What Difference Does the Psychosocial Make?

What Difference Does the Psychosocial Make?

The emergence of Psychosocial Studies in recent years is among the most exciting developments in the social sciences and humanities, urging the development of ways of thinking and researching that undermines conceptualising the psychological and social as discreet entities and processes, together with the boundaries between disciplines that reflect such a division of human experience and action. Yet many urgent and complex questions remain: In what ways is a psychosocial approach new? What does it entail methodologically and what is its theoretical genesis and scope? Does it offer any real advance on established ways of understanding individual experience and meaning-making; patterns of intersubjective interaction; dynamics of institutional life? Is its analytical power limited to investigations of micro-social interaction or can it be utilized in the service of bigger scale social and cultural analysis? If so, does it lead to a reinstatement of the very division between the psychological and sociological that it claims to refute? In other words: What Difference Does the Psychosocial Make?:- and to what and for whom?

This is the focus of this seminar. It seeks to engage this question via a series of substantive papers that take up questions of the social history of psychoanalysis as considered through research into the private life and domestic relationships of two key psychoanalysts and the question of narrative and truth as considered through research into post-second world war individual and collective memory of the Holocaust. These papers form the basis of general discussions addressing the issue of the specificity and contribution of the psychosocial.

This is the third in a series of seminars focussing on the psychosocial that have been organized by the Open University.

We think this will be an exciting and thought-provoking set of discussions and we hope that you will be able to join us and contribute