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What do we do with emotion in biographical research: is it an end in itself, a symptom to be explained, a thread to be pulled? This paper presents an experiment in methodology within a field of biographical methods that involved revisiting a single qualitative interview after the elapse of thirty years. The interview with 22 year old Stacey was troubling at the time it was generated (as captured in fieldnotes and interview transcript) and was still troubling when these documents were reprised. Naming sadness as an emotion at play in the material took teamwork and emotionally engaged methods of analysis and interpretation. Working with psychoanalytically informed theories we show how a curiosity about emotion and a willingness to follow feelings can help connect individual stories to collective histories. The paper presents group based analyses and writing methods as a way of tracing the psychic logics of story through scenic material (what we call ‘emotional bombshells’). We consider the difference that time might make to an analysis, considering the possibility that more time might produce more perspective through allowing the original context to be rendered (more) visible. We also suggest that clock time can be transcended when considering unconscious processes and experiences that resist narrative. Recontextualising research materials can enrich meaning and further realise the value of qualitative interviews that always contain more to be heard, resituated in new times and relationships. This is not simply an exercise in nostalgia but is offered as a method in its own right, reanimation as a route to the generation of new intergenerational knowledge of a thick present in which past, present and future co-exist.

In this short introduction to the Special Issue on ‘sociology and psychoanalysis’, we provide some background information on the conference from which the issue arose, give a brief overview of the issue’s contents and outline the history of the two disciplines’ relationship. We conclude with some thoughts on the ongoing need for a sociology informed by psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis informed by sociology.

In this article we reflect on our time as editors of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. The article reviews some of the journal’s major contributions to psychoanalytic understanding of social and political problems; considers whether or not we are entering a post-neoliberal world; and discusses some of the challenges faced by PCS given the marginal status of psychoanalysis in the wider culture, the journal’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and its commitment to providing a space for multiple psychoanalytic voices. The article’s later sections consider some of the areas that remain underdeveloped in the journal’s coverage. In particular, the penultimate section explores the challenging task of specifying whether or not social entities, as opposed to individuals, can be said to have properties that are unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense.

The editors of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society introduce a special section in which several authors, including Juliet Mitchell, celebrate and reflect on the 1974 publication of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism.

This brief in memoriam pays tribute to the influence on psychoanalytically orientated social and cultural inquiry of the work of the great cultural theorist, Stuart Hall (1932–2014).

This article aims to introduce an Anglophone audience to the work of Alfred Lorenzer. It has three main components: it outlines some of Lorenzer's central concepts (the scenic, interaction forms, engrams, symbolisation and desymoblisation, language games and scenic understanding); explores the dialectical relations through which, for Lorenzer, unconscious, bodily and social processes are mutually constituted; and sketches some of the principles informing the depth-hermeneutic method, the tradition of social, cultural and social psychological research to which his ideas gave rise. Throughout, Lorenzer is viewed as seeking to put psychoanalysis on a materialist footing and concerned to assert its critical potential.

Alfred Lorenzer, a major figure in post-World War II German intellectual debate, is little known in the Anglophone world. As well as supplying biographical details, this short Introduction to the special issue on Lorenzer's work sketches the nature of his debt to Frankfurt School critical theory, highlights his attempt to place psychoanalysis on a materialist footing, and provides an overview of the issue's contents.

This paper explores the concept of transference–countertransference arguing that it holds out the promise of an inherently relational understanding of the unconscious dimensions of affective, felt and emotional experience. This argument is contrasted to Ian Burkitt's multi-dimensional model of affect, feeling and emotion which rejects the notion that these have unconscious dimensions understood in psychoanalytic terms. The paper suggests that there may be more grounds for dialogue between these approaches than those that meet the eye and that, as such, transference–countertransference may be a useful resource in the current putative ‘affective turn.’

This brief article argues for the development of a stronger psycho‐social perspective in the broad field of the sociology of education and, in particular, in studies of masculinities and schooling. The article suggests that such studies have much to gain from an understanding of unconscious fantasy and the mutually constitutive nature of the unconscious and the social. By the same token, it also argues that a psycho‐social perspective has much to gain from ethnographies of the school.

This article revisits one of the more contentious debates in current studies of narrative: the claim that identities are, in some sense,fabricatedby and in narratives, and the counter-claim that individuals have inherent capacities, such as a dynamic unconscious, that precede or are in excess of any identity-building work that narrative might do. The article approaches this debate via competing theories drawn from sociology and cultural studies, contrasting post-structuralist and Foucauldian theories with a Kleinian cultural analysis of narrative. The theoretical discussion is illustrated via a story told by a young man who apparently had strong investments in heterosexual romance.

This article aims to explore some of the ways in which the cultural meanings and practices of gender, sexuality and relationships intersect with and are reworked in the same-sex friendships of children aged nine to eleven. Using material from an ethnographic study, it focuses on two boys, Ben and Karl, who identified themselves as best friends. The article argues that, while the boys clearly knew, positioned themselves in and deployed heterosexual discourse, their relationship to this was complex. In particular, they appeared to use it to distance themselves from the feminine and to build their friendship as a pleasurable, intimate and exciting space. The article uses psychoanalytic arguments to explore this material, tentatively suggesting that the boys' access to the cultural practice of 'best friendship' mobilised identifications that both reinforced conventional versions of heterosexual masculinity and questioned these. In particular, the article suggests that the boys' friendship may have involved 'o...

This article draws upon data gathered from a research project entitled 'Children's Relationship Cultures in Years 5 and 6'. The project aims to explore the ways in which primary school age children understand emotional, caring and family relationships. This paper will focus upon the role of friendship in the cultures of girls, aged 9-10, in a primary school classroom. An ethnographic approach is adopted to illustrate the variety of interactions in which friendship is spoken, displayed and enacted within pupil cultures. Analysis of these exchanges suggests that notions of friendship and patterns of friendship are constitutive of sexual-gender identities. The paper argues that being friends/breaking friends is a technique utilised for the regulation and negotiation of femininities and the production of differentiated sex-gender hierarchies. The paper will focus upon the activities of the 'diary group'--a self-styled network of eight girls who met in the school playground to discuss issues that interested an...

The journal editors introduce a new thread of short pieces that will reflect on current political events. The thread begins with two short pieces on Trumpism.

This article draws on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the relationship between some of the more implicit disciplinary dimensions of schooling and a group of boys' investments in heterosexual romance. It argues that romance provided the boys with a cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set of discursive practices—through which they negotiated and made imaginative sense of the “little cultural world” of their college. In particular, the article suggests that romance served to police and discipline relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the pupils' culture while providing for the boys a mode of subjective orientation to key disciplinary practices of schooling. As such, romance may be seen as a resource through which the boys “worked themselves into” the dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus.

This article is based on the ethnographic study of children's play at break time in two contrasting primary schools in north London. Play in the two schools was differently gendered, at least partly because of the different organization of the playground. The article will argue that children will use the means available to them to construct gender in their playgrounds and that this will frequently involve the reproduction of hegemonic cultural identities and relations of power. However, the article will go on to argue that local interventions at the level of the individual school can and do bring into question such identities and power relations, in the process making available to children ways of being that are more open to possibility and difference.

This article interrogates the concept of `homophobia' via a set of `open' interviews with 16- to 18-year-old boys. It explores a broadly sociological critique of the concept; one that understands boys' anti-lesbian and gay talk and behaviour in terms of the local and dialogic performance of heterosexual masculinities. However, while acknowledging the relevance of this critique, the article suggests that the existence of homophobia highlights the need for an understanding of the position of the unconscious in gender and sexual performance. The article explores an expanded account of the unconscious dimensions of `homophobia', arguing for forms of analysis capable of addressing the unconscious and the social as intersecting and mutually constitutive dynamics.

1This article developed from a collective project conducted by the Politics of Sexuality Group. Our thanks to group members for their comments on the first draft of this chapter. Particular thanks ...

This article explores the interaction between schooling processes and boys’ entry into adolescent and early adult forms of heterosexuality in the transition between primary and secondary schooling. It argues that sexualities are produced at a dynamic interface between historically available discursive positions, wider social relations, the immediate social environment and unconscious processes, and draws out some provisional implications of this analysis for sex education.