![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
In just a few decades, the normative world we inhabit is comprehensively different to the one in which S.H. Foulkes lived. As the pace, scope and content of change have transformed society, we have ‘greater indeterminacy to decide our movements and identity’ (p. 67). Personal identity has been released from many of its traditional moorings. The pervasive influence of contemporary ‘psy-sciences’ and exponential growth of therapeutic experts is one aspect of these changes. Seemingly, we live with more flux and flow than ever before. Have our theories kept up with theses fundamental changes? This paper offers a critical, post-Foulksean, post-psychoanalytic perspective on the normative world and our practices within it. It begins with history and the importance of locating who we are and what we do within the mutations of long-term change.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Anne Aiyegbusi, Daniel Anderson, Dick Blackwell, Inge Hudson, Brian Shand for reflections on this paper
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I adapt the phrase ‘qualitative multiplicity’ from Bergson’s (Citation2003) philosophy of time.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Martin Weegmann
Martin Weegmann is a group analyst and clinical psychologist, living and working (mostly NHS) in London. He has written and edited several books, his latest (Phoenix/Karnac, forthcoming) being: