that way, and I am sorry c 2008 Palgrave Macmillan 1088-0763/08 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 2008, 13, (416–422) www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/
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that it has come across as such. It bears the traces of its surprisingly rapid progress from being offered to the journal editor to being sent out for commentaries, and maybe this has affected its tone too much. It also reflects my recent attempts to push hard at a boundary that I have been working on for years, which has led me to repudiate some positions with which I was previously associated. As the paper by Lisa Baraitser and me states, Wendy is a particularly important British social psychologist who has made psychoanalysis fundamental to psychosocial studies; indeed, I think that she is the most important representative of this stance, because of the quality of her work and the industry and eloquence with which she has communicated it. As careful readers will see, her account of what the ‘‘psychosocial’’ means is given considerable space precisely because it articulates clearly how psychodynamic concepts have come to be deployed in certain ways to make sense of it, and its importance is such that it acts as a fulcrum of debate between those who see this approach as legitimate and those who dispute it. We do not survey the writings of all users of British School psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies because Wendy’s work provides the reference point for many of these other users; consequently, the critique we are interested in developing is best tested against her ideas. It should not be a surprise to anyone to read much of our critique; although I have shared in the project of bringing psychoanalysis into the psychological and now the psychosocial academy, I have long been troubled by the way psychoanalysis has, historically, tended to lose its socially critical power once it is appropriated as a mode of institutional knowledge, something I have written about for decades (e.g., Frosh, 1987, 1997, 2005). I know Wendy shares these concerns but disagrees about the consequences of ‘‘positive’’ uses of psychoanalysis, which I believe she sees as necessary to counterbalance the potential destructiveness of critique, whereas I see them as being in danger of drifting towards a normativeness that I look to psychoanalysis to disrupt. These are shared perceptions as well as real differences, and I have written about them elsewhere (e.g., Frosh, 2007) and also debated them with Wendy on occasional platforms, including the panel to which she refers in her response and an earlier panel which was the starting point for this journal discussion.1 I also want to take up the particular issues around ‘‘reflexivity’’ that Wendy discusses and that appear in some of the other responses. The point that our paper tries to make here is fairly precise, although perhaps its precision is lost in the dichotomizing that has overtaken things. There is neither prioritizing of sociological reflexivity nor accusation that Wendy and others working in this terrain do not seriously and carefully reflect on their work and on the way it is constructed as a relational encounter. Quite the contrary: their research is unusually strongly focused on precisely this point. Our argument, rather, has a number of stages: (1) reflexivity has become more important generally in social research; (2) the account of reflexivity to be found in sociological and On Negative Critique: A Reply
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social–psychological work is constrained by an impoverished vocabulary and set of concepts; (3) psychoanalysis has a rich theoretical tradition that can be brought to bear on this issue; and therefore (4) this is a good example of an area in which psychoanalysis might offer something of profound importance to psychosocial studies; but (5) this gives rise to problems when psychoanalytic concepts that look potentially useful are carried over from the clinical to the research situation without careful attention to the different demands and characteristics of these different contexts. We then use this example to suggest the general proposition that such ‘‘technological’’ uses of psychoanalytic procedures (by which is meant only that they are being employed as tools outside their conditions of emergence) risk creating normative structures through obscuring the very specific processes of knowing that have to be painfully reinvented in every psychoanalytic encounter. Wendy writes about recent developments in her work that look very important in countering this tendency; our paper picked up on a widely read article (which itself was accompanied by critical commentaries) in a major British social psychology journal to evidence some of the difficulties in which we are interested. It would be tempting to devote this brief reply entirely to the issues raised by Wendy Hollway, but I want to broaden it so as to be able to consider some of the other commentaries that have come from this group of closely aligned exponents of British School psychoanalysis (Hollway, Jefferson, Rustin, and Hoggett; Derek Hook’s and Erica Burman’s comments, which come from outside this tradition, are not discussed here). A large number of issues are raised in the responses, many of which take off from, rather than address, points we have made. There is no space here to do these many arguments justice, but I want at least to register them to show that their forcefulness has not been overlooked.
T h e e m e rge n c e o f p s y c h o s o c i a l s tudi e s a s a d i s c i pli n e Following his useful contextualization of psychosocial studies as an emerging and fragile discipline – with which I agree and which, to my mind, makes the need to articulate alternative positions in psychosocial studies greater, not less – Michael Rustin mounts a defence of psychoanalysis as a relatively secure discipline that is forging strong connections with academic institutions. I am involved in some of these connections myself and have no difficulty agreeing that psychoanalysis is much more firmly grounded than is psychosocial studies, even though I am more impressed than Rustin is with the difficulties of integrating psychoanalysis into the university setting. None of this is contrary to any of Lisa’s and my points. Indeed, we argue that some strands of psychosocial studies lean on psychoanalysis precisely because of the expertise that psychoanalysis has developed over the years. That expertise may grant credibility to psychosocial studies in situations where the latter’s conceptual and Stephen Frosh
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methodological base is relatively thin (our discussion of reflexivity is a case in point). My ‘‘ambivalence’’ is not towards psychoanalysis, but, rather, towards its too rigid or ‘‘certain’’ deployment as a totalizing system of knowledge. As Rustin notes, we do not propose the renunciation of a psychoanalytic perspective; we advocate, instead, caution, alongside a return to what we see as one of psychoanalysis’ genuinely significant contributions: a ‘‘disruptive’’ sensitivity that questions apparent truths in order to explore what constitutes them and what their ramifications might be.
C l i n i c a l p s y c h oa n a l y s i s This relates to a repeated trope suggesting that somehow the demands of clinical work can be a riposte to our advocacy of a disruptive mode of psychosocial practice. Paul Hoggett presents relational psychoanalysis as examining the affective communication ‘‘embodied in the notion of the transference–countertransference’’. Michael Rustin, rebutting our distinction (following Laplanche) between the therapeutic and analytic aspects of psychoanalysis, mounts a defence of the expert knowledge of psychoanalysts in treating ‘‘patients with serious difficulties’’. I agree but do not see what it has to do with our paper. Our position is that it is precisely in the arena of clinical activity that psychoanalysis is most firmly grounded; our argument is that the way the concepts developed in that situation are used in research, as if the situation were the same, not only does a disservice to psychoanalysis but also raises epistemological and practical problems. I would defend the approach of clinicians who engage with patients’ feelings, who focus carefully on transference and countertransference phenomena in the consulting room, and who try to act ethically to give their patients an experience of being recognized and understood. Clearly, the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis enables this approach. The situation of psychosocial studies, however, is different from that of clinical work, both as a mode of research (e.g., in the utility of its concepts in empirical investigations) and theoretically, as it lays out the nature of the ‘‘psychosocial subject’’. Additionally, the multiple ways in which psychoanalysis understands itself as a clinical phenomenon need to be held in mind; for example, Tony Jefferson’s argument that psychoanalysis is a ‘‘quest for meaning’’ reflects some psychoanalytic views but not others. Relational psychoanalysts as well as Lacanians might have a different version of the therapeutic process, and Freud himself did not use the word ‘‘understanding’’ in the passage Jefferson references, suggesting that Freud was not particularly focused on ‘‘meaning’’.
The discursive turn In various places, our paper seems to have been understood as opposing psychoanalysis and/or bio-psychosocial realism by positing a purely discursive understanding of subjecthood. This does not represent our position and is On Negative Critique: A Reply
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probably a function of the polarizing that has occurred, as well as of the way we describe criticisms of psychoanalytic understanding that come from discursive social psychologists. I have written quite extensively about the limits of language; I even titled one book After Words (Frosh, 2002), and I have no objection to approaches that understand subjectivity as rooted in embodied experience – a position routinely taken by psychoanalysis, as Paul Hoggett notes. The issue here, as with our related critique of interpretive work that remains on the axis of the ‘‘imaginary’’ (which I think has been misunderstood as a dismissal of attempts to understand anything outside language), is, rather, to find ways of querying things that are taken to be fixed kinds of knowledges, when they are more likely to be overdetermined, partial, and often obscure. Discursive approaches offer a helpful counter to speculations about internal events by showing how identity-accounts can be constructed from what might be called ‘‘surface’’ transactions (hence the opposition to the classical ‘‘depth’’ model), but noting that this is not the same as saying that nothing exists outside language.
Lacan ve r s us K l e i n This dichotomy appears strongly in the responses, for the obvious reason that we deploy Lacanian ideas as a way of unsettling the assumptions of Kleinian and object relational approaches as they appear in psychosocial studies. As readers of my work and of previous joint papers (e.g., Baraitser and Frosh, 2007) will realize, we do not identify ourselves as ‘‘Lacanians’’; instead, we see the critique of psychoanalytic certainty advanced in some Lacanian theory as productive in opening out areas that otherwise might be closed up too quickly. To take up a phrase of Tony Jefferson’s, the ‘‘points of disjunction’’ produced by reading one version of psychoanalysis against another is an important reminder that (as Paul Hoggett states) ‘‘psychoanalysis itself is not a unitary subject’’. To my mind, the critical application of Lacanian thought as a lever with which to unpack some of the assumptions of other modes of psychoanalysis is a helpful demonstration of how contested all claims to knowledge of unconscious phenomena should be; consequently, Lacanian theory redresses the temptation to use psychoanalysis as a totalizing expert system (which does not mean it is the only system that makes claims to expertise). However, the critical value of Lacanian theory does not rule out the use of other psychoanalytic approaches, such as that advanced by Laplanche, in debunking some of the apparent certainties of Lacan (Frosh and Baraitser, 2003), and it is not reducible to a straightforward opposition between ‘‘good’’ Lacanianism and ‘‘bad’’ Kleinianism, an opposition that would indeed be paranoid-schizoid in its structure.
