One of the key aims of my thesis is to elaborate a theory of personal morphogenesis i.e. the psychosocial dynamics of how individuals change. In broad terms, I am construing the subject matter as biographical. I’m interested in understanding how the particular circumstances which… Read More ›
Personal Morphogenesis 
Non-linear creativity
Another example in a very specific area is given by a client in a follow-up interview as he explains the different quality that has come about in his creative work. It used to be that he tried to be orderly…. Read More ›
Social theory and social research – what went wrong?
Underlying much sociological explanation is an attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ within the context of a specific empirical inquiry. As the authors put it, “in the human and behavioural sciences, the analytical connection or… Read More ›
Between subjectivity and subjection: untangling the confusion about reflexivity
Heaphy, Brian (2012) Reflexivity sexualities or reflexive sociology? In: Sexualities: Past reflections, Future Directions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. There are two main ways in which the term ‘reflexivity’ is used within contemporary social theory. The first refers to the self-monitoring and self-management of individuals…. Read More ›
Digital Technology and Human Being
I’m fascinated by the impact of digital technology upon human beings. In part this comes from being someone who has been an avid user of the internet for the last 13 years or more (since I was 13/14) and recognises,… Read More ›
Relationality and Reflexivity
What we are attempting to accomplish is to marry our concerns to a way of life that allows their realization, a way of life about which we can be wholehearted, investing ourselves in it with each personifying its requirements in… Read More ›
Explanatory Methodology
What cultural resources play a role in the lives of participants? How do they enable and constrain the commitments, projects and modus vivendi of participants? This constraint and enablement is mediated through internal conversation. Which cultural resources under which circumstances lead to personal morphogenesis? How do the former and the… Read More ›
Some thoughts on personal morphogenesis…
If we intend to conduct biographical research, it raises the obvious question: what is a biography? Our answer to this should ideally involve both theoretical and methodological considerations I.e. it should be orientated towards thinking through the practical consequences for… Read More ›
Being one’s organism, one’s experience
Therapy seems to mean a getting back to basic sensory and visceral experience. Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself, often unwittingly, “What do others think I should do in this situation?” “What would my parents or… Read More ›
From sexologists to sex columnists…
In advanced liberal democracies - the geographical and political regions with which I will be concerned in this chapter – genetics takes its salience within a political and ethical field in which individuals are increasingly obligated to formulate life strategies, to seek… Read More ›
Nikolas Rose, “Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain”
Nikolas Rose, “Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain” from Clinical Ethnography on Vimeo. How did we go from understanding and acting upon ourselves as psychological selves with inner depths to understandings and acting upon ourselves as corporeal beings with biological… Read More ›
Cosmetic psychopharmacology, selfhood and the underdetermination of our being by our bodies…
The cultural hype about designer drugs, like that of designer babies, deserves analysis. But while cultural representations may be of “designer moods,” what is sold to the patient is a dream of control. Take control of your moods, treat anxieties… Read More ›
The techno-politics of self in late capitalism (part 2)
Over the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, human beings came to understand themselves as inhabited by a deep interior psychological space, and to evaluate themselves and act upon themselves in terms of this belief (Rose 1989)…. Read More ›
The techno-politics of self in late capitalism
Enhancement, like susceptibility, is future orientated. Almost any capacity of the human body or soul – strength, endurance, attention, intelligence and the lifespan itself – seems potentially open to improvement by technological intervention. Of course, humans, at almost any place… Read More ›
Some thoughts on socialization and personhood
The traditional conception of socialization rests on the assumption that socialization is simply a matter of internalization. Dispositions which ‘fit’ the subject’s social placement are internalised from the social. Exactly what the socialising agent is called varies e.g. family, schooling,… Read More ›
Margaret Archer – Socialization as reflexive engagement
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The foundation of relational sociology
To maintain that social relations have a reality of their own (sui generis) means saying that they are not simply derived from something else, but reflect an order of reality of their own with internal dynamics that require theoretical-practical conceptualization…. Read More ›
The idea of ‘emotional purchase’
What I mean by emotional purchase is analogous to the idea of Merleau-Ponty (1979) that we have a basic need for an ‘optimal grip’ on the world rooted in our embodiment. He argues that our bodies sit in a prediscursive… Read More ›
An introduction to Margaret Archer’s hugely under-appreciated work on culture (cannibalisation of the unpublished chapter part 2)
The term ‘culture’ carries considerable intellectual baggage yet is rarely subject to extensive conceptual scrutiny. Our use of it is simultaneously everyday and abstract, concrete yet nebulous and, as a consequence, operationalizing it within the context of research necessitates a… Read More ›
A quick post on attachement theory and my PhD
After years of intending to read John Bowlby, I’ve finally got round to it and I’m very impressed. He formulated attachement theory as an attempt to affect a paradigm shift (in a very self-consciously Kuhnian fashion) within psychiatric research and therapeutic… Read More ›
