A Psychosocial Approach to Narrative Studies and Reflexive Research

Abstract

I introduced Chapter 1 of this dissertation with a series of questions asking what romantic love means to us, what it promises and how we cathect it as an ideal. In order to answer some of the questions that were raised in the Introduction to Chapter 1, ‘ways of seeing’ romantic love from a sociological, feminist, existentialist,¹ Lacanian, cultural studies (poststructuralist), Freudian and object relations viewpoint were outlined. The guiding research question was whether these ways of seeing love² led to a view of love as possible or impossible. It was argued that object relations psychoanalysis could contain both possible and impossible views of (a reconceptualised) love in contrast to the other concepts of love that were reviewed, which tended towards a one-sided concentration on love as either quite straightforwardly possible or as tormentingly impossible.³ However, the importance of a psychosocial way of seeing love was argued for, rather than a purely psychoanalytic or exclusively sociological explanation of love and its vicissitudes.