Discourse analysis and psychoanalysis

2013

From the critic’s analysis of the author to the text’s analysis of the critic and from thepsychoanalysis of literature to the literature of psychoanalysis, what this paper seeks to offer is a dynamic perspective on the ways in which psychoanalytic criticism expanded and developed novel ways of approaching the literary text. It looks to show how the psychoanalytic reading of literary texts has been perpetually repositioning and reconsidering itself, how the roles between the object and the subject of analysis have been reversed and how the function of interpretation has shifted from a tool of diagnosis to a complex relation between text and interpreter. The main changes in the field are explored in light of three key themes: the perspective on the unconscious in literary study, the roles of the instances involved in the analytical/critical praxis and the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. After reviewing the previous models of critical analysis and their shortcomings, the focus is then turned towards some of the newer developments in the field. The examples from various types of critical readings serve to illustrate, not only the openness of this interdisciplinary approach, but also the plurality which characterizes it.

2008

This paper reviews research that utilises language-based analyses (narrative analysis, discourse analysis and conversation analysis) to examine aspects of subjectivity in the context of psychotherapy. The studies reviewed fall broadly into two main groups. On the one hand, studies which share a view of subjectivity as the sum of internal 'voices' in dialogue adopt a narrative approach, examine subjectivity in terms of organisation, coherence and self-reflection, and consider psychotherapy a process of restoring an organised polyphony. On the other hand, studies which conceptualise sub-jectivity in terms of 'subject positions' adopt a discursive approach, emphasise the availability of subject positions and flexibility in adopting them and examine psychotherapy as a process of facilitating the flexible adoption by the client of a variety of subject positions. Theoretical, epistemo-logical and methodological issues regarding each of the two approaches are discussed, along with representative studies. We finally examine the implications of these two approaches for understanding psychotherapeutic practice and for theorising and researching subjectivity. In recent years, there has been a flourishing of qualitative research in the study of psychotherapy process (Frommer & Rennie, 2000; McLeod, 2001; Toukmanian & Rennie, 1992). In this paper, we focus on a subsection of qualitative research and review studies that utilise language-based analyses, i.e. conversation, discourse and narrative analysis (McLeod, 2001), to examine therapy talk. More specifically, we examine and evaluate how subjectivity has been theorised and analysed in the context of language-based analysis of psychotherapy. Our aim is twofold: on the one hand, we aim to review and critically evaluate the contribution of language-based analyses of therapy to our understanding of the construction of subjectivity in therapy, which we consider to be an important aspect of therapeutic work, and, on the other hand, to utilise this research to further discussions regarding subjectivity from a language-based perspective. In this review, we discuss studies that utilise language-based analyses to study therapy sessions and that explicitly study aspects of subjectivity. Correspondingly, we have chosen not to include analyses of psychotherapy which only implicitly deal with issues related to subjectivity, as well as studies that theorise psychotherapy from a narrative or construc-tionist perspective but do not analyse actual psychotherapy sessions. We focus on subjec-tivity here because discussions regarding subjective experience and one's sense of self are central both to psychotherapeutic theory and practice and to narrative and constructionist approaches in psychology. In line with social constructionist views of therapy, we assume that psychotherapy constitutes an institutional practice, which occupies a significant position in late modernity, that both reflects dominant cultural views regarding 'selfhood' and also provides theories that further define these views and practices that implement them

Review of Communication

One of the grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis can be read as a genre of speculative discourse that, recognizing the force of living speech, places itself in competition with philosophy and rhetoric. Performative through and through, it uncovers the ambiguity of meaning as it flows from speakers to addressees who stand to the former as more than themselves. Given its emphasis on language and the pragmatic contexts in which analytic discourse acts to establish and recreate reality, psychoanalysis bears undeniable affinity to rhetoric and, by extension, communication studies and media studies. This themed issue assembles four essays that explore the productive potentials of psychoanalysis to rhetoric and communication studies, and vice versa. Taken together, they demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic perspectives to rhetorical inquiries, especially when they respond to rhetoric's original vocation as technê and epistêmê.

