How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? When this is the question of an empirical research project, it poses methodological challenges: how can research bring to light such experience, and how can identity change be documented, conceptualised and written about? Nineteen women's lives populate this book, as they become mothers for the first time, each unique and all having much in common amidst the diversity of East London. Through in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a...

Offering a uniquely 'psycho-cultural' take on the emotional dynamics of UK political culture this book uses theories and research in psychoanalysis, cultural and media studies and political sociology. It explores the cultural and emotional processes that shape our relationship to politics in a media age, referencing Joanna Lumley to Nigel Farage.

Psychosocial studies challenges the traditions of psychology and sociology from a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective. The book reflects this agenda in its varied theoretical and empirical strands, producing a newly contextualised and restless body of understanding of how 'psychic' and 'social' processes intertwine.

This book reveals the workings of the bourgeois passion for submission in a variety of contemporary contexts. By (re)introducing the concept 'bourgeois' as an analytical term and describing this contemporary subject as a psychic economy rather than just as a social class, Panu shows the intractability of contemporary forms of enjoyment and neoliberalism's periodic outbursts of aggressiveness to be connected by a recurrent circuit of trauma and anxiety originating in the bourgeois subject's difficult relationship with symbolic authority.So far, most anticapitalist and decolonial struggles in...

Psychosocial studies challenges the traditions of psychology and sociology from a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective. The book reflects this agenda in its varied theoretical and empirical strands, producing a newly contextualised and restless body of understanding of how 'psychic' and 'social' processes intertwine.

This book examines how people cannot escape being tainted, whether actively engaged or not, by violence in its countless manifestations. The essays encompass a wide range of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and geo-political areas. They describe how images and fragments of traumatic and violent scenarios are transported from one generation's unconscious to that of another, leading to cycles of repetition and retaliation, restricting the freedom to imagine alternatives and inhabit alternative positions. The authors all work within a psychosocial framework by unsettling the...

This book explores the concept of certainty, a term which is widely used in everyday language to designate a psychological experience or feeling but is rarely considered controversial or politically charged.

This book brings together the work of scholars and writer-practitioners of psychoanalysis to consider the legacy of two of Sigmund Freud's most important metapsychological papers: 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (1914) and 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917 1915]). These twin papers, conceived in the context of unprecedented social and political turmoil, mark a point in Freud's metapsychological project wherein the themes of loss and of psychic violence were becoming incontrovertible facts in the story of subject formation. Taking as their concern the difficulty of setting apart the 'inner'...

This book breathes new life into the study of liminal experiences of transition and transformation, or `becoming'. Of transdisciplinary scope, it will appeal beyond psychosocial studies and social psychology to all scholars interested in the interface between experience and social (dis)order.