Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory

How can psychoanalysis and critical social theory engage and transform each other more effectively? If psychoanalysis offers interpretive access to social processes outside the range of behavioural theory, how can the social dimensions of subjectivity be interpreted beyond the range of classic psychoanalytic theory’s seeming disavowal of the social, a domain which has been defined, in recent feminist, post-colonial and queer theory, in the painful terms surrounding oppression, trauma, resistance and survival? This volume focuses specifically on the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonial studies and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film and cultural studies. The contributors to this collection take the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging - indeed, stirring up - unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.