Lisa Saville Young

In this paper, we describe and demonstrate the value of adopting a psychosocial methodology to explore unique sexual socialisation experiences emphasising the role of reflexivity. Psychosocial methodology emerges from Psychosocial Studies, a “transdisciplinary” area interested in phenomena from “both” a social and personal perspective and in this paper is employed to investigate how sexual socialisation is shaped by psychological processes “and” social relations, and how these can be “thought together” (Frosh & Vyrgioti, 2022). Psychosocial data analytic strategies involve applying narrative and discursive psychology alongside psychoanalytic concepts to understand the possible reasons for a participant’s investment in particular discourses, understanding these investments as serving unique unconscious defensive purposes, alongside social functions. To illustrate this, we use data from a Free Association Narrative Interview with an isiXhosa-speaking “Black” socioeconomically disadvantaged woman in South Africa about her experiences of sexuality socialisation within her sister-sister relationship. We show how a psychosocial emphasis traverses traditional boundaries between discourse and affect, talk and experience, researcher and researched, moving across disciplinary spaces. Furthermore, we pay attention to what is frequently considered the background of research – the study context; the emotional quality of the interview encounter between the researcher and participant; the researchers’ relationship with one another and their contribution to both the data production and analysis. This emphasis on reflexivity in psychosocial methodology is consistent with the political and philosophical position of Psychosocial Studies that is critical of the reification of disciplinary knowledge.

We demonstrate the value of a rapprochement between psychoanalytic work aimed at supporting marginalized mothers and discursive accounts of low-income mothers, providing a psychosocial analysis of data from an interview study with six low-income South African mothers. Employing discourse analysis, we show how instrumental mothering is a dominant and precarious construction in these mothers’ talk. We use the concept of mentalization to track the affective work that accompanies the interactional emergence of this instrumental mothering discourse in a particular interview encounter. The implications of the research are discussed in the light of increasing demands for sociocultural responsive research and clinical practice.

Background: This paper describes findings from research conducted on students who participated in a service-learning course in South Africa. Objective The study aimed to understand how participants constructed their experiences of service-learning and to interrogate their emotional investments in these constructions.

Method: Data were collected and analyzed using a psychosocial methodology, consisting of discursive and psychoanalytic readings of interview transcripts, reflective journal entries, and researcher field notes.

Results: The discursive findings focus on how participants employed liberal traditional learning discourses to construct service-learning as linear resulting in subject positions that reinforced prejudices and the power structures supporting these. A psychoanalytic reading of the data suggests that participants invested in these constructions to defend against their own anxiety related to uncertainty and guilt about privilege in an unfamiliar context.

Conclusion: Students invest in liberal traditional discourses of service-learning for defensive reasons, which can be understood as arising from the intersubjective and social context in which the service-learning takes place.

Teaching Implications: Recognizing prejudice as emanating from anxiety generated by the affective work required for service-learning means thinking creatively about how to both contain and allow this affective work to take place in service-learning activities.

This chapter provides a description of the employment of narrative and discursive research in psychosocial studies, with a specific focus on the use of psychoanalysis alongside these qualitative research approaches. In describing this work, I identify a set of problems that have developed in this transdisciplinary space and discuss how these have both enriched and challenged the field of psychosocial studies. Firstly, there is the problem of which psychoanalysis to employ in our research practices, with different schools of psychoanalysis leading to different approaches to collecting and analyzing data. Secondly, there are ethical dilemmas that result from employing concepts developed in a clinical context for therapeutic purposes, in a research context for the purposes of producing knowledge. Thirdly, there is the problem of how to ‘pin down’ the slippery concept of the unconscious in a way that is still considered reliable and valid research practice. Fourthly, there is the danger of losing the disruptive power of psychosocial studies, as an emphasis on the social context gives way to a more relational focus. In the second half of the chapter, I describe my own psychosocial approach to an interview extract demonstrating one way of employing psychoanalysis alongside discursive research, and one way of negotiating the problems already described. Central to my approach is the employment of reflexivity to ensure that the researcher is also understood to be a co-constructor of the data, and just as implicated in its analysis as the participant. I conclude by pointing to areas requiring further development, imagining the horizons of narrative and discursive research within psychosocial studies.

This paper reports on findings from a psychosocial study of maternal subjectivity of working mothers in a scarcely resourced community in South Africa. The study involved using the Free Association Narrative Interview method to interview six mothers to explore how and why maternal subjectivity is constructed discursively and defensively in their talk. The findings point to how these particular mothers employ an instrumental mothering discourse to construct ‘good’ mothering as ensuring the thriving and survival of the baby’s body. Drawing on extracts from interviews we show how the mothers in this study emphasised the infant as primarily a physical body and the environment as dangerous and depriving. We demonstrate how this talk enables these women to position themselves as ‘good’ mothers on the one hand, but that this position is constantly under threat. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this talk can be understood as defensive, protecting mothers and the researcher from feelings of anxiety and loss. We also argue, however, that there is a danger of this psychoanalytic reading serving its own defensive function – a denial of the faults of the social system. The article ends by discussing the implications of these findings for psychoanalytically informed interventions in scarcely resourced communities.

