Articulating Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies: Limitations and Possibilities

Of the limitations and possibilities raised by Frosh and Baraitser's discussion of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, three themes are particularly deserving of further attention. The first concerns the epistemological and ethical break that divides psychoanalysis' clinical praxis from its role as a means of qualitative or interview methodology. The second deals with the status of psychoanalytic discourse as a touchstone of authority, as a “master's discourse.” Debating such problems opens up two possible routes of methodological enquiry: the potential of using psychoanalysis, following Parker (2008), as a means of subverting effects of mastery, individuality, and truth; and the idea of focusing on libidinal economy rather than on individual subjects when it comes to combining textual and psychoanalytic forms of analysis. The paper closes by discussing the notion of a trans-individual unconscious, proposing that psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies might find some common ground with reference to the Lacanian idea of the unconscious as the subjective locus of the Other.