Researching Beneath the Surface

Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of the rapidly expanding field of Psycho-Social research. Drawing on aspects of discourse psychology, continental philosophy and anthropological and neuro-scientific understandings of the emotions, psycho-social studies has emerged as an embryonic new paradigm in the human sciences. Psycho-social studies uses psychoanalytic concepts and principles to illuminate core issues within the social sciences. The present volume contributes to the development of the new research methodologies in a number of ways. It is written largely from the point of view of practitioners who are also researchers. Although contributors draw largely upon object-relations traditions in psychoanalysis, other influences are also present, particularly from continental philosophy and the sociology of the emotions. It develops an approach to epistemology - how we know what we know, which is strongly informed by a living approach to psychoanalysis, not just as a theory but as a way of being in the world - that is as a stance.