The Ambivalences of Angel's ‘Arrangement’: A Psychosocial Lens on the Contemporary Condition of Personal Life

Introduction

The aim of this article is to explore the potential of a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial approach to extend understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. In attending to the social construction of intimacy and personal life, sociologists have neglected their equally important shaping and constitution from inner life, and have failed to address the psychodynamics of biography. It is my argument that the investigation of the meanings of contemporary formations of personal life requires the theorization of the complex intertwining of the social and the psychic. ¹ Such an analysis seeks to transcend the dualism of the individual and the social, and takes seriously the realm of the intra-psychic, ‘the power of feelings’ (Chodorow, 1999) and the dynamic unconscious, but does so without engaging in either psychological or sociological reductionism.

The article is, therefore, somewhat unconventional in the context of sociology as a discipline, drawing on theoretical and methodological developments in the emerging field of psychosocial studies. ² It takes as its focus the case of one individual, ‘Angel’ – a 46 year old white, heterosexual man living in a northern city ³ – and the story he tells of the ‘arrangement’ he has with a woman, an arrangement which he differentiates clearly from a ‘relationship’. The story is read psychosocially, within the context of the wider narrative he offers of his personal life, in which, against a backdrop of relationship break-ups and psychological break-down, friendship is currently assuming increased importance in his life. In this respect his story resonates strongly with findings from the larger study from which this case is drawn. How he talks of his arrangement can be heard as a positively inflected story of an ‘non-conventional partnership’, an example of that which the research set out to explore, and his life can be understood as exemplifying many of the processes of social transformation in personal life which characterize the highly mobile postmodern era: individualization, the re-ordering of gender relations, the de-centring of conjugality, re-centring on friendship, and the queering of the social (Roseneil, 2000; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). However, the analysis is directed as much at the psycho-biographical specificity of Angel's story as at the social patterns of which it speaks. With the casting of a psychosocial lens, we can explore the investments Angel has in particular identity positions, and the powerful unconscious conflicts which cut through his narrative. Bringing together the psychic and the social, his story can be seen as illustrating of some of the ambivalences of contemporary personal life. And, as psychoanalytic sociologist Ian Craib (1994) argues is common in contemporary world, the themes of disappointment, conflict, loss, failure, and melancholia can be discerned in the interview. Angel's story is one of existential pain and internal conflict, countered by the search for pleasure and connection, lived out in the particular context of the 21^st century city.

Personal life and the psychosocial

Recent years have seen an outpouring of sociological attention to the contemporary condition of personal life. Love and intimacy, care and connection, sex and sexuality, within and beyond the conventional family, have moved from the margins of the discipline to take their place as central objects of concern. ⁴ Much of this work is concerned with seeking out trends and patterns in the organization of personal life. There are sharp differences between those who focus on the transformations in intimate life wrought by individualization and/or reflexive modernization (e.g. Giddens, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, 2002; Bauman, 2001; Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) and those who focus on practices of care and interdependency, and their gender politics, in which they see much more continuity (e.g. Finch and Mason, 1993; Jamieson, 1998; Duncan and Edwards, 1999; Langford, 1999; Silva and Smart, 1999; Smart, 2000; Ribbens, McCarthy and Edwards, 2002). But sociologists of personal life share a concern with the aggregate rather than the individual, and tend to work with a social constructionist ontology, which assumes the existence of a rational, unitary intimate subject. ⁵ As Lois McNay points out of constructionist approaches in general, they lack attention to ‘the more troubling and destabilizing effects that irrational and unconscious motivations may have upon an individual's behaviour’ (McNay, 2000: 122). A preoccupation with thought and language, with the meanings people give to their behaviour and the discourses which interpellate them, tends to mean a corresponding lack of attention to the power of what is unthought, unspoken, unthinkable, and unspeakable (Hoggett, 2000).

In contrast, this article's psychosocial approach rests on a psychoanalytic ontology of the non-unitary, defended subject, on the psychoanalytic insistence on the importance of the dynamic unconscious (Frosh, 1987; Hollway, 1989; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000), ⁶ and on the idea that subjects are constituted relationally (Mitchell and Aron, 1999). ⁷ It attends to the unconscious dynamics which contest the rational mind, alongside the analysis of practices, identities and discourses. Paying heed to key psychoanalytic themes, a psychosocial perspective on personal life emphasizes the importance of the individual's biographical experience of internal psychic conflict, ambivalence, loss and disappointment (Craib, 1994).

But, it should be emphasized, adopting a psychoanalytic ontology does not mean accepting the entirety of the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly its neglect of the social. ⁸ The diversity within and transformation of psychoanalysis is seen in the development of feminist psychoanalytic theories which, engaging with the insights of poststructuralism, reject the ahistorical nature of traditional psychoanalytic theory, and endeavour to theorize the intertwinement of the psychic and the social. ⁹ Writers such as Teresa Brennan (1991), Jane Flax (1993), Jessica Benjamin (1995), Judith Butler (1997), Nancy Chodorow (1999), and Lois McNay (2000) all, in different ways, stress the importance of historical and cultural construction, but also emphasize the power of unconscious dynamics, and the disjunctures between socially available subject positions and psychic experience. ¹⁰ Building on Jacqueline Rose's (1986) earlier argument about the power of unconscious dynamics in destabilizing sexual identity positions, Judith Butler proposes: ‘the psyche, which includes the unconscious, is very different from the subject: the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject’ (Butler, 1997: 86). Thus, as Craib points out, individuals engage in two interlocking forms of emotional work: the internal work of coping with contradiction, conflict and ambivalence, much of which they may not be aware, and the external work of reconciling what goes on inside with what they are supposed to feel (Craib, 1995: 155). A psychoanalytic perspective, then, draws our attention to the struggles people have with available discursive positions, identities and social practices, and the investments that they make in them (Frosh and Emerson, 2005).

So, my psychosocial point of departure is the proposition that the sphere of personal life – intimacy, sexuality, love, friendship, parenthood – is both socially patterned and constructed, varying cross-culturally and historically, and that it has a life of its own, that it is experienced as beyond the control of reason, as inherently individual, internal, and as particular to specific relationships.

Methodology

The paper offers a close reading of a single interview from a research project on ‘Care, Friendship and Non-Conventional Partnership’ which set out to explore the practices and ethics of the meaningful relationships (particularly sexual/ love relationships and friendships) of a section of the population who might be considered the most ‘individualized’ – adults who do not live with a sexual partner. ¹¹ This section of the population is growing rapidly; the proportion of households composed of people who do not live with a (heterosexual) partner increased from 29 to 45 percent between 1971 and 2003 (derived from Summerfield and Babb, 2004).

In-depth narrative interviews, lasting between one and a half and two and a half hours were carried out with 51 ¹² people aged between 25 and 60 years old, 24 of whom were re-interviewed eighteen months to two years later. ¹³ The interviewees were selected to include (as far as was possible within the localities selected) a spread of ages and occupations, and included men and women, with and without children, white and African Caribbean people, heterosexuals, lesbians and gay men, single people and those in non-cohabiting sexual/ love relationships, and those living alone and in shared housing.

Conceptualizing interviewees as non-unitary, defended, psychosocial subjects, whose accounts, meanings, and selves are not transparent, the project drew upon Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson's (2000) work on the ‘free association narrative interview’. The interviews sought to elicit stories about intimacy, sociability and care, in which, as much as possible, interviewees were able to develop their own narrative structure. We did this by asking a relatively small number of open-ended questions around our main points of interest, along the lines of, ‘can you tell me about… ?’ We also used a ‘relationship mapping’ exercise, in which participants were asked to write the names of everyone whom they felt was significant to them within a series of concentric circles, indicating the nature of the relationship by the use of different coloured pens, and the degree of closeness felt by their proximity to the centre of the circle. ¹⁴

The analysis developed in this paper draws on principles derived from psychoanalytic practice, in that it is concerned with exploring the non-rational, unarticulated, unconscious dimensions of the experiences recounted – psychic reality – as much as that which the interviewees are able to formulate expressly in discourse. The analysis works with the methodological principle of Gestalt which emphasizes the importance of attending to the form of the data, of seeking to maintain the integrity of the data, and of ‘holding the whole in the mind’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000: 69). It focuses on the consciously articulated descriptions, justifications and explanations of actions and relationships given in the interview, but attends equally to the emotionality embedded in what is said. It examines the speed, density, and clarity of speech, the ordering of stories, what is said when, where stories begin and end, and what is not said – the gaps, silences, elisions, contradictions, avoidances – the use of understatement, irony and metaphor, asides, digressions and the free associations made by the interviewee in response to the questions posed. It grants particular analytic significance to ‘what people bring spontaneously to an interview’ (Jones, 2004: 75). Although the analysis presented here is mine, it was developed initially in the context of a day-long group workshop involving a number of researchers experienced in psychosocial and biographical-narrative methods, and including the interviewer, at which differing interpretations of Angel's story were discussed, alongside our emotional responses to the interview text. ¹⁵ I offer some reflections on my emotional engagements at the end of the paper.

The choice of Angel as the subject of this analysis was made on the basis that his interview offered a strong example of some of the general tendencies discerned through a more traditionally sociological cross-sectional analysis of the data. This analysis (reported in more detail in Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Roseneil, 2007) found that a significant proportion of the sample had, like Angel, experienced the breakdown of a long-term sexual/love relationship, and a considerable number had, also like Angel, experienced periods of acute or chronic psychological distress. The cross-sectional analysis also identified three inter-related relationship practices amongst the interviewees: a centring of personal life around friendships, a de-centring of sexual/love relationships, and a self-conscious experimentation with ‘non-conventional’ forms of sexual partnership. Angel's story exemplifies each of these practices, but the claim is not that Angel is typical or representative of the wider sample. The point of a psychosocial analysis is to direct attention to the interplay between the social and the psychic, to provide a rich analysis of the complexity and locatedness of individual experience of social and cultural processes and practices, rather than to straightforwardly suggest generalizability across a larger population. ¹⁶

A brief biography

Angel is a graduate, who had worked for many years in a high pressured job in the creative industries in London. In his early twenties he married Jane. They had two children and, at Jane's insistence, they moved out of London, which meant that he commuted into central London each day, regularly returning home late and tired after entertaining clients and contacts. After fifteen years of marriage he got involved with a woman who worked in the same business – Eloise – and about six months into the affair, he left his wife, and they divorced. He moved out of the family home, into a flat in central London, and shortly afterward, into another flat with Eloise. Two years before the interview, exhausted by the pace of their working lives, and still unable to afford to buy a house in London, this time at Eloise's instigation, he and Eloise agreed that they would change gear and move out of London, to Northern City, where she had a network of friends from university. She paid the deposit on the house; he left his job in London, moved into the house and began doing it up, and found work up north. The plan was that she would follow him when her contract finished. For a year they had what he called a ‘weekend relationship’, but eventually it became clear to him that she was not going to move, and their five year old relationship disintegrated. Around this time Angel was made redundant from two jobs in quick succession, and he was suffering from severe financial problems. Subsequently he experienced a mental breakdown. At the time of the interview Angel was sharing the house Eloise had bought with two male housemates, was unemployed, but had plans to set up a business with some friends.

The structure of Angel's intimate biography resonates strongly with widely recognized trends in the contemporary organization of intimate life under conditions of rapid social change. A long first marriage, which produced children, was followed by another co-residential, non-marital partnership, which broke down when the parties discovered that they wanted different things –she to stay in London pursuing a career at which she was increasingly successful, he to be in Northern City, living a down-shifted life (Hamilton and Mail, 2003), ¹⁷ much more focused on sociability than work. It is a story of the impact of postmodern working conditions on personal life (Bunting, 2004); a huge stress had been placed on his marriage by his long hours, and his wife's desire both to live outside London and to have him home earlier in the evening, made him angry. Later on, the insecurities of the neo-liberal labour market cast him into unemployment twice in a short period of time, and contributed to his psychological instability. It is a story of individualization, and particularly of its gender dynamics (Beck and Beck Gernsheim, 1995, 2000) – of Eloise's growing interest and commitment to her career, which conflicted with their shared relationship project and his expectations of men and women's careers. And it is a story of the increasing importance of geographical mobility (Urry, 2000) and its relationship to intimate life – of moving from London to the Home Counties, from there back to the London, and again to the north, in search of a better life-style. These sociological themes give shape to Angel's psychic life, but the particularity of his story, of his emotional responses and processes, cannot be ‘read-off’ his social experiences.

Theme 1: Breaking-up and breaking down

Angel's first break-up – that of his fifteen year marriage – was followed by an immediate, indeed overlapping, re-partnering, with little time for reflection. He volunteered very little about his wife or his children, none of which appeared to be uppermost in his conscious mind. In fact, when, about three quarters of the way through the interview, he was asked specifically about his wife, he was reluctant:

Q: OK, so, can we talk about Jane then?

Angel: My ex-wife. Do we have to? Alright then. [laughs]

At the start of the interview, in order to ascertain who occupies the emotional foreground of the subject's life, he was asked about the people to whom he felt closest:

Q: OK, so just starting out, in a real general sense, can you tell me about the people that are closest to you?

Angel: Well, there's a circle of friends here in Northern City, probably be closest now. Some friends in London, and, more family-wise, I've got two children.

The fact that his children are mentioned after his friends might be seen as reflecting the lack of frequency of his contact with them; he later said that he does not see them as often as he would like, because of the distance, and particularly now that he is unemployed, he can no longer afford to fly them up to Northern City for the weekend every few months. There was a sadness in his voice when he spoke about this. It is interesting to note, however, that on his relationship map (Figure 1), which he was asked to construct after about five minutes of discussion of the people who are most important to him, his children are in the inner circle, along with a close male friend. So, although his immediate response was to emphasize the friends in his day to day life, when reflecting on his relationships in order to construct a diagrammatic representation of them, he placed his children at the core of his intimate life.

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Figure 1

Angel's Relationship Map

The only other occasion when he referred to how he felt about the end of his marriage and his changed relationship with his children was when asked about living in Northern City. Here he confessed to the emotional impact of leaving ‘the family home’ and his children:

Q: Do you feel quite settled in Northern City now?

Angel: Yes, I do, and… also I think that's another thing with, over the past five years obviously, it was a huge emotional wrench leaving the family home because of the kids and everything. And, you know, it was a proper family home and everything. Then staying, you know, I stayed in a little flat on my own and a slightly bigger one with Eloise, although she'd moved into the other one which was really boxy – and then we moved out and that was

in [trendy inner city area], then moved out to [leafy middle class outer suburb] to a garden flat which was nice, but, you know, just that whole moving thing…

This is the only description of the period around the time of his first break-up. It is striking – that he speaks of a ‘huge emotional wrench’, but frames this in terms of disruption to living places, rather than in terms of the loss of relationships; acknowledging loss seems to be difficult. He poses the ‘proper family home’ which he left against the ‘little flat’ to which he moved, suggesting that he feels in some way diminished by his exit from a life which, at some level, he felt to be correct, morally right, and appropriate. This diminution is mitigated by his re-partnering, and the move to a ‘slightly bigger’ flat.

After leaving Jane and the children, he went straight into another life of hard working and heavy socializing, and when, five years later, things went wrong with Eloise, he could not cope. His story of this period is particularly hard to follow, and one has to deduce that she left him, because this is never clearly stated. His references to this period are often indirect (for instance, ‘and then that happened’), or couched in understatement:

I got a job and came up, and I found a house and, you know, she decided she wanted to stay doing the job in London so she didn't actually come up, which was a tad irritating (my italics), but you know, despite that I'm really glad that she did suggest it, cos I really like living up here rather than in London.'

