Parker, I. (2002) ‘Advertising English Subjectivity: Charity, Religion and Psychoanalytic
Discourse’, New Review of Social Psychology, 1, pp. 130-133.
Advertising English subjectivity:
Charity, religion and psychoanalytic discourse
Abstract
Discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and religious notions are brought to bear on
images of charity in bits of text. The theoretical and analytical elements of the
paper work together in order to disclose the production of particular forms of
self in charity advertisements. The version of discourse theory I use is indebted
to the work of Foucault, who saw discourses as practices that systematically
form the objects of which they speak, and also elaborates a certain way to read
social representations of psychoanalysis. The paper argues that notions of the
unconscious and other psychoanalytic paraphernalia should be treated both as an
analytic resource and as a topic of inquiry, something that is constituted in
discourse. It is particularly important when we consider the appeal and function
of charity in Western culture to take into account the sets of moral orders that
mobilise subjects, and their symbolic debt to Christianity. The paper argues for
an approach that can draw together discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and
relevant powerful cultural forms, Christianity in this case, to produce an
appropriate analytic device. This analytic device is the ‘discursive complex’.
Talk of the mother’s state of primary maternal preoccupation with her infant, the
child’s discovery of its true self in relation to the mother, and the role of
transitional objects in the gradual detachment of the infant from the mother as it
becomes an independent child, taps into the cultural imagination. This self-talk is
unravelled in the course of the analysis to locate a culturally specific ‘self’ in
forms of discourse embedded in moral orders.
Discourse, psychoanalysis and religion
One of my students said to me as he raised a clenched fist, ‘Discourse analysis is
psychoanalysis for the people’. He is a Christian evangelist. This event neatly
brings together three theoretical elements of this paper - discourse analysis,
psychoanalysis and religion - and I am going to bring them to bear on images of
charity in bits of text. Before I get to those images I want to spend most of my
time on each of the three elements, and the specific theoretical framework I am
going to employ.
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Discourse analysis
The particular version of discourse theory I use is indebted to the work of
Foucault who saw discourses as practices that systematically form the objects of
which they speak (Parker, 2002). The task of discourse analysis is to illuminate
the sets of statements that construct an object. Loosely speaking, that is what I
am concerned with here. But I want to focus on particular types of ‘objects’ that
are produced in discourse, ‘subjects’. That is, among the signs in a text are those
that specify types of person, their character, roles, relationships, responsibilities
and emotional lives. Signs are able to bring subjects to life in this way because
they are organized into discourses. There are two important points here. One is
that the ‘author’ of the text disappears as the foundational point which we
usually try to appeal to, to say what the text means, and the other is that the
‘reader’ disappears into the text as they are carried along by the discourses that
inhabit it.
This view of language has been important in literary theory and we can
take as an example the way poetry can be interpreted. A controversial biography
of the British poet Philip Larkin revealed that he hated blacks and collected
pornography (Motion, 1993). He talked about this in letters to friends: ‘Yes I got
the pictures, Wacko!’, ‘found a newsagent with a good line in Yank homo porn,
in quite a classy district. Didn’t dare touch it’, and so on (cited in Bennett, 1993,
p. 5). Now, on the one hand, discourse analysis of the poems is completely
uninterested in this extra-textual material. What might have been going on in
Larkin’s head as he wrote the poems is irrelevant to the way the poems
functioned and relayed certain types of discourse (Amis, 1993; Hitchins, 1993).
On the other hand, though, the image we now have of Larkin is, as public
knowledge, part of the inter-textual resource we bring to bear on the poems as
we read them. They will position us as subjects and Larkin as a subject
differently now. The crucial point is that it is still the text in relation to other
texts, the text organized by certain discourses that produces the meaning for us,
and produces us.
