Introduction: Psychoanalytic Methodologies in Geography

T his special section began, as many do, with an Association of American Geographers conference. In 2007 Paul Kingsbury and I organized two sessions with a total of nine papers (and ten scholars) that provided an impressive array of the many divergent possibilities that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory offer to geography. Indeed, as this section itself represents, the radically different approaches to psychoanalysis and the inspirations scholars take from its methodologies and ontologies present no unified front, no coherent account of the spatiality of psychic life and practice. Others similarly attest the inability to cull an inclusive or comprehensive lesson for geography or even whether psychoanalysis is an appropriate endeavor for geographers (Philo and Parr 2003b). Instead, authors posit that the common thread of psychoanalysis is the idea that the unspeakable, and thus not entirely representable, gird the social–spatial and the subjective. The unconscious exists in its effects, so this question arises: If only in effect, and unpredictably so, then how to observe, represent, theorize, if not measure? These are conundrums energizing the conversations on psychoanalysis and methodology (more recently see Callard 2003; Philo and Parr 2003a; Kingsbury 2004; Thomas 2007; Parr and Davidson forthcoming). The four articles in this special section, which I describe in turn next, articulate the ways that psychoanalytic thought already pervades much of human geography and its methodologies, albeit not always in the obvious or avowed framework of psychoanalysis (see both Pile and Kingsbury, this issue). Certainly the emotional, the affectual, and the subjective have all been framed through an understanding of the self as somewhat opaque, as nonlinear, as irrational—as a subject, in other words, enlivened by forces not entirely of its own consciousness, unacknowledged yet effective, powerful in its intangibility. Despite the hesitance of many geographers to engage with psychoanalytic theory, its influence percolates without an explicit consideration of its impact on our understandings of what the social–spatial entails (Kingsbury 2009). In this special section, we hope to edge forward a greater commitment to avow this influence and to think about how psychoanalysis shapes geographic thought and research. Our focus on methodologies points particularly to research encounters; that is, between researcher and researched. The four articles consider how methodology can be designed, unhinged, or rejiggered to consider psychoanalytic, subjective process. The articles contend that doing research is as much an unconscious as a conscious reckoning—from researchers’ sketching of projects to the carrying out of plans within ontologies that are as composed of fantasy as they are of materiality. After all, the researcher also has fantastic renditions of the social–spatial, even though this word should not be taken as “unreal.” Fantasies are evident in the material “real” world, too (e.g., Nast 2000; Pile 2005). Thus, the articles importantly give readers new insights into how the framing and doing of research are wrapped intimately in the subjectivity of not only those people and topics researched but also of the subjectivity of the researcher, of their interand intrarelations and spaces, and of the fantasies of just what we think the world is—indeed, how we as scholars also fantasize in terms of how we psychically need or are oriented to think what the world is. This is related to our own social, academic, and political positionings, as well as the positioning