And later in the interview:

Funnily enough, at the time, it didn't make me very happy.

His most explicit references to his mental state spoke of being in ‘a right state’, ‘really falling to pieces’ and ‘kind of descending into the hell that I descended into for three months’. Being alone at home was intolerable, because the walls of the house seemed to be closing in on him, and he was prescribed anti-depressants. Desperate for some sort of catharsis, he brought the situation to an emotional climax when Eloise came up to Northern City for work, and he chased her around the city, trying to get to talk to her, and being repeatedly blocked by a mutual friend who was trying to protect Eloise from his rage.

I was trying to find them round Northern city, by which time I was screaming down mobile phones, hanging round hotels, kicking doors down and really throwing a wobbler […] I was getting more and more psychotic by that stage. I did actually sort of steam in and out of various places trying to find them, and I got, you know, I got so completely mad about the whole thing.

Finally, in the middle of the night, he sat outside her hotel room, waiting for her to return, and when she still refused to talk to him, he stormed out of the hotel, violently kicking the locked lobby doors as he tried to leave.

How might we understand all of this from a psychosocial perspective? Craib's (1994) work on ‘the importance of disappointment’, offers a useful framework to think about Angel's relationship break-ups and his psychological break-down. Craib argues for the centrality to the human sciences of the under-utilized concept of disappointment, suggesting that ‘there is much about our modern world that increases disappointment, and at the same time encourages us to hide from it’ (Craib, 1994: 1). When we do not get something we expect, hope for, intend or desire, he suggests, there is a strong human tendency to revert to the infant self, to scream and rage, in the hope that our desire may thereby be realized; Angel's rampaging around the city can be understood in these terms. Craib says that the contemporary world fails to offer ‘containment’, pointing to the many processes of social change which produce losses which affect more and more of us – geographical and social mobility, which fracture networks of family and friends, the losses consequent on increased levels of relationship breakdown, and the fragmentation of working lives in the neo-liberal economy. And, he suggests, the loss of a loved one reminds us not just of every other loss, but of the existential human inevitability of loss.

This framework captures well Angel's story of movement between places, of job losses, and relationship breakdowns, but we need to consider too the gendered salience of these dislocations. His first, largely unacknowledged, ungrieved for loss of his status as a father and husband is followed by the loss of another intimate relationship, which ended because his partner put her career ahead of their joint plans. Then he lost his job, and a career which provided not just a good income but cultural kudos and social networks. These multiple dislocations and failures of masculinity seem to have been almost unbearable. In effect, he had lost the most significant markers of the successful performance of heterosexual masculinity, all of which had mattered to him in his constitution of self. His sense of frustration, rage and pain could not be contained, and without real support from friends, with the structures of paid work disappeared, and alone at home, he found himself depressed, melancholic. ¹⁸ His unwillingness to speak about the ending of his first marriage, and his indirectness in explaining the break-down of his subsequent partnership, are suggestive of a failure to assume responsibility for what happened in his sexual relationships, which could be seen as contributing to his sense of helpless rage at a woman, and a world, that were working against him.

However, Angel struggled through this period, and a year later, at the time of the interview, told a much more positive story about his current life – about his friendships and his ‘arrangement’. But, as we shall see, there is ambivalence in his stories of each, and loss and disappointment continue to haunt him.

Theme 2: The centrality of friendship

In common with many of those interviewed in this research, Angel's current personal life centres around his friends (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). ¹⁹ As we saw above, right at the start of the interview, when asked about the people to whom he was closest, he talks of his friends in Northern City, and in London. No mention is made of his current sexual partner in this initial response, and it is friends rather than family who occupy his day-to-day personal life. He describes himself as never having got on well with his mother, but his brother, whom he does like, is described as ‘more like a mate than a brother’. On his relationship map he names 31 friends (which was one of the highest numbers of friends named by any of the interviewees). He goes on to make clear that he particularly values his local friends. He tells of his ‘major socialization circle’ in Northern City, with whom he hangs out a lot, and with a few of whom he has plans to start a business. He thinks of himself as a sociable person, who gets on well with people, and the public sociality of the city gives him great pleasure. He paints a vivid picture of an active social life, populated by many friends, at the gym, in bars and clubs, where he can always get free drinks and guest list, and his mobile phone rang several times, and he received several text messages, during the course of the interview.

Several times a week I just walk up this road or will be going into Northern City or look over there and go, isn't Northern City fantastic? I really like it, because of the socialization. The fact you can go places, and if you don't like somewhere you walk round the corner to somewhere else. You can get there easy. You can get home easy.

In this quotation what he likes about Northern City is the ease of mobility, the possibilities of transitoriness. On one level, this is a straightforward comparison with the difficulties of moving about London, from someone who had spent many years making long commutes. But on another level, it can be read as a metaphor for his life, for the postmodern personal life, rather as described by Bauman's (2001) notion of liquid modernity, in which moving from place to place, from one person to another, has been a feature. As such it is a positive embracing of his current life in Northern City, his friendships and his freedom of movement.

But there is another strand to Angel's story about the importance of friendship, a more ambivalent, submerged story of disappointment, fracture, thwarted intimacy and loss, of the psychic distress he encountered when friends failed to offer him any containment. This emerges when he is asked explicitly if he had ever needed to rely upon a friend for help or care; at this point he tells the story about the end of his relationship with Eloise, and how he started ‘trying to lean on people, and find people to talk to.’ But he was disappointed, and his disappointments in friendship are tied up with his disappointments in love. He acknowledges that he has different circles of friends, and that he has moved through friendship groups in different phases of his life. The circle of friends he had when he was married:

went out of the window when the marriage went out of the window, by and large. Didn't really keep in touch with any of those people, and if lines were drawn, they were drawn cos I left, so it was like – sort of chucked out of that lot. The movement here between not-using ('didn't really keep in touch'), using (‘I left’) and not-using (‘it was like – sort of chucked out') the first person pronoun is telling: another illustration of his difficulty in consistently staying with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, and acknowledging responsibility for what happened. He says that he tries to keep in touch with his London friends by phone, but he admits that he is not very good at this, because he wants his friends close-by. When his relationship with Eloise was ending, in which he presents himself as the injured party, their mutual friends abandoned him too: ‘I did hit this patch where I didn't have anyone to speak to, and I really needed to speak to somebody and I was aware of that’. One couple sided with her, and refused to talk to him, and another long-term female friend of his also took her side. He recounts a number of attempts to talk to friends, and expresses a longing for less superficial conversation. One group of friends proved particularly disappointing, and provoked a realization that men are ‘not really equipped to help these conversations’. Even his best friend, who had also been left by his girlfriend around the same time, and who should therefore have been able to share experiences with him, would not talk to Angel about his emotional crisis.

All of this gives the impression that Angel is experiencing what Judith Butler (1997) calls ‘heterosexual melancholia’ – a lingering sense of lack in his friendships with men, of the possibilities of same-sex intimacies not achieved, and the unspeakable sadness of this ungrievable loss. He moves backwards and forwards between a conscious acknowledgement of his disappointment in his friends and an ongoing investment in the idea of himself as surrounded by friends who are the most important people in his life. His identity as a sociable man about town is not dislodged by the all too painful shortcomings of his friends’ practices of care. Indeed perhaps these failures serve to intensify his investment in the idea of friendship as central in his life, which is such a strong theme of the interview. ²⁰ In seeking to defend himself, his fragile self, against the acknowledgement of loss and disappointment, a discourse of sociability comes to matter all the more to him.

Theme 3: De-centring and re-imagining sexual relationships

In common with many of the people interviewed in the research, Angel was involved in a ‘non-conventional partnership’ about which he spoke in enthusiastic terms. These non-cohabiting relationships tended to share the characteristic of not being the exclusive, and often not the primary, space of intimacy for those involved. They did not conform to the dominant heteronormative relationship teleology, which posits that a relationship should be ‘going somewhere’, that somewhere being shared residence and long-term commitment. Instead, they were described as being about the construction of mutual pleasure in the present, and as involving a significant degree of conscious, reflexive thought and negotiation between parties who tended to think of themselves as separate individuals, rather than as couples (Roseneil, 2007). Many of these relationships shared a rejection of the romance narrative, clearly separating sex from romance, with Angel's particular version close in form to the ‘fuck buddies’ of several of the gay men who were interviewed.

A socio-historic lens on these non-conventional partnerships would understand them as made possible by discourses of permissive sexuality and the sexual liberalization of the past four decades (Hawkes, 1996), and by processes of gender change, sexual re-ordering – ‘queer tendencies’ – and individualization which have released (some) women and men from the hetero-relational familial practices of modernity (Roseneil, 2000). They might also be seen as examples of Giddens’ (1992) notion of the contingent ‘pure relationship’ and of ‘plastic sexuality’. But, as Craib (1994) argues such sociological approaches to emotional life do not register the psychic conflicts, dis-ease, and ambivalences which co-exist with the positively inflected stories of new relationship forms which the interviewees told. A psychosocial analysis must pay attention to these tensions and conflicts.

Angel is strongly invested in telling a positive story of his ‘arrangement’. He sets his choice of this particular mode of sexual engagement in the context of both the importance of his friendships, and the problems which his last relationship had brought. It is worth quoting at some length here:

Q: OK, so then, just the last question about relationships, can you tell me about your current relationship?

Angel: Yeah. It's an arrangement. […] The circle of friends I've got is a major socialization circle, and in a way I don't want to be tied down to a relationship. I don't want all the crap that it ends up – well, certainly what the last one ended up being. And I just somehow actually bumped into somebody who had a very similar last eleven years […]. So we just kind of bumped into each other and I just jokingly suggested that – I said what you need is, you need three studs, was my expression. You know, for social situations, for sex, and whatever else. And it's just kind of gone from that. And that's all it is. We're going to the pictures tonight, which is a bit borderline on the arrangement thing. We don't go out together. She stays here occasionally or I stay at her place. We both like films. We both like the same authors, so we are capable of speaking about other things apart from just sex, but that's effectively what it's based on.

Q: So in the first instance the arrangement is sex?