Psychoanalysis
When we are positioned by discourse something is going on inside us that we
cannot control, and the paradox is that the organization of language, on the
surface, is reproducing and transforming our emotional life as we read, write,
listen or speak, it is touching our interior. To be ‘positioned’ is simultaneously to
invest that new-formed identity in a text with an affective charge. Psychoanalysis
is useful here to understand that investment, but it is itself caught in a version of
that paradox, for it routinely reduces phenomena to the desire and history of the
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individual while at the same time insisting that individuality and desire is
constructed in sets of relationships governed by a broader history of
child-rearing and familial practices (Parker, 1997a). The study of social
representations commenced with exactly this insight (Moscovici, 1976). To open
up that paradox in psychoanalysis in order to bring it into connection with the
paradox of surface and depth in discourse analysis, we have to do some
theoretical work. Briefly, there are eight aspects to the task; to shift attention
away from the intentions of an author, to treat the text as the arena for the
operation of mental processes, to attend to our investment as readers in the text,
to move psychoanalysis into the realm of the human sciences, to recover the
more prosaic and personal terminology Freud used, to root it in collective
cultural processes, and to treat different psychoanalytic frameworks as
appropriate to different cultures and occasions of use. (Parker, 1997b)
That last point also opens up the notion that psychoanalysis itself is
culturally constructed. That is, we must be aware that the very tool we use is a
result of something else, culture, and as we use it we recreate it as something
true to us. For the moment, suffice it to say that psychodynamics are around us
in culture, and an understanding of dynamics in discourse needs to attend to
them as structuring sign-forces. When, for example, Philip Larkin talks of his
feelings about his parents as ‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’
(cited in Bennett, 1993, p. 3), and then sends poems to his father, who kept a
statue of Hitler on his mantle-piece, with the words ‘I crave/The gift of your
courage and indifference’ (ibid.), we are surely witnessing the re-creation in
culture of lived psychoanalytic forms, psychoanalytic subject positions.
Religion
Despite Freud’s (1907) hostility to religion as ‘universal obsessional neurosis’,
psychoanalytic ideas are embedded in systems of religious iconography and
ethics. And despite psychoanalysis flowing from subaltern religious traditions
such as Jewish Kabbala, the dominant mystical systems that enclose and rework
much psychoanalysis now are varieties of Christianity. Or, to put it another way,
at a different slant to this account, Freud intended psychoanalysis to be a
materialist critique of all forms of theology but it has too often been incorporated
into the church. Foucault’s (1981) image of psychoanalysis as a continuation and
intensification of the Catholic confessional draws attention to this, as does the
argument by some psychoanalysts that they are simply occupying the priest’s
domain today when they minister to sicknesses of the modern soul. Christian
discourse is still one of the more powerful semantic systems in the West, and lies
as a dead weight on the minds of the living now as a kind of prototypical
superego, or, as Freud put it, an ‘above-I’.
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There are both negative and positive sides to this. In a recent survey, the
people of the English village of Godley were asked if they believed in the virgin
birth, and one replied by saying, ‘What do you mean, do I believe? What do you
mean, what do I think? We don’t have to think about such things, they are given
and laid down for us. They are a part of the few things in life that require no
thought at all. It’s a very dangerous question to be asking at all’ (Mrs Bradley,
retired, in ‘Do people in Godley believe in the virgin birth?’, Guardian on
Saturday, 19 December 1992, p. 59). Religious ideas are the unthought which
define and limit what questions might be asked. They prevent reflection. On the
other hand, the history of care for others, and then this history transformed into
the history of charity, are also histories of religion. Many of the major British
overseas aid charities such as Oxfam are Christian in origin and still structured
by Christian moral codes that are reflexively reworked to accommodate political
movements, to support, for example, trends in liberation theology (Black, 1992).
It seems particularly important when we consider the appeal and function of
charity to take into account the sets of moral orders that mobilise subjects, and
their symbolic debt to Christianity. So, we need an approach that can draw
together discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and relevant powerful cultural forms,
Christianity in this case, to produce an appropriate analytic device.
Discursive complexes
One way of reworking psychoanalytic themes as collective social constructions
rather than as individual deep and inevitable psychic truths is to use the notion of
a ‘discursive complex’ (Parker, 1997a). A discursive complex is a set of
statements about a psychic object, a set of statements organized in line with
psychoanalytic preoccupations such that the object simultaneously looks like an
item in a psychoanalytic vocabulary and redefines the subject as a
psychodynamic subject. Discourse reproduces and transforms the social world in
texts, and a discursive complex simultaneously reproduces and transforms the
psychic world of the subject addressed by texts in accordance with
psychodynamic principles. The discursive complex is an analytic device, then,
which brings together the study of discourse: First, particularly as it pertains to
the positioning of subjects; and secondly to the study of psychodynamics
particularly as they emerge in language and are structured as collective cultural
forms. But this coupling of discourse analysis and psychoanalysis really only
gives us the shell of a device to help us read a text. It is a rather abstract notion,
and to fill it out we must elaborate a specific appropriate analytic framework for
the phenomenon in question.
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, one develops a particular dynamic story
that makes sense of the patient’s life-world. That is why, in psychoanalysis, there
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is really no such thing as a ‘case’ from which other cases can be extrapolated.
