Only Connect: The Auto/biographical, Psychosocial Imagination in Researching Lives

This chapter derives from a commitment to building interdisciplinary understanding, with particular reference to psychological, especially psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives in researching learning and learning lives (see West et al. 2007). There is a clear echo here of C.Wright Mills' (1970) call to consider, imaginatively, biography as a meeting point between historical forces and intimate lives, structuring processes in society and struggles for human agency. Psychoanalytic perspectives can enrich such an endeavour: if outer worlds shape the inner world, they also help us understand how inner worlds, in turn, shape perceptions of the outer. Moreover, we require a far more sophisticated view of the human subjects at the heart of our research than the cognitively driven, rational information-processing subject of much conventional social science (see Hollway/Jefferson 2000). Psychoanalysis takes as its major preoccupation the making of subjectivity but increasingly set within a sociocultural and historical context (see Frosh et al. 2005). We need to progress beyond old-style disputes between critical sociology and psychology: the conceptual world has, to an extent, moved on (see West 2004).