Angel: Yes, totally…. It's an ‘a’ not an ‘r’, as we say. It's not a relationship. It's an arrangement. And it seems to work quite well on that basis. And it's quite odd, because it's on that level you're able to have completely open conversations, and there's none of these kind of hidden corners of what's being said, which is quite refreshing.

He explains that immediately after break-up with Eloise, he was ‘desperate to get into another relationship straightaway’, because he was used to being with someone, and thought that he needed to be with someone. He admits to having been worried how he was going to find anyone else at his age, but ‘you kind of get through that and you just think, well, bollocks to that’. So, with his friends and housemates around him, he got ‘to the point where I don't actually want to do that.’ And then he met Debbie and they formed their arrangement. When asked whether he thinks it can be sustained, he replies, ‘I think we'll sustain it as long as it works’.

Throughout the interview he is keen to talk about his arrangement, spontaneously bringing up the topic several times before he gets to recount the story in full. He is clearly proud of it, and gives the impression of a man who is rather pleased with himself, explaining that whilst her workmates disapprove, or do not understand, his mates think it is ‘fantastic’. Sex is key to the arrangement, and Angel describes Debbie as the most sexually demanding woman he has met, tapping into an old hetero-patriarchal discourse – or fantasy – of insatiable female sexuality as something to be both admired and feared. He makes it clear that they are ‘enjoying each other's company’ a lot, and there is a note of triumph – a‘phallic flourish’ ²¹ – in his descriptions of how he is the only person she allows to smoke in her flat.

Amidst this positive account of the arrangement, of its negotiated, straightforward, open character, and of its purely sexual nature, there are, however, ambivalences and inconsistencies. He is aware that the borderline between an ‘a’ and a ‘r’ is rather fuzzy, and although he says that they do not go out together, they were going to the cinema on the night of the interview. He also tells a story of how Debbie – who he has said was not ‘into music’ – had angled to come with him to see a band, and how he had studiously ignored this – none of which tallies with his picture (above) of ‘completely open conversations’ and ‘no hidden corners’. The impression that this gives of him attempting to police the borders of their arrangement against Debbie's potentially dangerous incursions is further strengthened by another story he tells of the day before the interview:

She can be quite demanding. She's the most sexually kind of, I don't know, I don't quite know how to put it really, demanding, yeah. Yeah, so we have an expression. It's ‘h and h’ – hungover and horny. And she'd been out, and she texted me, saying, ‘I'm h and h. Please come round today’. And I'm going, ‘I'm exhausted from my birthday’. But I mean it's just a couple of things that we both quite miss, but we're just trying to keep on… So, I went round and sat and watched a bit of tv and stayed there last night, and the whole thing, the whole thing is a balance, because it's nice to sleep with someone, but then not every night, you know – the actual sleeping thing, as opposed to anything else. So, once or twice a week, keep it at that.

This story starts off being about Debbie's sexual voraciousness, the highly charged nature of their connection, and the potency of his heterosexual masculinity, and fits well with his earlier self-presentation as cool playboy about town. But, with an admission that on this occasion he felt too tired to live up to this image, the story goes on to reveal a rather different picture of cosy domesticity, and it ends up being unclear whether Debbie's sexual desires were met that that night. In his statement that they both miss ‘a couple of things’ –the implication being sex and sleeping with someone – we see a mutual desire for an intimacy that is not just sexual, an intimacy which exceeds his earlier construction of the arrangement as purely sexual. The mutuality of this desire is significant, because together with their shared texting language, it suggests that there is more of a ‘we’ than the explicit formulation of the arrangement will allow. Yet, Angel's psychic conflict about the interdependence this implies is obvious, as he quickly pulls back and makes it clear that such intimacy – ‘the actual sleeping thing, as opposed to anything else’ – is not for ‘every night’. His firm, ‘So, once or twice a week, keep it at that’, re-establishes control and separateness, against the unruly desire for the intimate merging and ceded control of sleeping together.

At the end of this extract, and overall, Angel seems to be working hard to assert his separate-ness from Debbie. He constructs their coming together as being only about two people with similar relationship histories, agreeing to fulfil a function for each other. He appears unwilling to express his connection with her as something particular to her. This is exemplified by the fact that at no time in the interview does he ever use Debbie's name – she is always ‘she’ or ‘her’. Indeed, we only know her name because he wrote it on the relationship map, in the second circle. This reluctance to name her could be read as a reluctance to pin her down, to commit her to him, or him to her, to specify her particularity, as more than the person with whom he happens to be having sex at the moment. It also tallies with his self-identification as single on the self-report questionnaire, which he filled out at the end of the interview. Setting this story within the context of his history of fractured relationships and loss suggests that he is struggling to maintain his psychic grounding, as he grapples with the tension between the lure of intimate connection, with its danger of further disappointment and loss, and the relative safety of being outside a ‘relationship’, with its own threat of depression and loneliness.