But we do have available many frameworks that elaborate different
psychoanalytic stories about the nature of sensuality and the unconscious, and
these are useful as templates to help us think through an interpretation. In
analytic discourse research we treat those templates as cultural forms, and they
live in the talk, writing and imagery that cluster around certain social
phenomena. We ‘discover’ them as we rediscover the writings of analysts whose
ideas either seep into the contemporary social imaginary, the cultural transtext,
or crystallize preoccupations that have already arrived from other places, or both.
In this case I worked backwards and forwards from puzzling over the way
charity images work to musings on the internal shape of religious thought,
Christianity in particular, and then sideways to writings in the British object
relations tradition.
Winnicott
My account about the psychological function of charity discourse is of how it
operates in England, and there is something of the atmosphere of English family
relationships in Winnicottian object relations theory. There is something about
the fit between the theory and its culture that makes it possible for one
Winnicottian to say that it is an ‘ordinary-language psychoanalysis’ (Phillips,
1988). Winnicott himself was very influential on the shape of ‘ordinary
language’ accounts of family relationships in England through popular BBC
broadcasts on mothering during the 1940s (Winnicott, 1957) and through
lectures to midwives, child welfare offices and social workers in the 1950s
(Winnicott, 1965). In this case, the talk of the mother’s state of primary maternal
preoccupation with her infant, the child’s discovery of its true self in relation to
the mother, and the role of transitional objects in the gradual detachment of the
infant from the mother as it becomes an independent child, tapped into the
English imagination. It is particularly shocking and understandable at the same
time for English people, for example to read of Philip Larkin’s comments on his
mother as ‘that obsessive snivelling pest’ (cited in Bennett, 1993, p. 3), and him
writing ‘I suppose I shall become free [of her] at 60, three years before the
cancer starts. What a bloody, sodding awful life’ (ibid.). Say ‘Philip Larkin’ to
someone middle-class in England, and it is entirely possible that they will start
reciting his best known poem: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They don’t
mean to but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra
just for you’ (www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm).
Standard edition psychoanalytic theory revolves around infantile fantasy,
but what Winnicottian theory does is to emphasise what the mother actually does
to her infant, how it is so difficult to escape that dependency on the mother, why
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independence is at such a terrible cost, and the ways in which the grown-up child
infantilises the mother and others in a mistaken strategy to gain autonomy. The
developmental story here is one of psychic suffocation and the ruin of something
potentially and essentially good. Winnicott had no time for the theory that there
was a death instinct, for example. Rather, it is that, ‘The mother hates the baby
before the baby hates the mother, and before the baby knows the mother hates
him’ (Winnicott, 1947, p. 200). As the infant attempts to grasp what is objective
in the world, it hallucinates objects into being. The mother is among those
objects, and when the infant destroys the object in fantasy but the mother is still
there, it develops an understanding of the difference between subjectivity and
objectivity. Transitional objects lie between these two spheres as bridges, links
between inside and outside, between sleeping and waking.
Winnicott’s family background in Plymouth was Wesleyan, and he
attended a Methodist church when he was at Cambridge until he converted to
Anglicanism, to the Church of England. He died in 1971. He was not especially
devout, or concerned to use psychoanalysis in the service of religion, but in
recent years his work has been employed by Christian theologians anxious to
rebut traditional Freudian characterizations of religious thinking as
psychopathology (e.g., Meissner, 1990). The truth of God is treated in these
writings as an objective reality, but one that an individual cannot hope to grasp
directly in itself. Internal objects operate as representations of this ‘Truth’, and
transitional objects in the sacrament mediate between the internal sense of God
and the external truth of his Being. When one tries to deny God, destroy him in
fantasy, he is still there holding the subject, as a power that can be returned to.
The point is not whether this Winnicottian account is correct or not, but the
conception of self that it maintains, and the image of the self as a carer and
cared-for being in relation to others is crucial. Mother is source of self, father is
protective envelope. Which brings us to caring and giving.
Charity
The appeal for money in a newspaper advertisement, on a television fund-raising
programme or face-to-face in the street sets in play a tension between donor and
recipient. It is the anxiety in the donor I want to focus on and the way that
anxiety is mobilised in the newspaper advertisement as the reader is addressed as
a subject by the text. To start with, there is ambivalence about giving money
with no return in any situation. It is easier to simply deny undercurrents of
resentment, and it is uncomfortable to be reminded of that ambivalence. Philip
Larkin wrote to his friend Kingsley Amis, the novelist, ‘Don’t you think it’s
ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING
ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE? I
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do: simply DISGUSTING. It makes me ANGRY. Everything about the
ree-lay-shun-ship between men and women makes me angry’ (cited in Bennett,
1993, p. 5). Choices about the placing and frequency of adverts negotiate a fine
line between a reader’s altruism and their annoyance.
