"The baby will grow" : a poststructuralist and psychodynamic analysis of a community psychology intervention

Long, Carol

"The baby will grow" : a poststructuralist and psychodynamic analysis of a community psychology intervention

Master Thesis

1999

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Psychology

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Progressive South African psychologists have recognised the need for community approaches in South Africa which maximise access to psychological intervention and which value politically aware psychological practice. Few extended analyses of such interventions exist in the literature, and community psychology has been critiqued for its lack of theory. This study aims to provide an extended analysis of a community intervention conducted with a group of Primary Health Care Workers. The intervention was motivated by their request for psychological skills in order to enable them to work more effectively with their clients. Interactive workshop sessions were thus conducted by two facilitators (including the author) under supervision over a period of one year. The aim of such workshops was to instil a psychological way of thinking. This consequently implied an emphasis on the emotional world of Primary Health Care Workers. This study provides a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic analysis of the process of intervention in order to offer potential suggestions for future community work and to explore how the interface between psychoanalysis and post-structuralism may offer possibilities for more theoretically grounded community work. Particular emphasis is placed on power relations, discourse and language, and psychoanalytic understandings of relationship in order to explore the intervention as well as the implications of articulation of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis in community work. It is suggested that psychoanalysis is best utilised in community settings when it explicitly recognises socio-political influences and includes these in the object-worlds of ourselves and our clients, and when recognition of power and difference are foregrounded. A further aim involved subjecting a Foucaultian discourse analytic method (e.g. Hollway, 1989) to a practical intervention in which there are multiple texts and in which the clinician becomes the discourse analyst. Whilst this method is no doubt controversial, it offers the potential to extend the use of post-structuralist methodology to the analysis of practical therapeutic encounters beyond the typical methods of analysing written or transcribed texts. Implications of this analysis thus hold bearing on future intervention as well as on future methods of researching psychological practice.

Keywords

Clinical Psychology

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