Lisa Saville Young

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 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).

In this chapter, we explore the employment of psychoanalytic ideas in one important area of social research, narrative research, beginning with a discussion of the continuities between psychoanalytic thinking and the narrative turn, briefly reviewing selected work that has drawn on both these paradigms. We emphasise the way in which psychoanalysis provides conceptual and methodological tools for reinserting the focus on subjectivity, and in particular the affective dimensions of subjectivity, in the narrative domain. In the second part of the chapter, we provide a worked example of how psychoanalysis might be employed alongside a critical narrative focus to analyse an interview extract. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate, in an empirically grounded way, that bringing psychoanalysis into the frame alongside narrative work allows for the emergence of nuanced understanding and interpretation, while at the same time ‘interrupting’ – that is, offering a reflexive space for – the research project itself.

In summary, using psychoanalysis in qualitative studies involves conceptualising individuals as embedded in social and cultural contexts with socially acceptable and powerful ways of being, but also as individually orientated to these contexts, uniquely invested in discourses in different ways influenced by conscious and unconscious wishes. Such an approach requires thinking about narratives as dynamic processes mediated by, but not reducible to, personal biographies, relational events, linguistic repertoires and subjective experiences, and always holding onto some opacity in its resistance to be known.