Constructing Subjects, Producing Subjectivities: Developing Analytic Needs in Discursive Psychology

The publication of Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) blueprint for a discursive
social psychology was a pivotal moment in the discursive turn in psychology.
That transformational text went on to underpin much contemporary discursive
psychology; paving the way for what has become an enriching range of
analytic approaches, and epistemological and ontological arguments
(Wetherell, Taylor and Yates, 2001a; 2001b). Twenty years on, and as
discursive psychology continues to develop, the approaches it encompasses are
becoming more vibrantly contested and a range of positions are forming
around what one might appropriately designate a discursive psychology, and
what form that discursive psychology should take (Wetherell, forthcoming,
2007).
In this exploratory paper I pursue some of these debates insofar as they
offer analytic resources for my PhD study of women’s accounts of success and
failure. I outline two different strands in discursive psychology; an
epistemological constructionism concerned with how meaning is established in
interaction; and an ontological constructionism, which takes this somewhat
further by looking at the implications of constructions for subjects and
subjectivity. I consider a range of resources available for a discursive
psychology attentive to the everyday practices of lived lives, to the
intersubjective production of meanings and to the theorisation of individual
history and individual differences. As part of this, I explore the potential
contribution of a psycho-social discursive psychology, significant for the
inextricable connection it makes between individual and society, and for how it
might inform notions of a dynamic, acting, individual. In this, however, I query
whether a discursive psycho-social psychology must necessarily draw upon
traditional psychoanalytic architectures.