This chapter asks questions about the conceptualisation of the ontology of the social subject that informs biographical methods of research. Arguing from a psychoanalytically informed view of the subject, I suggest that emotionality and creativity as it derives from our capacity to dream (or what Freud referred to as primary process thinking), and our hesitant and uncertain development as subjects out of infantile states of near complete inarticulacy, are all necessary dimensions of a fully developed concept of what it is to be a subject.

The chapter was first conceived immediately following an experience of listening to the accounts of war trauma counsellors in Kosovo, and this reminded me that the origins of psychoanalysis remain absolutely relevant today for our project of understanding the social subject as always and everywhere simultaneously a psychological subject. In this view, emotionality is the essential foundation of all true mental activity, dreaming the foundation of all creativity. Equally, however, both these functions may be attacked and damaged by the trauma of social and political terror, displacement, upheaval and dislocation. The Europe in which we work today is not so far removed from the Europe of 1900, 1914 or 1945. Biographical research has the potential to grasp the complicated relationship between the psychological and the social subject more fully than any other research method but only, in my view, if it embraces an ontology of deep subjectivity such as psychoanalysis proposes.

Why do Frenchmen wave their arms about?

Here are some extracts from one of Gregory Bateson's ‘metalogues’ between himself and his young daughter: