This special thematic section responds to the 21st century proliferation of social movements characterised by the slogans ‘another world is possible’ and ‘be the change you want to see’. It explores prefigurative politics as a means of instantiating radical social change in a context of widening global inequalities, climate change, and the crises and recoveries of neoliberal global capitalism. ‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to a range of social experiments that both critique the status quo and offer alternatives by implementing radically democratic practices in pursuit of social justice. This collection of articles makes the case for psychologists to engage with prefigurative politics as sites of psychological and social change, in the dual interests of understanding the world and changing it. The articles bridge psychology and politics in three different ways. One group of articles brings a psychological lens to political phenomena, arguing that attention to the emotional, relational and intergroup dynamics of prefigurative politics is required to understand their trajectories, challenges, and impacts. A second group focuses a political lens on social settings traditionally framed as psychological sites of well-being, enabling an understanding of their political nature. The third group addresses the ‘border tensions’ of the psychological and the political, contextualising and historicising the instantiation of prefigurative ideals and addressing tensions that arise between utopian ideals and various internal and external constraints. This introduction to the special section explores the concept and contemporary debates concerning prefigurative politics, outlines the rationale for a psychological engagement with this phenomenon, and presents the articles in the special thematic section. The general, prefigurative, aim is to advance psychology’s contribution to rethinking and remaking the world as it could be, not only documenting the world as it is.
This paper constructs a conversation about male violence between psychoanalytic feminism and Lakota psychology, based on interviews carried out at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the United States. The paper has four aims. First, it outlines the concepts in feminist psychoanalytic theory that inform this study, and discusses key dilemmas that arise in working across cultural borders established through histories of colonial domination. Second, the paper identifies areas of common ground between feminist psychoanalytic theory and indigenous psychologies, focusing on their shared emphasis on traumatic splits in the human psyche, gender development, and storytelling. Third, the paper describes the Cangleska program developed by Lakota practitioners at Pine Ridge-a systematically conceived set of services that combines psychological, cultural, and political analyses of violence-and explains how Cangleska offers insights that go beyond the borders of indigenous communities. Fourth, the paper draws out lines of convergence between Kleinian psychoanalysis and Lakota principles in their ethical responses to violence and discusses the implications of such convergences for the wider anti-violence movement.
As part of preproduction research for a documentary film on mental health practices in the United States military, this field note takes up findings related to discursive strategies deployed by the US Department of Defense and Veterans Administration programs in preventing and treating military sexual trauma. In the analysis of dozens of training manuals and interviews with therapists working in Sexual Assault Prevention teams through the Army National Guard and the VA, the analogy of military sexual assault and incest emerged as a recurring motif. The authors pursue the question of whether the analogy is progressive or regressive from the perspective of women service members. The authors situate their arguments in a line of analysis pursued in the earlier work of Haaken that explains how real accounts of abuse acquire social symbolic loadings over time in ways that are open to both conservative and progressive interpretations.
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