Angel's presentation of self

Reading the tensions and conflicts in Angel's story of his arrangement in the context of the inter-subjective dynamics of the interview, one wonders how much of the emphasis on raw sex is conditioned by the interview situation itself. The interviewer was an attractive woman, over ten years younger than Angel, whom he might have wanted to impress. Through a psychosocial lens, as we shall see, there is considerable evidence of a powerful unconscious desire to establish his cool, successful masculinity, against a backdrop in the interview of having to talk about breaches to this image. A concern with presentation of self has a long history in sociology, dating back to Goffman (1969), although surprisingly few qualitative researchers dwell on how interviewees self-present when reporting their research. ²² The first notable aspect of Angel's presentation of self was that when the interviewer arrived at his house to interview him, he had forgotten about the interview. He was flustered by her arrival, but agreed to do the interview anyway because he did not have any other pressing engagement. How much significance to accord this act of forgetting is a matter of speculation. Certainly the time of someone who is unemployed is often different from that of a busy sociologist trying to schedule her diary with several dozen interviews within a fairly short period. It might be thought that forgetting was an act of repression; at some level he knew that talking about his life and his relationships would be difficult, and so he repressed the knowledge that he had agreed to the interview. Indeed, in the light of the interview that was to follow, in which he moved back and forth between seeming able to acknowledge and wanting to talk about the difficult aspects of his personal life, and downplaying and suppressing them, this seems plausible.

Another aspect of self-presentation which might be significant is an interviewee's narrative style. Angel's biography, outlined earlier, had to be pieced together from a narratively confusing interview. He was highly articulate, rarely stuttered, and appeared to enjoy talking. He told long stories, and rarely needed follow-up questions or encouraging interjections to keep him speaking. Yet the interview is exceptionally hard to follow, not least because he rarely spoke of the women with whom he had had sexual relationships by name. The interviewer had to repeatedly ask him to clarify to which ‘she’ or ‘her’ he was referring. Some of this is because he had his relationship map to point to, but so did all the interviewees, and he was particularly parsimonious with the naming of the characters in his stories. It is, perhaps, quite telling that it was the women, both ex-es and friends, not the men, whose names are missing from his stories. One understanding of this non-naming of the women is that it expresses a submerged misogyny, in the tradition which has long referred to wives as ‘her indoors’, or ‘the missus’, rather than by name. But, perhaps more generously, it also seems likely that his difficulty in expressing himself clearly about the women in his life reflects the unprocessed and conflicted nature of his thoughts and feelings about many of them. In this respect Angel was unlike the archetypical late/postmodern subject who engages in a continual and conscious production of a life narrative (Giddens, 1991: Rose, 1998); his stories gave the impression of being relatively unrehearsed, lacking the coherence of time-line and characterization that oft-told stories tend to have. Indeed he spoke on several occasions of how he could not get his friends to listen to him when he wanted to talk about the break-up with Eloise.

At the end of the interview, as is common practice in qualitative research, we gave our interviewees the opportunity to choose their own pseudonyms, not at the time suspecting this would offer the potential for the analysis of unconscious dimensions of presentation of self. In contrast to other interviewees who chose unobtrusive names, broadly congruent with their age, class and ethnicity, and who offered neither pseudo-surnames nor explanations of their choice, ‘Angel’ is very different from this subject's given name, and was accompanied by a surname – ‘Morales’. He was, he told the interviewer, naming himself after the D.J. ‘Angel Morales’. Interestingly, at least according to my Internet search, ²³ there is no (famous) D.J. by this name – which seems to be an amalgam of the names of two D.J.s – Angel Moraes and David Morales, who have their roots in the queer, multi-racial house music club scene of New York. ²⁴ The choice of ‘Angel Morales’ as a name might be regarded as an assertion of the subject's cool status, linking him with the global hip of dance culture, and, in its gender, ethnic and sexual ambiguity, allowing him to transcend his actual status as an unemployed, white, heterosexual, middle-aged father of two living in a northern city in England who had recently been left by his girlfriend. ²⁵

Indeed the interview as a whole was peppered with implicit assertions of his cool. He spoke of how he is friends with all the people who matter in Northern City – those who own and run the trendiest restaurants and bars, of the free drinks and guest list entry he receives in the city's bars and clubs, of his earlier successful career in the creative industries in London, with its late nights and hard partying, and he made several references to his birthday party, from which he was still recovering three days later. Angel's reaching for an identity in this way, and just missing, resonates, as we have seen, with how he presents himself in relationship to his arrangement – where he stakes a claim to a cool persona, asserting not to care too much, whilst simultaneously betraying his cool.

Angel's choice of name might also be read as either a conscious ironic gesture or as an unconscious act of ‘image work’ in other ways. In terms of his life history and lifestyle, Angel is no angel, and he is well aware that his life choices might not be considered moral:

Q: Has there been a time when you feel that your lifestyle wasn't respected, or the choices you were making?

Angel: Don't really see why my lifestyle should be respected. It's not very respectable. But I'm happy with it.

This interaction came close to the end of the interview, after the formal end of which Angel was asked to choose a pseudonym. In this context ‘Angel Morales’ might be seen as a defiant, ironic stance. It might equally be a case of mis-remembering: although there is no famous D.J. by the name of Angel Morales, there is a Spanish footballer with this name. A psychosocial analysis might then point to how this unconscious slippage between the international cool of queer club culture and the more traditionally masculine, but equally glamorous, world of football, could be seen as speaking of the tensions Angel lives in relation to his masculinity – his embracing of a ‘night-life’ – a non-normative life-style for a father of his age – after his escape, and later expulsion from, a conventionally masculine ‘family-life’. Whether imagining himself a D.J. or a footballer, the name suggests an aspiration to an identity which is nationally, ethnically and socio-economically other; it speaks of a yearning for another life. But it is possible, too, that it was an unconscious signalling of existential anxieties. The invocation of the figure of the angel might point towards a state of being which transcends the anxieties and disappointments, fears and losses of the mortal life, which speaks of redemption – the disavowed, unutterable concerns of a man in middle-age, leading a life which is seeking to defy conventional expectations of life-course and ageing.

