Walls and Holes in Psychosocial Research: From Psychoanalysis to Critique

This commentary reflects on the different innovative motifs introduced into psychosocial research by the contributions to this special issue: the risk of oversubjectification in research placing undue emphasis on the individual reasoning or feeling subject, the attempt to link the “feelings” and “talk” about emotion in one interpretative framework, the place of the interview in research which questions rather than reinforces “identity,” the location of subjects in a “place-assemblage” rather than in their own selves, and the reconfiguration of “mindfulness” so that it opens out to social relations rather than evades them. Focussing on the role of psychoanalysis in psychosocial research, I situate these motifs within the analysis of the machinery of “facialization” offered by Deleuze and Guattari, in which the “white wall” of signification is complemented and locked in place by the “black hole” of subjectivity.