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In the post-war period, psychoanalytic theory has seen a significant paradigm shift from the drive-based individual of traditional Freudian theory to an emphasis on the importance of relationships for understanding individual agency (Aron; Benjamin, 1 Bonds; Ogden). A core proposition of this relational psychoanalysis can be summed up in the phrase unconscious intersubjectivity, by which is meant the unconscious dynamics that work between people to constitute their experiences of self, others, and their capacity to act in the world. In this paper we use the case study of one heterosexual couple, Juliet and Billy, in order to explore and develop the potential of this principle of unconscious intersubjectivity in research into relationships. Specifically, we argue that it helps us to unravel certain paradoxes which emerge in the accounts produced from two interviews with each person.
The interviews were gathered during a study of gender differences in the fear of crime on one high-crime and one low-crime public housing estate in the north of England.1 One thing that became clear in our research was that the general term “fear of crime” was misleading: people fear particular crimes, and in the case of Juliet and Billy, we focus on burglary and on their shared fear of Juliet being the victim of a sexual crime.
Following from our relational psychoanalytic starting point, we reasoned that, in the case of heterosexual couples, their different relations to fear of crime might have to do with the complex intersubjective dynamics of living in a highly gender-differentiated world. Specifically, we expected that the discourses and patriarchal relations contributing to fear of crime offer up different positions to men and women: broadly speaking, fear for women and the capacity to protect for men. However, discursive explanations of this type have been criticized for not acknowledging the role of an active subject. In our framework, we ask what motivates the take-up of