‘And where were your brothers in all this?’: A psychosocial approach to texts on ‘brothering’

Abstract

This article offers a psychosocial analysis of interview material from a larger study on ‘brothering’, making an empirically grounded contribution to what are frequently abstract debates on the use of psychoanalysis to ‘read’ narratives. Recent psychosocial approaches which employ psychoanalysis alongside discursive psychology are reviewed, including a Lacanian approach which has been described as a less certain and potentially less individualizing and pathologizing gaze to take up in psychosocial studies. The authors put forward the notion of concentric reflexivity to apply Lacanian theoretical concepts to narrative material, ‘troubling’ sense-making, alongside recent calls for psychoanalysis to be employed in psychosocial work as a tool for ‘disintegrating’ and ‘disrupting’ text. The discussion argues for the interruptedness of narrative as an ethical necessity and for acknowledging fragmentation as central to the construction of an ethical subject.