Subjectivity, Not Personality: Combining Discourse Analysis and Psychoanalysis

Mainstream psychology can often be criticized for turning the liberal concerns of psychologists into conservative practices focusing on the individual. In the United Kingdom, the discursive turn in social psychology has been marked by an audacious body of work critical of cognitive attempts to theorize the social. A particular psychodiscursive strand has emerged, which combines discourse analysis and psychoanalytic theory in an attempt to change both the subject of, and the subjectivity (re)produced by, mainstream psychology. This paper reviews three different psycho-discursive approaches: (i) Hollway and Jefferson’s Free Association Narrative Interview method; (ii) Billig’s Psychoanalytic Discursive Psychology; (iii) Parker’s Lacanian excursions into social psychology. In these psycho-discursive approaches, ‘subjectivity’ replaces personality as the key theoretical construct where the social forms part of who we are and these approaches seem to offer social psychologists the theoretical tools to start to appreciate how individual personality and social context are intimately connected. In the 1960s, behaviorism’s obsession with the outwardly observable became a failure to conceptualize inner mental states as psychology turned to cognition. Whereas experimental cognitivism continues to dominate the psychological landscape, the 1980s saw the start of a turn-to-language as psychologists took an interest in how context bound actions can be understood to construct and reconstruct our worlds. In UK social psychology, the turn-to-language – also known as the discursive turn – was marked by an audacious, innovative, and prescient (Marecek, 2002) strand, which some have argued highlights the possible irrelevance of mainstream social psychology (Bayer, 2002) because of its failure to adequately attempt to theorize the social (Leach, 2002). The now seminal publications Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984) and Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning, and Science (Hollway, 1989) attempted to change the subject of psychology and the theory of subjectivity that psychology relied upon. The main critique was that mainstream psychology assumed a unitary rational subjectivity, which meant that the liberal concerns