Thinking Psychosocially About Difference: Ethnicity, Community and Emotion

Abstract

In this chapter I address the complex interrelationship between identity, ethnicity and the huge role that emotion plays in this by focusing on an empirical example of the study of community cohesion which forms part of the larger ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme. It is not my intention to explore this area in depth. Rather I will give the reader an overview of a range of psychosocial approaches to the construction of otherness and then focus on the notion of community and what it means to ordinary people in Britain. There are also a range of different psychosocial approaches to the subject: some have more of a psychoanalytic influence, some are relationally psychodynamic and others are more socially rooted. My own understanding of the psychosocial I recently outlined in the journal Sociology (Clarke, 2006). I feel that the main problematic in this area of study is how we actually ‘do it’ and argue that this is an emerging discipline based in sociological and psychoanalytic ideas that bridges this gap and points to a way forward in qualitative data analysis, that is, psychosocial studies. A psychoanalytic sociology is a synthesis of both worlds, rather than an opportunity to stake a position and stick to it in an inflexible way. We all know that there is a social construction of our realities as much as we know that we are emotional people who construct our ‘selves’ in imagination and affect. Neither sociology nor psychoanalysis, or psychology for that matter, provides a better explanation of the world than the other, but together they provide a deeper understanding of the social world.