Undoing the Self & Undoing the Social: A Discussion

Self & Social: Discussion 1
UNDOING THE SELF & UNDOING THE SOCIAL: A DISCUSSION
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Self & Social: Discussion 2
Undoing the Self & Undoing the Social: A Discussion
I. UNDOING THE SELF
Typically, disciplines evolve and shift interest informed by underlying changes in research methods, emerging insights and sociopolitical agendas. Tracing psychology as a discipline in Britain, Walkerdine (2008) argues for a discursive shift in psychology, accelerated by structuralism and post-structuralism, away from a psychoanalysis to a psychosocial focus. The normalization in psychoanalysis, explains Walkerdine, coupled by a more critical social and cultural shift in psychology and sociology, has dissipated much attraction away from psychoanalysis as a major discipline to understand self and state of social being to a wider psychosocial discipline assuming more prominence in British academia. This presentation of psychology's evolution, so to speak, by Walkerdine uncovers a major irony about assumptions proponents of a psychological discipline adopt. Specifically, whilst proponents of a psychosocial discipline emphasize a more critical understanding of self and state of social being away form arbitrary normalizations of psychoanalysis, such emphasis is, ironically, embedded in ideological and politicized assumptions informed, inevitably, by wider cultural and social contexts – as is noted by Walkerdine comparing psychological studies in Britain and USA. The shift from a “pure” psychoanalysis to differential forms of “psychological” and “social” concepts adopted just as differentially at British universities is, accordingly, one strongly believes, not so much about an actual de-normalization of “unnecessary” ideological and political baggage in psychoanalysis. This shift is, instead, yet a different layer of conceptualization simply setting aside one set of assumptions in an earlier discipline, i.e. psychoanalysis, and emphasizing new sets of assumptions from a different perspective. The article's closure captures ingeniously such
Self & Social: Discussion 3
paradox – and, for that matter, irony – of such shift:
Obviously, since psychoanalysis is a broad church and not straightforwardly compatible with social scientific fieldwork, there is a great deal of room for debate about method, and, in effect, about both what it means to ...