This chapter aims to describe the psychology of nonbelonging through co-constructed accounts by informal settlement residents who belong – yet also struggle to not belong – to ‘non-places’ such as the informal settlement. It illustrates how (non)belonging is performed as unspoken affective senses of place that are resonant in narratives. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, the chapter contributes to an expanded conceptualisation of ‘senses of place’ by showing that we also perform place belonging in an ‘unconscious’ sense – beyond our discursive performances (place identity) or expressed feeling states (place attachment). This epistemological stance highlights senses of place belonging as coordinated via an unspoken social contract with the hovering interlocutor (Other), who offers the navigational cues to situate where we are (place) and to define who we are (identity).

Background: When there is a lack of resources in the community to support deinstitutionalisation, the siblings of an individual with a mental illness are the ones who are the most affected and vulnerable. Nevertheless, sibling care work is still largely unacknowledged in the mental health sector in low- and middle-income countries.

Aim: This article describes and interprets the lived experiences of 'black' isiXhosa-speaking individuals having a sibling with a mental illness, to shed light on how mental health professionals might support and sustain the involvement of individuals in the treatment and care of their sibling.

Setting: The study was conducted in a semi-rural town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Methods: The study employed a qualitative research design using interpretative phenomenological analysis as the research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed.

Results: The findings present interview extracts which give voice to participants' experiences of financial burden, social burden and stigma, and of engaging with psychiatric treatment while providing care for their mentally ill sibling. Findings also highlight the positive aspects of caring for a sibling with a mental illness.

Conclusion: This study specifically highlights the gendered nature of care work and siblings' increased understanding of mental illness by virtue of their relationship with their brother or sister, thereby possibly pointing to sibling relationships as valuable relational resources for challenging stigma. The study findings suggest that calls for greater cooperation between healing belief systems should include dialogue with western religious belief systems alongside traditional healing belief systems.

Considerable research has been devoted to understanding and promoting parent-child sexual socialisation. Less attention has been paid to experiences of sibling interactions concerning sex. Drawing on discursive psychology, this study explores how women report interacting about sex and reproduction in their sisterly relationships. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, using Free Association Narrative Interview technique, with five Black isiXhosa-speaking, middle-aged and working class women in South Africa. Findings show that the participants construct their sisterly interactions concerning sex drawing on three interpretative repertoires: silence; safety and secrecy; risk and responsibilisation. The silence repertoire constructs sex talk between sisters as vague and non-viable. Within the safety and secrecy repertoire, sisters are constructed as sharing sexual secrets and providing a safe space for sexual exploration. The risk and responsibilisation repertoire is deployed when understandings of 'proper' feminine behaviour and sexual purity are breached, with sisters emphasising the importance of avoiding risk and acting responsibly. Thus, alongside encouraging the expression of women's agency in relation to sexuality, sisters potentially join a patriarchal policing and the shaming of women's sexuality. These contradictory repertoires have implications for sexual health programmes and interventions targeted at family communication about sex.

This paper is concerned with the significance of raced experience, and whiteness in particular, as one facet of the emerging identities of trainee clinical psychologists in South Africa, and with adding to the existing literature in this area from a psychosocial perspective. This psychosocial perspective is broadly informed by social constructionism and psychoanalytic thinking reflecting a growing psychoanalytic interest in the intra- as well as inter-personal significance of socio-political processes. As part of this psychoanalytic emphasis, we employ the concept of mentalization to think about modes of psychic experience, in relation to race, as facilitated by different kinds of discursive practices or particular ways of talking. Analysing an interview encounter with a white trainee clinical psychologist highlights a discourse of ‘racial innocence’, which constructs the speaker as being free of racial enculturation, eliding a broader social context. We argue that this discourse may be understood in terms of a pretend mode of experience, where aspects of the wider social context and of race are experienced as being unrelated to intimate personal experience. The implications of this talk and mode of experiencing for clinical work are discussed, as is the importance of understanding the talk as co-constructed in the research context. The analysis highlights the complexity of our raced subjectivities, pointing to the need for ongoing work in relation to race within psychology, and in particular within professional psychology training programmes.

In this paper I explore the relationship between psychosocial studies and the practice of psychology, with a view to considering how each might enhance the other. The first part of this paper reviews existing work within psychosocial studies on applied practice internationally. Thereafter, the ways in which psychosocial studies has been taken up in the South African context is briefly described, before turning to a contextual overview of the status of applied psychology in this context. I argue that, given South Africa’s high levels of poverty and unequal access to mental health resources, novel ways of providing psychological services is needed and this is where psychosocial studies and a responsive practice of applied psychology might be enlivened together. The second part of this paper therefore describes a service-learning course for fourth year psychology students, and caregivers and their children with physical disabilities, as an exemplar of this responsive psychosocial practice. The teaching philosophy that guides the delivery of the course as well as the course content are described, both underpinned by a psychosocial framework. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on two major tenets of this psychosocial framework and how these are articulated in the service learning. I argue that a mutually beneficial relationship exists in bringing together applied psychological practice, in its less traditional sense, and a psychosocial studies that draws on psychoanalysis in particular, illuminating that which is surprising, possibly ‘unconscious’, to both.