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Love and Hate: an Introduction to Psychosocial Studies

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 4
  • Convenor: Dr Ben Gidley
  • Assessment: formative coursework of 500 words (15%), 1500-word essay (35%), four entries for a bibliography (15%) and 1500-word precis and critical analysis (35%)

Module description

This module provides a grounding in approaches to, and theories of, human relations. It orients you to a psychosocial perspective, helping you to differentiate this from the cognate areas of psychology and sociology.

In the first term, using the trope of ‘love and intimacy’, we will consider accounts of affect, feeling and emotion, and emotions as cultural phenomena; basic psychoanalytic concepts and how emotions can be thought of as ‘public events’; and case studies such as the response to the death of Princess Diana, or the mobilisation of feelings towards ‘celebrities’. We then consider psychoanalytic ideas about sexuality and desire; how love operates both as an ‘unwilled’ element in psychosocial life and as a construct that has foundational significance in culture and society; differences between distinct kinds of love, for instance romance and parental love; and whether love is ‘imaginary’. We will look at attachment theory and other relational ideas, set in the context of social assumptions about intimacy, care, parenting, ageing, family life and development; and postcolonial perspectives on ideas about normative family life. Under the theme of 'belonging', we consider identification with a collective, including social responsibility, ideas of community and ethical relationality; and the centrality of some philosophical positions on relational ethics to the psychosocial project.

In the second term we introduce you to the different meanings and manifestations of hate and the negative in certain moments in western culture and how psychoanalytic writers have theorised hate. You will be introduced to terms such as disavowal, denial, resistance, negation, splitting, sadism, aggression, defence, envy, ambivalence, matricide and patricide. We will trace how this vast psychic area of the destructive is placed and implicated in relation to formations of subjectivity and sexuality and its role in the capacity for creativity. We also address manifestations of hate in the social, addressing hate crimes and misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia as well as fascism, totalitarianism and violence. We will introduce philosophical ideas about fear and hatred of the ‘other’, and themes such as revenge, fear and envy.

Indicative syllabus

Love

  • Feelings and emotions
  • Love
  • Attachment and care
  • Belonging

Hate

Thinking hate psychosocially:

  • Is hate social or emotional?
  • Where does hate come from?
  • Organising hate
  • The sociological approach and its limits
  • The performative model of hateful speech

The psychoanalytic approach and its limits:

  • Freud
  • Klein
  • Winnicott and Pogue-White
  • De Beauvoir and Fanon

Researching and writing about hate psychosocially:

  • Critical reading and producing an annotated bibliography
  • Resources for hope

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • explain some core assumptions of psychosocial studies
  • identify the relationships (affinities and critical distinctions) between psychosocial studies and some of the disciplinary positions out of which it has emerged
  • apply some basic psychosocial ideas to the field of intimate human relationships
  • understand some of the different ways that the concept of ‘hate’ has been theorised in critical social, cultural and psychoanalytic theory
  • understand the links between the formation of subjectivity/identity and ‘hate’ and the negative
  • trace and analyse some of the ways in which ‘hate’ and conflict is a central component of inter-subjective and socio-cultural life
  • understand reflexivity and use this as a tool of critical inquiry, including your own positionality
  • demonstrate the development of a psychosocial orientation to the study of ‘hate’ in micro-social and macro-social contexts.