{"title":"The coming triumph of the psychosocial perspective: lessons from the rise, fall and revival of Erich Fromm","authors":"N. Mclaughlin","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110871","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents the story of the rise, fall and revival of Erich Fromm, arguably the most important psychosocial thinker of the 20th century. Fromm was a major intellectual figure in the 1940s, 1940s and 1950s in a period of time when psychosocial work was growing in influence.\u0000 Work that continues in that tradition is outlined and the implications this story holds for the psychosocial school of thought is spelled out through given events in the world today (Trumpism and right wing nationalism in particular) that once again create space for psychosocial ideas. The\u0000 opportunities and the challenges faced today by the psychosocial perspective are discussed in light of the lessons that can be learned by looking at the earlier case of the rise and fall of Erich Fromm and the current global revival of interest in his theories. I conclude by offering some\u0000 thoughts on how elements of sectarianism have sometimes plagued the psychosocial perspective and how this can be avoided in the coming years as we look forward to the coming triumph of depth psychological perspectives in the social sciences.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"108 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77656512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Secondary authoritarianism ‐ the economy and right-wing extremist attitudes in contemporary Germany","authors":"O. Decker","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718111032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718111032","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay the thesis of a secondary authoritarian dynamic governing contemporary German society is presented. The author follows Sigmund Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary masses ‐ a leader as idealized object of the group members constitutes the first,\u0000 an abstract object produces the latter mass. To underpin his thesis the author argues with empirical findings of the longitudinal research project ‘Leipzig-Studies on Authoritarianism’ measuring right-wing extremist attitudes in the general German population since 2002 (until 2018\u0000 known as ‘Leipzig “Center”-Studies’). Those empirical findings and group discussions conducted in the same project point out that in post-fascistic German society, economic growth had a most prominent role. It was able to win this powerful position because its historical\u0000 roots were laid in Nazi Germany. The authoritarian dynamic under economic regression until today shows that the function of this secondary authoritarian object is still in power. If this thesis is correct, right-wing extremist attitudes give a deeper insight into modern societies as well as\u0000 into an individual’s prejudices.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91108786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Abjection, identity and the enigmatic message: embodied meanings and social constructions","authors":"M. Charles","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110916","url":null,"abstract":"Identity is built upon the early interactions with caretakers through whom we internalize a felt-sense of what it means to be ourselves, including values and judgments that have been passed along the generations. Psychoanalytic theory and the attachment literature help us to understand\u0000 some of the more subversive elements of that transmission process, ways in which unprocessed trauma and unresolved mourning provides a vehicle for passing along positive and negative aspects of personal, familial and cultural aspects of identity across the generations. Because that transmission\u0000 process directly impacts ways in which oppression and marginalization skew meanings for future generations, it is important that we consciously recognize and work with the projective processes as they play out in our children and in ourselves. In this paper, I discuss ways in which projection\u0000 and unprocessed shame can inhibit the type of active reflection required for ethical behavior and democratic process.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87413013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychosocial studies and the practice of psychology: a South African perspective","authors":"L. Young","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110970","url":null,"abstract":"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,\u0000 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\u0000 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\u0000 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\u0000 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\u0000 studies that draws on psychoanalysis in particular, illuminating that which is surprising, possibly ‘unconscious’, to both.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91276382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychosocial studies with psychoanalysis","authors":"S. Frosh","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110952","url":null,"abstract":"Psychosocial studies is methodologically and theoretically diverse, drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources. However, psychoanalysis has often taken a privileged position within this diversity, because of its well-developed conceptual vocabulary that can be put to use to theorise\u0000 the psychosocial subject. Its practices have become a model for some aspects of psychosocial work, especially in relation to its focus on intense study of individuals, its explicit engagement with ethical relations, and its traversing of disciplinary boundaries across the arts, humanities\u0000 and social sciences.This article begins with a brief description of some principles of psychosocial thinking, including its transdisciplinarity and criticality and its interest in ethics and in reflexivity. It then explores the place of psychoanalysis in this genealogy, presenting the\u0000 case for psychoanalysis’ continuing contribution to the development of psychosocial studies. It is argued that this case is a strong one, but that the critique of psychoanalysis from the discursive, postcolonial, feminist and queer perspectives that are also found in psychosocial studies\u0000 is important. The claim will be made that the engagement between psychoanalysis and its psychosocial critics is fundamentally productive. Even though it generates real tensions, these tensions are necessary and significant, reflecting genuine struggles over how best to understand the socially\u0000 constructed human subject.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75386078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unemployment: a psychoanalytic approach to families of unemployed workers","authors":"B. Mandelbaum","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110907","url":null,"abstract":"The author carried out a psychosocial study on the repercussions of unemployment in poor workers and their families, which involved psychoanalytically based observations and interventions with unemployed population attended at a Reference Center for Workers’ Health in a lower\u0000 middle class neighbourhood in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. After an initial discussion on unemployment as one of the drastic results of the contemporary forms of worldwide capitalism, and a presentation of some ideas concerning the contemporary debate on the relations between unemployment\u0000 and psychic life, she shows some findings of the research, through which she sustains that the immediate experience with the unemployed worker and his/her family adds to the theoretical conceptions on unemployment an organic dimension, the active aspect of each of the implicated ones. The\u0000 findings suggest that in face of the trauma provoked by the unemployment experience, the family tends to be the central nucleus of elaboration, the remaining territory for a personal re-organization of the new situational reality that unemployment generates, although it cannot meet the material\u0000 and emotional demands that were previously supplied, even though precariously, by the insertion in the work world.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80140110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychosocial approaches to mass hysteria phenomena: a case study in Mozambique","authors":"Carla Penna","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718111005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718111005","url":null,"abstract":"This article has two aims. First, it will provide an overview of hysteria and mass hysteria phenomena throughout history, by exploring the psychosocial elements underneath selected historical episodes such as medieval ‘dance plagues’ and ‘Loudun possessions’\u0000 (1632‐34), but also by presenting recent social-psychiatric and epidemiological case analysis on the topic. Second, it will present and discuss an episode of what could be described as mass hysteria, which occurred in 2010 in a secondary school in Maputo, Mozambique. Using psychoanalytic\u0000 and group analytic inputs, both aims will enable a suggestion as to the psychosocial aspects that lie underneath the referred episode. The article will also consider, although in the background, the role played by apparatuses of power and colonial discourses in shaping some of the analysis\u0000 and visions that mass hysteria portrayed in the case study may have acquired. A transdisciplinary perspective will allow a broader understanding of mass hysteria, highlighting the relevance of psychosocial approaches to investigations of collective phenomena.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87755411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feeling real and rehearsal for reality: psychosocial aspects of ‘forum theatre’ in care settings and prisons","authors":"L. Froggett, Laura Kelly-Corless, J. Manley","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110880","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses psychosocial aspects of a short drama module, drawing on observational research into the adaptation of ‘forum theatre’ by Odd Arts theatre company for people in educational, care and custodial settings. The course facilitated the enactment of life\u0000 experiences and choices, enhancing self-awareness and reflective capacity. The drama space is considered as ‘third space’, and a transitional space, where participants play with creative illusion in what Augusto Boal called a ‘rehearsal for reality’. We argue that the\u0000 use of third-space and third-position thinking is key to understanding forum theatre as a restorative practice both through rehearsal and in ‘playing for real’ before an audience ‐ a symbolic community that offers the opportunity for recognition. Problems attendant on the\u0000 performance of ‘false self’ arise where there is collusive avoidance of difficult issues because the value of forum theatre lies in the achievement of authorship and authenticity ‐ or ‘true self’ ‐ publicly performed and owned. It is this that allows individuals\u0000 to imagine the possibility of creative living in the future.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83264332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explorations and reflections: on envisioning the psychosocial clinical programmes at the School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, India","authors":"Honey Oberoi Vahali","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110989","url":null,"abstract":"In the early years of psychology’s history, creative thinkers in different pockets across the world experimented with innovative ways of envisioning the field of psychological enquiry. Over time, in its pursuit to establish for itself a status akin to that of the ‘natural\u0000 sciences’, psychology lost links with its introspective beginnings and came to be largely identified as a study of ‘human behavior’ and its effects. Since the last three decades, like other social scientists, psychologists too have gone through much creative tension. As a\u0000 consequence, marginal but extremely significant bodies of work have pressed for subjective, critical, cultural and non-Eurocentric modes of humanness to be considered as valid domains of psychological enquiry. The endeavour has been to outline the dimensions of a psychological human science\u0000 which is contextually sensitive, is in line with the spirit of decolonalization of knowledge and which can relate to the intricacies of the human unconscious. The present writing focuses on one such radical exploration in India in the recent past. It concerns itself with the envisioning and\u0000 setting up of the Psychosocial Clinical programmes at School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. The essay includes a brief account of intellectual influences on, and the past work history, of pioneers who imagined the Psychosocial Clinical axis in the Indian context. The writing\u0000 also focuses on the distinctive features of the Psychosocial Clinical perspective at the School of Human Studies, and on the methodological, practice oriented and pedagogical challenges and considerations in the training of a reflexive psychological practitioner, researcher and thinker.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82255271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Serbian reflective citizens and the art of psychosocial listening and dialogue at the caesura","authors":"M. Mojović","doi":"10.1332/147867319X15608718110934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867319X15608718110934","url":null,"abstract":"‘Serbian reflective citizens’ is a psychosocial community practice and a new discipline conceived in Belgrade amidst Yugoslavia’s ‘Horrible Nineties’ by Dr Marina Mojović (the author) and Dr Jelica Satarić, both psychiatrists and psychotherapists\u0000 in various Yugoslav public health psychiatric institutions. The therapeutic communities seemed to open a way for new paradigms to shed light and hope on overwhelming social despair, however, besides the Belgrade therapeutic community, ‘Serbian reflective citizens’ has a multitude\u0000 of roots and ancestors in professional and wider social communities.The author explains the development of ‘Serbian reflective citizens’ using a metaphor of caesura at birth, discussing the history and methodology, its grassroots style, numerous ancestors, ways (and spaces)\u0000 of being, its building blocks, names and other identity aspects of this new community practice and discipline, with particular mention of a recent example of a newly-formed reflective citizens branch in Italy. The mentioned caesura of birth is also considered by the author as a transitional\u0000 space, a place where, as Marina Abramović would say, ‘The artist is present’. The Northfield experiments are seen as transcending the caesura and, as such, particularly mentioned at the 2nd International Belgrade Conference on Reflective Citizens in 2014, ‘Learning\u0000 through Experience about Inclusion/Exclusion Phenomena in and between Traditions of Bion, Foulkes and Main’.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":"23 8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87381741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}