Psychoanalysis after the Turn: Relationality, Ontology and Ethics

Abstract

Amongst the many things that the cultural turn brought to social research was an interest in psychoanalysis. This can be traced from several theoretical and empirical directions, including post-structuralist concerns with language, which reflect an interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis (Coward and Ellis, 1977), postmodern evocations of identity fragmentation (e.g. Frosh, 1991), post-colonial explorations of identity construction (Hall, 1996; Khanna, 2004) and social critiques deploying psychoanalytic categories to offer ‘diagnoses’ of contemporary culture (most famously, Lasch, 1979). What was at stake here was not exactly a ‘turn’ to psychoanalysis from a position of having neglected it because, despite many ups and downs in the course of the last hundred years, psychoanalysis has never been completely absent from the social science agenda. However, it does represent something of a renewal, with a more sophisticated conceptual armoury and perhaps some more openness to influence in both directions – from psychoanalysis to the social sciences, and back again.KeywordsSocial TheorySocial ResearchSymbolic OrderSocial Science DisciplineEthical ViolenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.