Discourse Analysis and Psycho-Analysis.docVIP

Parker, I. (1997) ‘Discourse Analysis and Psycho-Analysis’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 36, pp. 479-495 Discourse Analysis and Psycho-Analysis Ian Parker Summary Discourse analysis presents a challenge to mainstream psychology, but it risks either neglecting individual experience by employing a quasibehaviourist notion of ‘blank subjectivity’ or folding back into simple humanism through an appeal to ‘uncomplicated subjectivity’. This paper argues that productive links can be made with psychoanalysis to elaborate an alternative notion of ‘complex subjectivity’ which would provide a better theory of the subject, and so circumvent these problems. Eight aspects of transformative theoretical work that would need to be applied to psychoanalytic writing  a move to a human science frame, a turn to collective phenomena, a shift away from always intentional authorial responsibility, a reading of texts as reconstructions of the past, an attention to researcher subjectivity, an understanding of the text as ‘other’, an emphasis on language in reframing accounts, and a sensitivity to the cultural specificity of analytic vocabularies  are described, and some reflections on method, including a description of the ‘discursive complex’ as an appropriate analytic device, are outlined. Introduction This paper explores connections that might usefully be made between discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. These connections would respect both the social constructionist impulse of the discursive approach and the experiential insights of analytic work. Psychoanalysis would enable an account of the ‘self’ or ‘subject’ of discourse to be developed that both valued experience without essentialising it (the worry of those writers who resort to varieties of ‘blank subjectivity’) and located human experience without reducing it to an effect of language (the concern of those who indulge in a return to ‘uncomplicated subjectivity’). It is not being proposed here that psychoanalys