Concluding critical reflections

To some readers elements of the analysis presented in this article might seem a little far-fetched, departing too far from the concrete material of Angel's life as recounted by him in the interview. For those who reject the notion of unconscious dynamics, or who demarcate the interests of sociology as excluding attention to their workings, this paper will remain unconvincing. But a number of criticisms have been made of the analysis by participants in seminars where I have presented, and by anonymous referees, which it is important to address. In this concluding section, then, I will briefly reflect on some of these criticisms, and more generally assess the limitations of the psychosocial approach I have developed here.

In common with others carrying out psychoanalytically oriented psychosocial analysis, I have been accused of ‘over-interpretation’ of my data. ²⁶ Over-interpretation is a danger faced by all qualitative researchers, but particularly those who seek to explore the unconscious dimensions of personal or social life, where the reader is invited by the analyst to make associations and connections that involve a leap into territory which is not explicitly addressed in the text of the interview. It is vital, therefore, for the analysis to be carefully explicated to the reader, demonstrating the analyst's close engagement with the text of the interview. It is important, too, that the claims made for the analysis are modest, and consistent with the depth of the research. I, therefore, readily concede that this analysis, based as it is on a single interview, cannot lay claim to the depth that might be achieved by a series of interviews, let alone the understandings offered by psychoanalytic case studies generated from clinical practice.

This is a psychoanalytically orientated psychosocial analysis of an interview, not a psychoanalysis of Angel. The interview did not collect a full and detailed biography, and knowledge about his life is limited; it probably does not come close to representing his ‘idiom’ (Bollas, 1995). Moreover we do not know what happened to Angel, and his arrangement, after the interview, which, as Hollway and Jefferson (2005a) suggest is a ‘highly relevant source of warrant’

(2005b: 161), and unlike in clinical psychoanalysis, my interpretations have not been explored with the subject himself. ²⁷

The contingency of the analysis must also be recognized. The interview was the co-production of the interviewer and the interviewee, at a particular moment in both of their lives, and, if we accept the importance of intersubjectivity (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000) the stories told by Angel would, inevitably, have been inflected differently to a different interviewer – to an older man, for instance, or, indeed, to me. The analysis is, likewise, produced in the context of my own psychosocial biography, which is different from that of the interviewer. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore how my own experiences of relationship breakdown, friendship and ‘non-conventional partnership’, of loss, inner conflict and ambivalence, the similarities and the differences between my life and Angel's, impact upon, or even determine, this analysis. Suffice to say that the intersubjectivity of interviewer and interviewee, and the projections I may have made on the interview data (across differences of age, gender, sexuality, and occupation) have unavoidably constructed the analysis presented here. But this is always the case in qualitative analysis. We bring our selves to our research, and we make assumptions about what we study on the basis of our unique psychosocial biographies.

Other interlocutors have been concerned about the ethics of the analysis, asking if it is acceptable to attempt to analyze a subject's inner conflicts and to move beyond that which was knowingly ‘given’ to the interviewer. As Margie Wetherell (2005: 169) suggests, with regard to Hollway and Jefferson's (2005a) work, is Angel acquiring an identity he might not recognize and might wish to repudiate? There are real, and troubling, questions of power and authority at stake here, particularly given the ‘institutionalized hierarchies and discourses of pathology’ which are traditionally associated with psychoanalysis (Frosh and Emerson, 2005:310).But it is important to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that sociologists probably often produce analyses which are not congruent with their subjects’ own self-identifications. How many research subjects, I wonder, would reject their identification as ‘working class’, ‘patriarchal’ or ‘heteronor-mative’, for example? ²⁸ Psychosocial research might give rise to agreater degree of psychicdis comfort than other types of social research if fed back to its subjects, but that is an empirical matter, yet to be explored.

These limitations and problems notwithstanding, I would suggest that the analysis offered here, of the particular inner conflicts faced by this one individual, adds depth and complexity to more strictly sociological approaches to the study of personal life in the contemporary world. The analysis highlights the losses and disappointments – the ‘ordinary human unhappiness’ – and, the ambivalences of personal relationships, which potentially face us all, and it also explores their socio-historical specificity in the present moment. Weaving together an analysis of the social and the psychic dimensions of affective life, the approach developed here demonstrates the importance of attention to the constitution of self, and to the identity investments people make, in understanding personal relationships. This troubles dominant sociological approaches to intimacy which assume that they are studying rational, unitary actors. The analysis has worked, instead, with an ontological perspective which recognizes the power of unconscious dynamics and the significance of psychic conflict. In addressing emotions which are hard to articulate in discourse, and through the exploration of tensions, contradictions and unconscious meanings within the context of individual biography, it has cast a different lens on the experience of personal life in the contemporary world.