PSYC3004  Mind, Meaning & Discourse

Lecture 9 & 10: Discourse, Subjectivity and Agency / Memories and situated Occasioned Action
© Dave Hiles, October 2003

O Discourse, Subjectivity & Agency (Burr - 6 & 7)

O The person in discourse.
G What kind of person must we now envisage as the subject of social contructionism?

G n.b. Burr writes: " . . different forms of constructionism . . abandon essentialism in favour of construction; they replace traditional psychology’s emphasis upon coherence and unity with fragmentation and multiplicity; and they remove the forum for psychological life out of the individual’s head and into the social, interpersonal realm. Social constructionism, the replaces the self-contained, pre-social and unitary individual with a fragmented and changing, socially produced phenomenon who comes into existence and is maintained not inside the skull but in social life." (p. 104)

Burr also writes:
G "All the objects of our consciousness, every ‘thing’ we think of or talk about, including our identities, our selves, is constructed through language, manufactured out of discourses. Nothing has any essential, independent existence outside of language; discourse is all there is." (p. 105).

G " . . social constructionism denies us psychological properties such as personality, attitudes and opinions, drives and motivations". (p. 105).

O Discourse and identity
G social constructionists, rather than talk of personality, refer to the idea of ‘identity’.

G identity avoids essentialist connotations i.e. masculine/feminine, hetero/homosexual, sane/insane, black white, working/middle class - these are socially bestowed identities rather than essences of the person

G for each thread of our identity there is a limited number of discourses on offer out of which we might fashion ourselves

G although these discourses serve to limit the identities we ‘adopt’ - they at the same time offer possibilities for resistance (e.g. Kitzinger)

O Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality
G Foucault is concerned with how in the West sexual experiences became a moral issue - "the history of a morality". Why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, etc, but subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that surround sexual behaviour?

G The Uses of Pleasure (Vol. 2)
Chapter 3: Morality and Practice of the Self Foucault is concerned with the process of self-formation as an ‘ethical subject’:
G " . . a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself , to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself." (p. 28).

O Subject positions
G Louis Althusser and the idea of ideology as ‘interpellating’ or ‘hailing’ an individual as a subject.

G discourses address us as particular kinds of person - furthermore we cannot avoid these subject positions - our choice is only to accept them or try to resist them (e.g. Willig - addiction, Parker - disease, Holloway - sexuality)

G Davies and Harré develop the notion of subject positioning - the active mode in which a person endeavours to locate themselves within particular discourses during social interaction

G positioning stresses the tension between the power of culturally available discourses to constrain while allowing the room for the person to actively engage with those discourses and employ them in social situations - we are simultaneously produced by discourse and are manipulators of it

O Agency and change
G Burr writes: "The social constructionist attack on essentialist psychology has left us with an empty person, a human being with no essential psychological characteristics . . . [but] our subjective experiences still need to be explained, though in new ways." (p. 119).

G Burr concludes: "I think it is a fair criticism of the macro form of social constructionism that our experience of personhood and subjectivity is left unexplained". (p. 119).

G "If people are products of discourse, and the things that they say have status only as manifestations of these discourses, in what sense can we be said to have agency?". (p. 120).

G This way of conceptualizing human beings has been called "the death of the subject"

G Furthermore, if people do not have agency, then in what sense can they be expected , or be helped, to change?

G Sawicki (1991) points out that Foucault’s concept of "human-beings-as-manifestations-of-discourse" does allow for some kind of agency

G e.g. discourses of motherhood, femininity, family life can be used to help a woman see herself as oppressed rather than depressed

________________

O Burr - Chap. 7:
G Discursive psychology - brackets off attitudes, emotions memories as something we cannot say anything about from a study of what people say (p. 132)

G The self in relationship (John Shotter, narrative psychology)

O Memories and Situated Occasioned Action (Burr - 7)

O Engel, S. (1999) Context is Everything: The nature of memory. Freeman. (Chap. 3: Courtrooms and therapy rooms)
G One’s memory never stands alone - one never remembers outside of some context, some situation that shapes the thing we know as remembering
G Important determinants of memory include: whether you are alone or with others when you recall something from the past; how formal the setting is; and how salient the process of remembering is within that setting
G Memory invokes one set of rules and expectations in court and quite another in therapy
G We tend to recall events in a way that confirms our current hypotheses about things - or fits with what we are trying to do - and the reflects the strong theories we have about memory
G The courtroom context: formality, highly structured, perceived pressures, seriousness, judge’s instructions, and exclusion of nuance, evocation, personal associations
G The therapy context: collaborative remembering, therapeutic theories of memory, especially early memories (a belief in the idea that putting your past into words will have a positive impact on your present life - cf. Pennebaker), historical truth vs. narrative truth (Spence, Schafer), transference - the past re-enacted in the present (Freud), the problems of disentangling memory from fantasy (Person & Klar)
G Do the memories that people construct within a therapeutic setting represent what really happened?

O Hiles (1996) Recovered Memories: A discursive psychology model. 26th ICP, Montreal.
G The debate on recovered memory has recently been given new life and attention viz. - Repressed memories of abuse - "False memory syndrome"
G Two basic flaws are associated with these positions:
    (1) therapy is not a way of establishing historical truth, but a dialogic way of establishing personal narrative truth (see Polkinghorne, 1988; Ganaway, 1989)
    (2) the positivist cognitive perspective does not give a sufficient account of human memory
G Criticism of: BPS Working Party Report: Recovered Memories (1995). Nowhere, does the BPS report consider the possibility that a memory that is not shared, that is left unspoken, that is excluded from discourse, may become "repressed".
G Many of Freud's insights are conveniently overlooked in this debate. In his paper, "Screen Memories" (1899), Freud remarks that childhood memories do not emerge but are formed at the time of recall. They are constructions. He questions " . . whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused." (S.E. [3], p.322). Some 40 years later, in "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), Freud defines the analyst's task as " . . to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it." (S.E. [23], p.259).This Freudian perspective clearly sees psychotherapy as a constructive process, less concerned with historical truth than with personal truth. It is possible to view Psychoanalysis as a fledgling discursive science - albeit a clumsy one, restricted in storyline, and biased towards the analyst's constructive skills rather than those of the client. A re-evaluation of the Freudian position from a modern discursive perspective is well overdue.

O Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992) Discursive Psychology. Sage. (Chapter 2. Ulric Neisser's Memory)
It is in the research of Edwards and Potter that a discursive approach to human memory can be found (this work is totally ignored by the BPS report!!).
"A memory is not a mere recalling, isolated and serene, but is related to communicative actions and interests. Versions of mind, of thought and error, inference and reason, are constructed and implied in order to bolster or undermine versions of events, to accuse or criticize, blame or excuse and so on . . ." (p.16)

Q John Dean's Watergate testimony (also see Chancellor Lawson’s Memory)
      Neisser's three-part distinction:
             (a) verbatim recall
             (b) gist
             (c) repisodic memory
             ________________
             + meta-memory    )    n.b. these are both explicitly discursive
             + confabulation    )

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