Paul Stenner

• Psychology and Sociology, BA, 1st Class, Reading
• Professor at The Open University

This contribution offers a sense of the scope and transdisciplinary relevance of the philosophy of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead by providing an overview of the three main phases of his career. The contribution goes on to distinguish process thought from the substance thought which dominated modern philosophy, and to...

This chapter offers a new historical and theoretical perspective on postmodernity and postmodernism which broads the frame of the debate. We give the name 'pomo2' to the more familiar version of postmodernism, inspired by Lyotard and others. In this received version, postmodernity begins in the second half of the 20 th century and is associated wit...

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the law functions as society’s immune system by regulating conflicts that threaten the certainty of expectation structures. In this article, we argue that law itself has become a target of new social immune mechanisms. Since the 1980s, welfare states have increasingly seen their own structures as a threat. Tod...

Liminality was described more than 20 years ago as a major category explaining how cancer is experienced. Since then, it has been widely used in the field of oncology research, particularly by those using qualitative methods to study patient experience. This body of work has great potential to illuminate the subjective dimensions of life and death...

Winnicott was a British psychoanalyst famous for identifying an area of experiencing between inner psychic life and social reality called the potential space. In his work, potentiality is what can emerge on the basis of what is already there, or, in other words, it is there, where new possibilities can emerge. The idea of potentiality – and a pract...

Clinical practitioners are frequently encouraged, through literature, training, and policy, to learn, understand, refer to and use their knowledge of attachment theory and research when working to meet the needs of children and families. However, there has been very little empirical study of how practitioners understand and perceive the releva...

This paper approaches the theme of the psychology of de/globalization by taking up the example of Brexit as an historical conjuncture which hinges upon troublesome questions of sovereignty. Operating at the interface between history and psychology, and informed by liminality scholarship, the paper offers a broad genealogical sketch of three mutatio...

Transdisciplinary in nature, psychosocial work has drawn on a range of theoretical inspirations. This contribution builds on prior theoretical work which makes the case that 'process thought' is a good candidate for inspiring the sort of 'metatheory' that is helpful to researchers concerned with the psychosocial relation. It assumes the wisdom of d...

The aim to discern variation in religion and spirituality has been central to the Study of Religions, and in particular, it has fueled the discussion on typologies. In this chapter, we analyze five distinct worldview profiles (prototypes) that we extracted from our study in 12 countries with the Faith Q-Sort (FQS). The FQS enables us to investigate...

How can we make sense of religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural perspective? Is it at all possible to compare what we are used to calling ‘religion’ across different cultures? In this chapter we use findings from Faith Q-studies (FQS) in 12 different countries to investigate variance of religion and spirituality from an international perspec...

This chapter is an homage to Professor Steve Brown and is based on a reflection on an early Q study conducted by the author on the topic of sincerity and authenticity. It presents Q methodology as a constructivist research technique.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused strict regulations to lower transmission rates. Industries were shut down, people were in lockdown, and travel was curtailed. Restrictions were in effect for an enough period for people's behaviour to change. For example, online meetings rather than needing to travel. This opens the possibility for alterations to the pe...

This chapter discusses where, why and how the concept of idiography arose and evaluates the continuing relevance of the idiographic / nomothetic distinction for psychology. The German neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband introduced the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic in 1894 (see Windelband, 1894/1998). The distinction pertaine...

This chapter proposes that some new sense can be made out of the pandemic by viewing it through the theoretical lens of liminal experience. This theoretical move makes visible various ways in which it is possible to become ‘stuck in the middle of a transition’ or held suspended in liminal hotspots of various kinds (Stenner & Kaposi, 2020). Compared...

This contribution offers a psychosocial theorisation of the notion of cultural experience/experiencing. Building upon interdisciplinary scholarship on liminality, and developing some insights from Donald Winnicott, an argument is developed which brings to light the distinctively liminal sources of cultural experience. A liminal experience, in a nut...

This contribution is a commentary which builds upon the thesis that the worlds within worlds that constitute the obvious contents of human culture (play, sport, song, painting, film, theatre, ritual, prayer, pilgrimage, travel, therapy, etc.) have their source and their vocation in liminal experiences between worlds. They are provoked into becoming...

This paper uses Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground as the starting point for a critique of the assumption that engaging with narratives enhances well-being. While the ‘limits of narrative’ have long been an object of critique by scholars in the medical humanities, the question of limits has been posed primarily in terms of whether narrativity...

Lev S. Vygotsky is one of the major figures of psychology; however, his deep engagement with the arts is less known. This is surprising, given the fact that the arts, and especially Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are present throughout his career. In this article, we argue, first, that Hamlet was a major symbolic resource for Vygotsky in times of liminal tr...

