A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

Abstract

This paper uses a psychosocial approach to explore young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’, in the context of the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys. In our psychosocial interview‐based study, with young men as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, we found a community riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity, projected on to the young men in such a way as to almost scapegoat them. The experience of the young men was marked by embarrassment and shame. They feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community for not being able to find gender‐appropriate work.

Keywords:

• unemployment
• service work
• masculinities
• working class
• psychosocial methods

Notes

1. Economic and Social Research Council Grant: RES‐000‐22‐2479.

2. For example, the unconscious seemingly compulsive exposure to situations reminiscent of earlier complex emotional experiences which have not been fully assimilated emotionally in order to gain some control over its frustrating effects on conscious life, which in themselves express the simultaneous conformity, resistance and collusion with the local moral male gender order where these men live.

3. In a clinical setting, this type of hypothesis would also involve considering the unconscious normative aspects (Layton 2002) mediating the relationship between Tony and his stepfather and this would ordinarily need to be tested in direct long‐term dialogue with the patient and to sense his emotional reactions to it and not just his rationalisations about his stepfather’s reactions of embarrassment and over‐protectiveness.

4. We could not interview Tony’s stepfather nor his mother, as both refused to participate, although we also heard from Tony how his mother was not happy with him doing unmanly work and how she supported her partner (Tony’s stepfather) when he decided to withdraw his affection from him in order to force Tony to leave the cleaning job thereby limiting the ‘shame’ his stepson had caused to the family. These parental responses further added to Tony’s worries and frustration.