Psychoanalysis has always had a closer relationship with the psychosocial than commonly acknowledged. Many of Freud’s own writings explicitly engage with issues such as religion, war, sexuality, and the pitfalls of sociality. And social themes abound in various iterations of post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought. By emphasizing the struggle between destructiveness and the propensity for love and reparation, Melanie Klein offered an account of human subjectivity that is both psychological and sociological. And D. W. Winnicott discussed democracy in relation to both the family and the larger society. Historians and psychosocial theorists have appraised Klein’s and Winnicott’s contributions to the formation of social democracy in Britain during the modern era. Indeed, from the beginning, psychoanalysis has been frequently engaged with the sociopolitical world.
Yet certain tensions between the intrapsychic and the psychosocial have also increased over time. Few psychoanalysts enter the public sphere directly to engage with social issues. For the most part, their interventions are applications of psychoanalytic models to social phenomena. Many analysts are still reluctant to consider closely the implications of war, neoliberalism, violence against women, colonialism, racism and racial oppression, climate destruction, and technological determinism in theorizing the psychoanalytic subject.
Almost a century after Freud and Einstein discussed the causes of war, my colleagues and I in the Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies Department at the University of Essex seek to enhance attention to the psychosocial dimension of psychoanalysis and the relation between interior life and sociality. The curriculum of the BA in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (BAPPS) includes a number of undergraduate modules in which we pursue new ways of making psychoanalytic sense of the social world.
Unlike most psychoanalytic training curricula, which locate the origins of subjectivity in infancy, the psychosocial studies approach begins with the social world, with all of its visible and invisible forms of power, into which the infant is born and in which subjectivization occurs. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, this approach critiques the too-exclusive focus in much psychoanalytic theory on the world of early infancy and the mother-infant relationship as the foundation of subjectivity.
Students benefit from this approach in a variety of ways. As program director, I assign undergraduate dissertation supervisors. Early in each autumn term, students submit a dissertation “topic form” that outlines their research interests, helping me to assign the most appropriate supervisor. In recent years, especially, these undergraduate dissertation topics have reflected students’ deeply felt political commitments and ideals. Traditionally, dissertations have focused on rather generic topics related to childhood trauma, narcissism, parenthood, and the psychology of abusive relationships. But in more recent years, students have opted for greater specificity and urgency—for example: the relationship between breast-feeding, disgust, and the maternal; the relation of far-right ideologies to psychoanalytic ideas about belief; femininity and social media; the lived experience of racial violence; and transactional relationships and the male gaze on the OnlyFans platform.
In turn, BAPPS faculty members conduct their own research. Dr. Magda Schmukalla, for instance, considers how pro-abortion politics is often wrongly associated with restoring the subject’s lost sense of authority and sovereignty over their own body. Instead, she proposes that abortions point to subjectivity as being never entirely “individual” or “separate.” Abortions, she writes,
help us conceptualise a subject that is vulnerable, contradictory, and haunted by the unknown or unrealised possibilities of being that fall through a person’s and society’s sense of subjecthood and yet are real. [They] actualise a subject that is not defined by independence but by her entanglement with the maternal and with this with processes prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract. (2024, 663)
Both faculty and students in BAPPS explore and seek to fortify the complex and often conflicted relation between psychoanalysis and social theory, expanding and extending the radical implications of psychoanalytic knowledge. And most BAPPS faculty members are also trained psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic psychotherapists, which allows them to bring their clinical experience to bear on the various tensions that arise between academic and clinical work.
We continue to develop our curriculum in three ways:
The first is through modules focused on the works of psychoanalytic trailblazers such as Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan. These modules provide a solid theoretical and conceptual foundation, while also contextualizing and critically interrogating these foundations.
The second is through modules that place psychoanalysis in dialogue with literature, film, and popular culture. Unlike approaches that seek to “apply” psychoanalysis to cultural objects—sometimes even positing psychoanalysis as a “master” discourse of incontestable truths—these interdisciplinary modules encourage students to think about phenomena such as melancholia, narcissism, sadism, intergenerational trauma and hauntings, racism, ageism, sexism, and misogyny by focusing on what happens at the threshold between the intrapsychic and the sociocultural.
The third is through modules that exemplify lateral ways of thinking psychosocially. For example, the first-year module on “The Psychosocial Imagination” introduces students to such themes as consumerism, surveillance, social media, aging, gender and sexuality, and family life, while eschewing Western dualism, developmentalism, evolutionism, and hetero-patriarchal typologies. Other second year modules, such as “Care, Intimacy, Vulnerability,” teach psychosocial theories of relationality and dependence and the way these phenomena intersect with domestic economies, racialized labour, and global care-chains. In this module, student discussions often center on the status of need in contemporary Western societies—needs reflected in the skyrocketing demand for caregivers and mental healthcare workers, even as these professions are being devalued. One of the module’s early readings is Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), and students often find that this treatise on the modern family, monogamy, patriarchy, and the oppression of women offers valuable insights into their own experiences of family dynamics, while also helping them to critique the implicit and explicit heteronormative biases of psychoanalysis itself.
Other modules include: “Violence,” which explores various manifestations of violence in the clinic (e.g., aggression and “anti-social behaviour”) and situates violence in socio-political contexts of bigotry, hate speech, acts of exclusion and discrimination, and regional and global conflicts; and “Madness and its Cure,” which interrogates the concept of “cure” through an investigation of narratives of recovery and historical, social, and psychoanalytic debates about the goals of mental health treatment.
British psychoanalytic theorist and feminist theorist Parveen Adams has characterized the contribution of psychoanalytic education as making space for a “third reality,” along with biological and social realities:
Social science students are often set essays which they dutifully deliver in terms of the naturalness of sex and the constructed nature of gender. The biological and the sociological present little difficulty for social science students; they know what’s what. Sex can be thought of in biological terms; gender can be thought of in sociological terms. To introduce psychoanalytic theory is to complicate things because we have to make room for one more reality, this time psychical reality. (1996, 27)
Indeed, the potential benefits of psychosocial studies extend beyond academic settings to the psychoanalytic profession itself. As many of our teacher-scholars have observed, psychoanalysis has never been immune to the influence of the authoritarian, racist, and misogynist contexts in which it emerged and has continued to develop. In The Political Clinic (2024), BAPPS faculty member Carolyn Laubender challenges the well-established notion of clinical neutrality by demonstrating the impossibility of practicing psychoanalysis in ways that sidestep contemporary politics. Similarly, in their “Manifesto for Infrastructural Thinking” (2024), BAPPS faculty members Raluca Soreanu and Ana Minozzo draw on ethnographic research on free clinics to argue that it is only by destabilizing and deconstructing the hegemony of psychoanalytic institutions that a more fully emancipatory psychoanalytic practice can be realized.
Ultimately, psychosocial studies programs like BAPPS foster the critical interrogation of psychoanalysis in the classroom, the consulting room, and the clinic, challenging its status as a master discourse, reconceiving it as a restructured resource for the welfare of all people, and helping to illuminate its further potential in the service of social justice.
Works cited
Adams, Parveen. 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge.
Laubender, Carolyn. 2024. The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schmukalla, Magda. 2024. “Living Prior Being.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies. Ed. Stephen Frosh, Marita Vyrgioti, and Julie Walsh. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 651-66.
Soreanu, Raluca, and Ana Minozzo. 2024. “Manifesto for Infrastructural Thinking: Living with Psychoanalysis in a Glitch.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 29: 323–342.
