Introduction

Abstract

This book collects together essays by members of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, one of the key sites for the development of psychosocial studies in the UK. The Department’s work is transdisciplinary, bringing together issues that might appear in other disciplinary sites (for instance sociology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, political theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, literary theory) and rethinking them from the perspective of a psychosocial approach that subverts the distinction between them. Our central argument is that there is no firm division between the ‘psycho’ and the ‘social’, despite the institutional power of academic disciplines that are built precisely on the reiteration of that division. Our approach therefore aims to be transformative of the subject of psychosocial enquiry itself and also both suspicious of (in the sense of offering a critical encounter with them) and generous towards (in that it is open to influences from them) the theories and methods that currently occupy the field. That is, we attempt in various intersecting and at times contrary ways to rethink the formation of the human subject as a ‘psychosocial subject’, irreducible to the traditional ways this subject is positioned, particularly by sociology and psychology. Psychosocial Imaginaries reflects the agenda in its very varied theoretical and empirical strands; what unites these is our dissatisfaction with the fragmentation of the disciplinary field into separate elements and our multifaceted attempt to articulate the intricate entwining of ‘psychic’ and ‘social’ processes to produce a new body of understanding.