A QUEST FOR A PSYCHOANALYTICALLY INFORMED METHOD IN CULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract

B a c k g r o u n d . The article discusses the possibility and necessity of using a psychoanalytically informed approach as a method for studying cultural phenomena. The author believes that the focus on researching particular cultural traditions, which goes back to ethnography and cultural anthropology, where culture is viewed as a warehouse of skills, leads to a conceptual deficit as its side effect. The basic concepts of cultural studies, including the concept of 'culture,' are used intuitively and thus lose their conceptual potential. Therefore, lots of cultural phenomena remain only recognisable but not understood. The idea of what the concept is and what it is actually based upon remains largely unconscious, cultural theories being logically and phenomenologically incomplete. Thus an instrument is needed that allows us to work with unconscious content that is the ground for both the conceptual apparatus of cultural theory and the ways in which its notions are used. Psychoanalysis is the first and perhaps the only tool specially developed for understanding the unconscious content.

M e t h o d s . The author uses a careful reading of primary sources and some of the selected comments on them as a research technique. The focus is mainly on the practical side of both psychoanalytic theory itself and its use as a therapeutic method.

R e s u l t s . The author shows that, as a method, psychoanalysis is in many ways identical to the study of cultural sources (texts). It was understood by cultural anthropologists, since psychoanalysis was able to add a rational understanding of human nature to ethnographic studies, thus transforming them into cultural studies. In general, the significance of unconscious meanings contained in texts (artefacts) was appreciated before psychoanalysis, but it was psychoanalysis that proposed a method for understanding unconscious meanings. The psychoanalytically informed method should be not a method of choice, but the method to understand the implicit ontologies on which any cultural text is based and which it ultimately expresses.

C o n c l u s i o n s . The critical attitude towards psychoanalysis that has developed in the humanities can be explained by historical and cultural preconditions and, in this sense, it can be understood and overcome. The author draws attention to the fact that psychoanalysis as a method needs to be (re)constructed and offers, as a conclusion, the main points necessary for such a reconstruction.