Love: an introduction to psychosocial studies

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 4
• Convenor: Dr Brendan McGeever
• Assessment: formative coursework of 500 words (30%) and a 1500-word essay (70%)

This module provides a grounding in approaches to, and theories of, human relations. It orients you to a psychosocial perspective, helping you to differentiate this from the cognate areas of psychology and sociology.

Using the trope of ‘love and intimacy’ we encourage you to explore how psychosocial theories can elucidate key social, developmental and personal issues. We introduce ways of thinking that are personally reflexive but also academically robust - a theme that will recur throughout the BA.

Indicative syllabus

• Feelings and emotions: accounts of affect, feeling and emotion and the social life of emotions as cultural phenomena; basic psychoanalytic concepts and how emotions can be thought of as ‘public events’; case studies such as the response to the death of Princess Diana, or the mobilisation of feelings towards ‘celebrities’
• Love: psychoanalytic ideas about sexuality and desire; how love operates both as an ‘unwilled’ element in psychosocial life and as a construct that has foundational significance in culture and society; differences between distinct kinds of love, for instance romance and parental love; if love is ‘imaginary’ what does that mean?
• Attachment and care: basics of attachment theory and other relational ideas, set in the context of an understanding of social assumptions about intimacy, care, parenting, ageing, family life and development; basic postcolonial perspectives concerning the construction of ideas about normative family life
• Belonging: identification with a collective, including social responsibility, ideas of community and ethical relationality; the centrality of some philosophical positions on relational ethics to the psychosocial project

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• explain some core assumptions of psychosocial studies
• identify the relationships (affinities and critical distinctions) between psychosocial studies and some of the disciplinary positions out of which it has emerged
• apply some basic psychosocial ideas to the field of intimate human relationships
• write an evaluative essay addressing the issues above
• participate to a greater or lesser extent in classroom and virtual discussions on psychosocial topics.