Psychology After Psychoanalysis: Psychosocial Studies and Beyond

Why is psychoanalysis now re-emerging as a sub-discipline inside psychology? What is the value of using psychoanalytic ideas to develop psychosocial research? How does psychoanalysis tackle the relation between the individual and society? This volume includes a clear account of psychoanalysis, and the different varieties of the approach that are at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. It explores its status as a series of concepts and as a methodology, and shows how its clinical practice is crucial to the way that it operates now in academic practice. The book thus provides the reader with access to lines of debate currently occurring inside psychoanalysis, with discussion of its relation to 'critical psychology', 'psychosocial research', the 'health professions', 'culture' and 'social theory'.

A brief commentary introducing each paper draws out key themes that are outlined in the introduction and returned to in the course of the book. Each specific intervention is thus able to function as a separate argument and as part of an introduction and overview of psychoanalytic ideas for psychologists. This book is titled Psychology after Psychoanalysis to emphasise the impact of Freudian and post-Freudian arguments on the discipline, and the changing ways many of us now approach subjectivity as a result of those ideas.