Revista PsicoFAE: Pluralidades em Saúde Mental, 2021

The interview centres on Ian Parker's book Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography. London: Routledge (2019). In this publication Parker provides an account of psychoanalysis and history, situating his own biography. In this critical analysis of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Parker explores key psychoanalytic concepts based on Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, through a biographical journey. Parker brings important contributions to a critical view on psychoanalytic theory and practice, exploring deadlocks of psychoanalytic theories and insights towards subjectivity. Interwiever: First of all, thank you very much for participating in the interview. We could start by talking about your book Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2019), which brings important insights into psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly on the contributions from Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and Marxist perspectives for critical perspectives in and outside psychoanalysis. Ian: What you have been describing are all of the things that are in the book, and I think the first thing to say is that the book, is one book simply focusing on psychoanalysis, there is going to be another book that will be published next year that will be focused on psychology. I think those are two very difficult questions for us here in Britain. I am not sure whether the same applies for you in Brazil, but in Britain the discipline of psychology usually treats psychoanalysis as a strange subspeciality and usually gets Freud out of the way in the first year of the degree, and then there are studies of developmental psychology, neuro psychology, cognitive psychology, etc., etc. without any references to psychoanalysis. So, that's one thing, psychoanalysis, which we are focusing on in this book, is a study and experience of human subjectivity in the practice of care in the clinic that has operated usually outside the discipline of psychology and usually outside the universities. So, I'm focusing on the way that I encountered psychoanalysis, the way that I trained in psychoanalysis, and I look at the limitations of psychoanalysis as an epistemological framework to comprehend political matters and matters that psychology should be concerned with.

In the following essay I’m going to take a radical position concerning the tendency to eliminate psychoanalysis from the European Academic field and the failure of psychoanalysts and relational therapists to defend psychoanalysis from such aggression. My question is why in Italy—just to make a local example, which I am involved in—different kinds of psychoanalytical traditions are not able to defend themselves from this attack while in France, for another example, all the different branches of relational therapies have been able to unite in making a common effort to take a position for psychoanalysis. One of the main problems, in my opinion, concerns the constitutive marginality of psychoanalysis in relation to Academic Institutions. In my way of writing, I will use psychoanalysis, with “P” in capital character, when referred to Academia, and psychoanalysis, with no capital character, when referred to clinical practice. Keywords Psychoanalysis, Academy, Transmission, Subject, Relationship, Epistemology, Ontology

Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2003

The recent preponderance of discursive or social constructionist approachesso currently popular within the critical social sciences, humanities and artsseems to call for a rival ontology, so as to delimit the analytical field of the discursive. The primary theoretical challenge of this paper is to do just this, to think, psychoanalytically, an ontological domain that both precedes, and exists in opposition to the discursive, that is, to the realm of language and the symbolic. The body and corporeality prove to be key players in this argument given that it is here, as puts it that we confront an "underground resistance from the boundary of the discursive empire" (p. 219). This body, as problem to representation, is able to induce a variety of disturbing experiences, reactions of dread, horror and nausea -reactions which typically mark the confrontation of discursive limits, arising at particularly those moments where signification fails and meaning collapses. These affects, along with the role of the body as limit-case of social or discursive meaning can variously be understood as the effects of the uncanny (in Freud), of the abject (in Kristeva), or the Real (in Lacan). A careful reading of these theories -across which a single explanatory trajectory may be traced -enables one to speculative about both the conditions of possibility for the speaking subject (and their significatory practices), and, by the same token, about the conditions of impossibility for this subject (and their ability to signify).