Currently, municipal schools in Denmark face reforms and political demands for organizational change (EVA in Ledelse tæt på undervisning og læring : erfaringer fra fire skoler med gode ledelsespraksisser, 2015). The perception is now commonly held that it is necessary to radically rethink the entire set up of the institutional school towards a more...

In the early 1930s Henri Bergson made a bold attempt to trace the source of religious experience, belief and practice to a psychological process he called ‘fabulation’ (a term deriving from the Latin fabula, meaning either talk / conversation / discourse, or a story, tale, myth, legend or fable). Beginning with an illustration from the drama series...

Max Weber excluded the phenomenon of emotions from the idea of rational bureaucracy. Modern European organizational theories are on the other hand almost obsessed by emotions and especially affect. Emotion re‐entered organizational theory around the limited topic of ‘emotional labour’, but today, passion is generally praised as a driver in successf...

This article argues for the centrality of fiction, imagination, and art for psychology and for life in general. It proposes an integrative theoretical framework examining art as liminal experiencing that supports transitions by engaging imagination. Grounded in a process philosophy, drawing on Vygotsky, it thus demonstrates the transformative power...

Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to 'expect the unexpected' and to celebrate 'the future of the future'. Many new public managerial technologies of change-such as steering Labs, future games, and managerial performance arts-promise the co-creative 'potentialisation' of employees, citizens and organisations. This pape...

This paper uses conceptual resources drawn from psychosocial process thinking (Brown & Reavey, 2015; Brown & Stenner, 2009; Stenner, 2017) and from G.H. Mead in particular, to contribute to an emerging body of work on the experiences of adult women with ADHD (Horton‐Salway & Davies, 2018; Quinn & Madhoo, 2014; Singh, 2002; Waite & Ivey, 2009). It h...

Based on a close reading of relevant works of Gilles Deleuze, and informed by Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson's writings on religion, this paper articulates a novel concept of 'fabulation' which has significant implications for psychosocial theory. Beginning with a discussion of Jean Rouch's classic film ‘Les Maîtres Fous’, a distinction is drawn...

Peer-reviewed online open-access journal, published on http://www.discourseunit.com/annual-review/ This issue of ARCP introduces Deleuze’s project on a philosophy of difference in its critical intersection with psychology. After a general introduction, this special issue employs the distinctions Philosophy/Science/Art articulated in his later work...

In this paper we build on Szakolczai’s analysis of the sociological relevance of the novel to propose that novels can be regarded as a historically specific instance of what we call ‘liminal affective technologies’. We develop this proposition through a reading of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to demonstrate that this novel not only represents...

In this paper, we develop a conceptual and methodological approach that psychologists and other social scientists can employ to study emergence. We consider relevant social psychological approaches and conclude that, for the most part, social psychology has tended to focus on processes of normalisation following disruptions, rather than examining e...

This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquir...

This article introduces the concept of liminal hotspots as a specifically psychosocial and sociopsychological type of wicked problem, best addressed in a process-theoretical framework. A liminal hotspot is defined as an occasion characterised by the experience of being trapped in the interstitial dimension between different forms-of-process. The pa...

This article develops a concept of liminal hotspots in the context of (a) a secondary analysis of a cyberbullying case involving a group of school children from a Danish school and (b) an altered auto-ethnography in which the authors “entangle” their own experiences with the case analysis. These two sources are used to build an account of a liminal...

This book breathes new life into the study of liminal experiences of transition and transformation, or ‘becoming’. It brings fresh insight into affect and emotion, dream and imagination, and fabulation and symbolism by tracing their relation to experiences of liminality. The author proposes a distinctive theory of the relationship between psycholog...

This chapter constitutes an intervention into the so-called affective turn. It centres upon a critique of the affect/emotion distinction upon which this turn ‘turns’. The chapter begins with a discussion of Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structure of feeling’, which is used to explicate one key inspiration for a turn to affect: a distinction betwee...

This chapter examines a phenomenon that is largely ignored in contemporary literature: fabulation. Fabulation is closely related to imagination, which in turn is classically distinguished from perception (where we are assumed to perceive a reality that is co-present) and memory (where a reality which did exist has now passed). In contrast to memory...

This chapter begins with a definition of transdisciplinarity. It then identifies three significant responses to the transdisciplinary problem of how to research the interface between the psychological and the sociological: a psychosocial ‘factors and variables’ approach, critical and discursive social psychology, and psychoanalytical psychosocial s...

This chapter examines Alfred Schutz’s thought-provoking concept of ‘shock experiences’. Schutz distinguishes the 'worlds' of dream, play, theatre, humour, religion and science from the world of ‘everyday life’. He considers the transition from daily life to each of these worlds to be a shocking experience and in so doing he strangely exaggerates th...