Let me turn to charity texts. I trawled through every English national daily
newspaper on one day (7th June 1993), and this was the day when there were no
Oxfam appeals, nothing in fact that related to the third world or overseas aid. A
surprise. It is important to note this as an absence, however, for the absences on
that particular day condition our reading of what did actually appear. There were
only three adverts in total. Again, a surprise for this reader, and a surprise that
draws attention to the expectation that a charity advert appears on every page, of
every paper. One advert was in The Times, and two were in the Daily Express. A
third surprise, for this reader of the liberal Guardian expects those Right-wing
rags to be read by people who would never give anything to anyone. The advert
in The Times was for ‘King George’s Fund for Sailors’, the one in the Daily
Express was for the ‘Royal National Lifeboat Institution’, and the other was for
‘The Mental Health Foundation’. What discursive complexes might be at work
here? I just have space here to briefly mention one – a more detailed reading will
be found in Psychoanalytic Culture in which the photographs of the three
advertisements are reproduced (Parker, 1997).
‘Identification’ is invited through the rhetorical trope of ‘people like you’.
Identification encourages the self-less giving over of part of one’s-self to
another. The advert in the Daily Express Royal National Lifeboat Institution
describes the ways in which ‘people like you’ keep them going and how they
save the lives of ‘complete strangers’. The reader is a complete stranger, but is
addressed as a stranger who helps other complete strangers in an identification
with the organization. The advert puts it this way ‘Because just as thousands of
people rely entirely upon us for their survival, we must rely entirely on you for
ours’, while the advert for the King George’s Fund for Sailors reads ‘All these
charities rely heavily on us - as we need to rely on you’.
The advert for the Mental Health Foundation runs rapidly through a series of
identifications to arrive at the reader from the headline to a point in each
paragraph; ‘Isn’t his future worth protecting’ to ‘This baby, like every baby’ to
‘In fact, one in four adults’ to ‘this vital step for your family’s future welfare’.
This identification is two-fold. First, there are reminders of dependence,
powerlessness and passivity. The child is a potent sign for each of these things.
The child being held in Mental Health Foundation advert is fairly placid, but the
child in Royal National Lifeboat one is distressed, and the man holding the child
gazes helplessly at the reader too. A semiotic displacement from child to
floundering ship occurs in King George’s Fund for Sailors. Second, there is the
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promise of autonomy, control and activity. The Daily Express advert is
particularly interesting here, for we have a Winnicottian mother-child dyad
appealing for support from the father as protective envelope, but we take the
position of the father while we simultaneously identify with the man who is
positioned as the mother. But let us conclude.
Conclusion
There are a number of methodological points that are important in this kind of
work (Parker, 2002). First, that it is the task of discourse analysis to illuminate
the sets of statements that construct an object. Second, that the analysis of
objects in a text needs to include an analysis of the forms of ‘subject’ and
subjectivity that is constituted. Third, one needs to examine the way in which to
be ‘positioned’ in discourse is simultaneously to invest that new-formed identity
in a text with an affective charge, and so also to form ‘subjects’, Fourth, a case
analysis of specific texts can serve to illuminate an argument as well as, if not
better than, study of a large sample of material. Fifth, that analysis of specific
material always needs to locate the text in a cultural context. It is that last point I
have tried to address all too briefly in this paper with my discussion of Winnicott
and my use of Larkin to evoke something of the charitable and uncharitable
shape of English subjectivity. This attention to the culturally-shared meanings
that make psychological phenomena possible is also where we are able to
connect ‘discourse analysis’ with the path-breaking analysis of social
representations in the French tradition (Moscovici, 1976).
This has only been a brief illustration of the type of reading of texts that
can be developed within a discourse analytic framework using some
psychoanalytic theory. Philip Larkin had the endearing habit of ending all his
telephone conversations with Kingsley Amis with the words ‘Fuck Oxfam’
(cited in Bennett, 1993, p. 3). This really brings us up against some links
between sexuality and charity, and some might argue that those words also
express the double distortion of genuine caring that the reification of
relationships brings in contemporary capitalist culture. Affection is reduced to
sex and then to an expletive, and care is turned into part of a commercial
machinery which reduces recipients into powerless objects of a text that is
mechanically reproduced millions of times. That aside, or precisely because of
that, it is important to understand how those texts work when they meet the
readers who are turned into subjects, into powerful objects of another kind.
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