2020

Two interviews were then granted by Prof. Glynos, one of them focusing on the Critical Fantasy Studies research programme he is developing and here the reader will find the second one, focused on Glynos's own intellectual trajectory, his engagement with discourse theory and psychoanalysis (expressed in his dialogue with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek) and a discussion of methodological aspects of the logics framework developed by him and David Howarth (also from the University of Essex). Particular attention will be given to the relation between the logics of equivalence and difference, on the one hand, and the three meso-level logics put forward by Glynos and Howarth, as the social, political and fantasmatic logics. Glynos is also asked to ponder on how the latter relate to one another, especially in contexts of empirical work, around the question of problematization. The interview was conducted by Joanildo Burity and Gustavo Oliveira, at the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation. Joanildo Burity (JB): Maybe the obvious thing, Jason, would be to ask you to say a little bit about how you came to Discourse Theory and, you know, how did your thinking develop around the theoretical impact of discourse theory? Jason Glynos (JG): Well, my interest in discourse theory really emerged back in the early 90s. That was at a time when I was studying law and thinking specifically about the ideology of law and how judges and lawyers reasoned. Questions were being raised about identity: gender and sexual identities, minority identities -including Native American identities -and so on. It was a big thing in the early 90s. Perspectives in Law was a theme and a set of courses introduced at UBC [University of British Columbia] and other universities at the time, responding to a growing awareness and interest in social movements and associated demands. Many were increasingly aware of and registering certain difficulties in translating some of these progressive demands and perspectives into law and policy. And so, I -like many others -became increasingly interested in what it was that made things so difficult to change, why transformation appeared so 'inertial'. Maybe you could say that these issues were more obvious and visible in law, because law tends to be rather conservative in its operation and orientation, building as it does on precedent and incremental change. Nevertheless, it opened up a set of questions for me about the nature of judgment-making, the character of meaning and identity, and their conditions of transformation. And so it was in this period that I became exposed to ideas associated with postmodernism, deconstruction, critical legal studies, and proper names like Foucault, Derrida, Butler, and so on. It was at that time that I also became exposed to the post-marxist ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, through their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS). (HSS, published in 1985, is considered to be one of the founding texts of their brand of discourse theory. Their work as a whole, alongside other scholarly outputs that their work has inspired, have served to 'found' the so-called Essex School in Discourse Theory.) I was introduced to this book by Joel Bakan -a professor at my Law School -and I was immediately struck by how this short, dense volume could make so much sense out of the developments unfolding before my eyes -in terms of identity, socialist strategy and radical democracy. And so, I became interested in pursuing these ideas more fully. And so -getting back to your question about discourse theory and how I became interested in it -well, in a nutshell, and in retrospect, it was about finding a vocabulary with which to make sense of the difficulties of transformation and the conditions of transformation -legal, economic, and political, transformation. And so I resolved to engage more systematically with discourse theory after attending UBC Law School. At the suggestion of Chantal -whom I had met at that time in Vancouver, while she was on one of her North American lecture tours -I left for the University of Essex to study under the supervision of Ernesto Laclau. That was, I would say, in broad brush strokes, how I became interested in discourse theory, and how I ended up in Essex. Now you teach at Essex. How do you see your own role in the development of political discourse theory and in the Essex School of Discourse Theory? JG: I would say that one of the key reference points for me, right from the outset, from when I first arrived at Essex had to do with questions around psychoanalysis: the role the psychoanalytic dimension in discourse theory played or could play. Actually, it was another professor at UBC who influenced me a great deal -Joseph Smith -who set me on this path. He was an expert in tort law, but he also ran some of the modules in the Perspectives in Law programme I mentioned earlier, and, crucially, introduced me to psychoanalytic jurisprudence, which I know is an ugly term. Basically, it JB: Yes, Freud's "Psychology of masses"... JG: Indeed. Exactly. And debates linked to Tarde, Le Bon, and so on. And there is also the idea of radical investment -which is also present beforehand, and which resonates with some ideas in psychoanalysis, for example, the idea of affect. And the important distinction he makes between ethical moment on the one hand and the 'normative-descriptive complex' on the other. JB: That's right. JG: These ideas reinforce the point about how psychoanalysis took on an increasingly significant role in the development of discourse theory over several decades. Yes, but then adding to that, what difference do you think you are making to this discussion? JG: It's very funny, because we had lots of conversations with Ernesto about this, especially with my fellow research student at the time and later close colleague, Yannis Stavrakakis, who -as you know