Psychoanalysis and cultural studies in Britain

Abstract

This article explores the under-stated, shadowy but nevertheless significant role of psychoanalysis in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in Britain, whose development it reviews from the latter’s inception in 1964. It notes an early distance between the emerging social and political focus of Cultural Studies, and what were perceived to be the individualist and liberal perspectives of Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain. It points out that psychoanalytic perspectives and methods came to have a significant role in its later writing, as the Centre engaged with issues of gender and race, complementing its earlier focus on social class. It was through the Lacanian rather than British object relations tradition that psychoanalytic ideas were first taken up and incorporated into the CCCS’s complex Gramscian analyses of cultures, ideologies and ‘conjunctures’. The idea is proposed that Stuart Hall’s and the CCCS’s conception of culture as a source of creativity and agency, as well as of repression, is, however, consistent with the approach to meaning and symbolism of the British analytic tradition, and that there is scope for a further conjunction of these approaches.