Abstract
This chapter explores data emerging from a series of reflective psychosocial group-based explorations of emotional experiences of “Leavers” and “Remainers” that were held in an English coastal town following the result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. We propose that the group method deployed in that project enabled an intimate insight into underlying structures of feeling constituting psychosocial and political life in the UK from 2016–2018. Specifically, the work of the groups highlights powerful psychosocial dynamics related to a lack of emotional containment including prevalent expressions of “shame” as theorised by James (Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a national epidemic, Vintage Books, 1996; Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on our deadliest epidemic, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999; Gilligan, Social Research: An International Quarterly 70:1149–1180, 2003). We draw on these conceptualisations, and complementary psychoanalytic and cultural-philosophical accounts of shame and guilt (Akhtar, Shame, Routledge, 2018; Benedict, 1946) further support our analytic approach. The chapter examines the ramifications of the winner/loser outcome structured into the referendum-as-political mechanism, one at risk of becoming firmly instituted in post-Brexit politics.
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Notes
- 1.
“Nation” has also shifted, with the fragile settlements linking England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in further complex and painful disarray, now longstanding (O’Toole, 2018).
- 2.
Hay suggests this complex term, “political ontology” includes considering: “What is the polity made of? What are its constituents and how do they hang together?” (Hay, 2009: 81).
- 3.
Christopher Nolan’s (2017) film Dunkirk, alongside Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour (2017) marked cinematic interventions within a Brexit culture preoccupied with martial themes and inviting (specious) analogies between WWII and the UK’s political-economic withdrawal from the EU.
- 4.
See also Yates and MacRury (2021).
- 5.
Some group approaches liken the group leadership to the reciprocal musical attunement needed in leading an orchestra. In this tradition, the group facilitator is referred to as the “Conductor”.
- 6.
O’Toole (2018) dubs this phase, Three Years in Hell.
- 7.
This process-led approach has some roots in clinical group analysis pioneered by the psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes (1948) who is linked to the Institute of Group Analysis and also the British Human Relations tradition of group analysis pioneered by Wilfred Bion (1963), and practised in the Tavistock tradition.
- 8.
To aid analysis we transcribed and reviewed emergent themes in the data, see also (Yates & MacRury, 2021).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank contributors to this research project which led to the writing of this chapter. These include John Biggs, Sonia Devji, Darren Ellis, Irene Eskanazi, Lynn Froggett, Jacob Johanssen, Brett Kahr, Amy Tatum and Katy Vaughan. Our thanks also to the Bournemouth University Women’s Academic Network and the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences for supporting the research discussed in this chapter. The project followed the Bournemouth University Code of Ethical Practice and was approved by the Bournemouth University Research Ethics Committee.
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Yates, C., MacRury, I. (2022). Shameful and Shameless: Projecting Triumph and Humiliation in the Brexit Era; A Psychosocial-Group Methodological Approach. In: Gerodimos, R. (eds) Interdisciplinary Applications of Shame/Violence Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05570-6_13
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