Once more with feeling: What is the psychosocial anyway?

This article asks if psychosocial studies can be distinguished from neighbouring fields of inquiry and what, if anything, constitutes a ‘shared language’ among the psychosocial field’s different ‘dialects’. It briefly explores a number of common confusions about psychosocial studies (concerning the field’s relationship to the psychosocial of health science; its newness or otherwise; and the status of psychoanalysis within it), before interrogating two central formulations of the nature of psychosocial study: the claim that the psychosocial refers to the ways in which the psychic and the social demand to be ‘thought together, as intimately connected or possibly even the same thing’ and the notion of a negative practice in a positive structure