This chapter builds directly upon the concept of fabulation crafted in Chap. 2. Its strange title is a reference to one of Aesop’s fables known as The Dog and His Reflection. The dog in the fable loses its food, but this loss gives it food for thought. A fable, as the word implies, is quite literally the product of fabulation. The chapter uses Aeso...

This chapter concludes the book in six main sections. The first section provides a summary of the transdisciplinary approach provided by the book and discusses how it relates to the contemporary situation of knowledge fragmentation, particularly within the ‘anthropological’ domain (understood broadly, in Max Scheler’s sense). The second section art...

This chapter follows Chap. 3 in being structured around the contemplation of an art object from which a number of theoretical distinctions, and indeed the makings of an ontology, are unfurled. In this case the art object is René Magritte’s well-known painting called Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The stable visible form of the painting captures felt insi...

A poetic voice develops in different ways and from different sources. In this paper, a poetic voice is brought to the experiences of patients and family members as recounted in the first phase of a UK National Health Service funded Q-methodological study, the key outcomes of which are summarized. Their stories are presented as a single poetic perfo...

This article explores the relation between subjects and standards in a way that is informed by a process orientation to theoretical psychology. Standards are presented as objectifications of values designed to generalize and stabilize experiences of value. Standards are nevertheless prone to becoming “parodic” in the sense that they can become obst...

Following a discussion of Tarkovsky's film 'The Stalker', this chapter identifies the liminal dimensions of the experience of 'being in the zone' (BITZ) and in so doing offers a positive critique of the well-known psychological concept of 'flow'. Building on some provocative comments from Victor Turner, an argument is developed to the effect that B...

A move towards self-management is central to health strategy around chronic low back pain, but its concept and meaning for those involved are poorly understood. In the reported study, four distinct and shared viewpoints on self-management were identified among people with pain and healthcare providers using Q methodology. Each construes self-manage...

This chapter is about a way of working with processes of experience in social settings (a critical transdisciplinary psychosocial approach). It contributes to theoretical psychology by stressing the importance of thinking psychological questions alongside questions raised by other social and human sciences and humanities. The word ‘psychosocial’ st...

Since Monica Greco and I attempted to document the growth of concern amongst social scientists in emotionality and affectivity in our edited volume The emotions: a social science reader (Greco/Stenner, 2008), there has been a quite dramatic surge of interest in affect, and indeed many now talk of an affective turn (Hemmings, 2005; Clough / Halley,...

The broad aim of what follows is to contribute towards the continued and perhaps continuous articulation of a critical alternative to mainstream psychology. I was delighted to contribute to the Hans Kilian lecture series because this series, following the spirit of Hans Kilian himself, keeps this aim alive through its dedication to the fresh and tr...

My title - which of course is inspired by the Talking Heads and by Asbo Derek –reflects the preoccupation with the nature and limits of psychosocial studies expressed, quite appropriately, at the inaugural APS (Association for Psychosocial Studies) meeting. My unscripted comments at that meeting were intended to encourage an open definition of psyc...

Drawing on contemporary research into ethical consumption and sustainable tourism this article starts by outlining the ways in which sustainable tourism (and other forms of ethical consumption) has been understood as a means to perform class based distinctions. At this stage, it is suggested that whilst class may be one factor in understanding such...

Paul Stenner reviews Felix Guattari “The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis”

Building upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to Seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. Defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the...

Building upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to Seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. Defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the...

Social psychological research has increasingly acknowledged that any pretensions to a singular theory of love should be replaced with a concern about its affirmation and what people actually say and do in love's name. Lee's (1977) love styles research and Sternberg's (1995) theory of love as a story are prime examples. Despite traditional definitio...

Building on ethnographic work on deceased organ donation (DOD) in Spain, this article supplements the concept of affectivity at the core of the emerging field of affect studies with a concept of liminality. The article begins by focussing on relevant scenes in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film ‘All about my mother’, using these as a spring-board to discu...

1 Introduction: basic assumptions Paul Stenner Open University Monica Greco Goldsmiths, University of London The concept of affectivity has assumed central importance in much recent scholarship, and many in the so- cial sciences and humanities now talk of an ‘affective turn’. The concept of affectivity at play in this ‘turn’ remains, ho- w...

The emotions of jealousy and envy are grasped in conventional psychological theory as discrete intrapsychic states of feeling triggered by a complex of causes. A case will be made that experiences of jealousy and envy are better understood in terms of people’s involvements in dynamic micro-social systems that characteristically produce themselves b...

This paper aims to re-establish the legitimacy of the inverted factor technique in psychology, to provide details of appropriate data collection and analytic processes, and to highlight some possible applications of the method. The inverted (or by-person) factor technique had traditionally been applied to the same matrix of data that supported more...