Habitus: beyond sociology

This paper presents a contribution of a set of interrelated innovative thinking to revitalize the sociological understanding of the notion of the habitus. It discusses contributions by sociologists exploring the sources of Bourdieu's inspiration from psychology and psychoanalysis to the development of the concept, and brings in new thinking inspired by authors and frameworks that branch out of sociology to bring into sociology fresher thinking. Three areas of concern about habitus are focused on: firstly, the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy; secondly, the plasticity or rigidity of the concept; and thirdly, the implications of intangibles attached to the notion. The paper introduces a Special Section including five articles on theoretical and empirical explorations bringing exciting perspectives to creative and critical sociology.     

FINDING THE WORDS: SOCIAL WORK FROM A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

Dialogue is at the heart of social work. In conversations with the professional, clients speak out about their pains and sorrows, and about their hope and beliefs. The conversation is the place where social worker and client try to find new words to express these emotions. In doing that, they construct new meanings and create new perspectives.

The role of dialogue in child development is used to understand this underlying process of social work. It shows how children learn to use language as an instrument to organize their world. The role of social workers is similar to that of parents, to help their clients to find the words that enable them to reposition themselves. As soon as they become the author of their life story again, they will be better able to reconstruct their lives.     

INSIDE–OUT: RESOCIALISATION FROM PRISON AS A BIOGRAPHICAL PROCESS. A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH TO THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF IMPRISONMENT1

The social and economic regeneration of inner-city housing estates has been a common feature of successive UK government policies for a number of years. However, their focus has primarily been on the physical regeneration of communities to the exclusion of individuals' emotional and personal problems. Community-based counselling projects are still a rarity in regeneration projects. This article describes the establishment and subsequent history of a counselling project based on an inner-city housing estate in East London, which was undergoing extensive regeneration. It discusses how the service originated from the ongoing work of a participatory action research project and how it challenged stereotypical images of counselling. It demonstrated that free, accessible and locally based counselling services are needed in the regeneration of communities; that extensive planning is necessary both within the organisation and in relation to funding before the project begins; and that on-going core funding is essential to sustaining such innovative and much-needed projects.     

计算机UPI心理分析系统

本文提出了利用计算机进行 UPI 心理分析系统设计的思想,着重讨论了系统的功能结构及 UPI 数据库的结构设计,并对系统进行了实现。该系统的进一步研制开发对 UPI 的应用推广有广泛的意义。     

Gaming–playing on social media: using the psychoanalytic concept of ‘playing’ to theorize user labour on Facebook

ABSTRACT

Political economists have argued that user activity on corporate social media is regarded as labour that appears playful and fun but is exploited and sold to advertisers for profit maximization. This article begins with the working assumption that such user labour on social media constitutes a form of playing. It is theorized through a psychoanalytic perspective on the term as developed by D. W. Winnicott and André Green. The notion of gaming–playing is put forward to account for set interface structures on Facebook that resemble a game as well as free-flowing dimensions more akin to playing. Some user discourses on Facebook are analysed through this prism. A psychoanalytic conceptualization of user labour as playing allows one to analyse both positive discourses that emphasize Facebook as a space for creativity, exploration and the unknown, as well as negative discourses that critique the platform with regard to lacking privacy controls or data ownership. Both discourses are conducted in a playful manner that creatively utilize a sense of user agency in relation to others and Facebook itself, but often remain without consequences.     

Reclaiming complexity: beneath the surface in residential child care

ABSTRACT

Residential child care is an inherently distressing and multi-layered endeavour undertaken by staff who are often poorly trained and supported. In addition, the children, and the adults who care for them, can provide a convenient receptacle for the split off negative feelings of professionals, politicians and the public. The complexity and difficulty of this work is often unrecognised and a simplistic response based on a programmatic, behavioural framework, reinforced by performance-based management and an audit culture, is common. This paper argues for the usefulness of a different approach, drawing on psychoanalytic and open systems thinking, to provide a more nuanced understanding of what is happening in these volatile settings that can guide interventions which match the complexity of the work. Alongside advocating the use of key psychoanalytic and systems concepts to improve understanding, it argues for the importance of providing a containing and reflective environment for staff.     

The Fathers’ Dark Triumph: terror and the end of revolution in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novel Demons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption.     

‘The letting go’: the horror of being orphaned in Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinema

In this article, I read the recent cinema of the Danish-American Director Nicolas Winding Refn through a contradictory complex of Freudian–Jungian psychoanalysis, Bataillean philosophy and Buddhist thought. By focusing on Winding Refn’s three most recent films, Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, I explore his representation of what I call the horror of contemporary orphan identity, and show how he contrasts this with a mystical sense of wholeness and unity comparable to that which appears in the works of Jung, Bataille and before both of these writers, Buddhist philosophy. Beyond the lonely figure of the orphan, who we also find outlined in Jung’s work on child archetypes, Winding Refn constructs a nightmarish dystopia, the post-modern city, which is characterised by violence, objectification and estrangement. Inside this complex, Winding Refn tells the story of the destroyed self of the lonely orphan lost in post-modern urban space, and considers possible futures for this abandoned, exposed, desperate individual. It is this story of loneliness, abandonment and tragic attempts to escape from the pain of loss which I explore in this article by first, exploring the ways in which Drive exposes the horror of the orphan in contemporary Los Angeles and captures the terror of the self endlessly on the run; second, reading Only God Forgives in terms of an attempt to think through possible escape from the desperate condition of the orphan by taking up Buddhist philosophy and images of the ritualistic destruction of the self; and finally thinking about the way The Neon Demon opposes these two positions in a psycho-politics of on the one hand desperate self-making and on the other hand the Buddhist non-self and cosmological escapism.     

精神分析学与辩证唯物主义的同构互补性

借助于阴阳四象的观念与逻辑结构,会发现精神分析学与唯物辩证法在宏观框架上具有一致性.更重要的是,弗氏的以性本能为核心的潜意识理论与马克思主义的物质观也具有同构性.把马克思学说关于意识的触角往前延伸到精神分析学所提示的潜意识领域里,再转过身来将精神分析学的潜意识与意识连接在马克思的"物质"范畴上,就能将两种理论进行有效的沟通,并弥补各自的不足.     

“5.12”汶川地震后抗逆力的个案研究——来自精神分析视角

“5.12”汶川大地震在各方面都造成了巨大损失,然而灾区人民展现出了强大的抗逆力。通过田野观察、咨询记录文本分析,对灾区两个个案在地震前后的抗逆力表现的进行研究,并运用精神分析理论对抗逆力的内涵进行阐释,得出以下结论:在个体生命早期提供“足够好的抱持性养育环境”有利于抗逆力的形成;心理干预有效途径在于对抗逆力恢复和养成。