I nn e r ver sus o u t e r wo r l d s Our paper advocates an understanding of the psychosocial that is not ‘‘hyphenated’’, that sees ‘‘inner’’ and ‘‘outer’’ as run through by a series of forces Stephen Frosh
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or perhaps by a field of force that constitutes them as domains that can be experienced as well as studied. The paradigm for such an understanding is not necessarily discursive or Lacanian; it could just as easily be Deleuzian or be theorized through the turn to affect. Our paper’s criticism of what happens in some psychosocial uses of psychoanalysis is not that the external world disappears but that it is colonized by the internal, and in so doing the dichotomy between the two is obscured but not erased. As is evident from Hoggett’s comparison of ‘‘sociological’’ and ‘‘clinical’’ approaches to his putative ‘‘social construct’’ patient, the choice of focus is tactical rather than absolute, and the task of theorizing a subject who is both agent and structure, both empowered and constructed by power (as Butler, 1997, considers it), is not one that can in this way be solved.
Critique I would like to finish by returning to Wendy Hollway’s response, and in particular the issue of negative critique. The hurtfulness of our paper seems in part to have been the terms in which it was couched, and I am certainly sorry for this. Without trying to justify it in a personal context, however, I do hold to what I have always understood as a kind of ‘‘analytic attitude’’ in which negativity is used as an important antidote to the tendency to seek illusory solutions. In recent years, I have come to understand this from within the framework of the Lacanian exposure of the ‘‘subject supposed to know’’, but it does not need this particular trimming to exist as an outcome of modernist and critical theory; and of course it is also closely connected to the ‘‘deconstructionist’’ turn that until recently was highly reputable. A shared perception of these disparate approaches is the difficulty of sustaining a position in which the ever-powerful pull of conformist ideology is resisted and the interests served by claims to knowledge are revealed. My impulse in thinking about psychosocial studies as a newly emerging discipline, or more optimistically as a transdisciplinary structure that can do more than just add the social to the psychological, is that it risks being co-opted into normative structures that reduce it to being the same as the approaches from which it has sought to distinguish itself. Psychoanalysis has at various times demonstrated similar tendencies towards conformism and has been kept alive mostly by the unsettling of its assumptions by sympathetic external critics. My book, ambivalently referenced by Michael Rustin, ends this way: In its second century, psychoanalysis is very much alive, but perhaps it needs to aim some more kicks at itself to make sure that it remains so. A good place to start would be with the reminder that when Freud introduced the notion of a dynamic unconscious, he brought a demon into the modern world which will not let anything alone, but which continually disrupts the things we take On Negative Critique: A Reply
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As a coda to this discussion, I think that quotation both states what I consider to be the difficulties and the promise of psychoanalysis in all its fields of activity, including psychosocial studies, and throws light on some of the dynamics of this mode of intellectual activity.
A b o u t th e a ut h o r Stephen Frosh is Pro-Vice-Master and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, and Head of the School of Psychosocial Studies there. His most recent books are Hate and the ‘‘Jewish Science’’: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2005), and For and Against Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2006).
Note 1 This panel took place in Oslo in the autumn of 2007 and was attended by one of the editors of PCS, whose interest in the debate spurred me to submit Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies to the journal.
Re fe r e n ce s Baraitser, L. and Frosh, S. (2007). Affect and Encounter in Psychoanalysis. Critical Psychology 21, pp. 76–93. Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Frosh, S. (1987). The Politics of Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan. Frosh, S. (1997). For and Against Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Frosh, S. (2002). After Words: The Personal in Gender, Culture and Psychotherapy. London: Palgrave. Frosh, S. (2005). Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’: Antisemitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave. Frosh, S. (2006). For and Against Psychoanalysis, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Frosh, S. (2007). Disintegrating Qualitative Research. Theory and Psychology 17, pp. 635–653. Frosh, S. and Baraitser, L. (2003). Thinking, Recognition and Otherness. The Psychoanalytic Review 90, pp. 771–789.
Stephen Frosh
