The work of French psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-MaxGaudillière centres on the understanding of the ways in which large historical traumas associated with war are brought to life by descendants, often generations later, who carry an experience that they cannot understand and that erupts as psychosis. They have devised a unique clinical method in which, together with the patient, they research what they term as the missing 'social link', a link broken within an earlier generation by a personal or family experience of an extreme situation. Their work, which draws upon a historical reframing and broadening of Lacan, is deeply resonant with implications for pychosocial enquiry within the social sciences. In this article, we show how we developed a method for engaging with interviews with women who were serial migrants. In paying attention to their story, we show how we attended to the complex manifestations in the material of the embodied experiences associated with a history of slavery, colonization, poverty and migration. Our aim was to develop a mode of working, which did not pathologize but still recognized the transmission of suffering and distress in complex ways and its twists and turns across generations. In doing this, we sought to provide a way of working that radically rejected any split between a psychic/personal and social/historical realm.
This article adds to the emergent literature on classed fathering by exploring how middle-class and working-class fathers relate to their sons’ ADHD diagnosis. The strong requirement on parents to adhere to a dominant medical discourse of ADHD is used as a case to explore how the entwinement of class and gender shape different fathering practices. The article draws on in-depth interviews with 16 fathers of boys diagnosed with ADHD. These interviews were part of a larger study including interviews with children and their mothers. All the fathers interviewed were critical of the medical understanding of their sons’ behaviour, and seemed, in different ways to defend their sons against the diagnosis and medication. However, this resistance is much clearer in the working-class fathers’ narratives than in the middle-class fathers’. We argue that classed masculinities allow these fathers to take on a love-driven identification with their sons’ problematic masculine behaviour. Seen in a wider context, the fathers’ critical voices offer considerable resistance to the medicalisation discourse, and thus also to currently dominant parenting regimes.
Given the overwhelming attention paid to the mother-child dyad in all realms of psychology and many in sociology, what theoretical frameworks are available to us through which to explore and understand father-daughter relationships? More specifically, what significance might working class fathers, both the flesh and blood person and the 'father in the mind' so frequently approached through the realm of the imaginary, have for their daughters' relationship with education? Drawing on a longitudinal study of girls growing up from 4 to 21 years old, we look to the work of psychoanalytic and psychosocial theorists to think about the place of fathers in the educational experiences, trajectories and outcomes of working class girls and young women. In doing so, we want to disassemble some of the 'heteronormative unconscious' ideas and phantasies, so often dependent on splitting, that are attached to femininity and masculinity, especially in their classed representations. We also want to explore the ways in which the terms of gender are simultaneously fixed and fluid, binary and challenging of the binary, when we consider working class girls and young women's relationships with their fathers and the connections that these may have with education and schooling.
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