Introduction

I argue in this chapter that psychosocial and auto/biographical perspectives have much to contribute to build better understanding of the interplay of complexity, diversity and democracy, within the power dynamics of a neo-liberal world; and in illuminating their social, personal and psychic costs. I also wish to emphasize the central importance of dialogical, democratic education, across difference, historically and contemporaneously, in any new (but also very old) politics of resistance and hope. Historical and recent auto/biographical narrative research, drawing on an interdisciplinary psychosocial sensibility, provides the basis of the case study of how education can facilitate profounder forms of dialogue, resources of hope and personal as well as collective transformation. I locate the whole analysis within a neo-liberal, individualized political economy, in which global capital exercises pervasive power; where inequalities have deepened, and racism, xenophobia, fascism and fundamentalism are on the increase. A place where universities are increasingly incorporated in this dystopia, often distant from marginalized communities, and where various forms of democratic or popular education have weakened (West, 2017; Tuckett, 2017). Notwithstanding, I describe how democratic community learning spaces can be life sustaining, and mind and heart expanding, in the spirit of bell hooks (2003). They give us glimpses of a liberating self/other mutuality, across difference.

Public service and public provision, including publicly provided adult education, are much diminished, often dismissed and disparaged, in contrast to the fetishizing of the market and private sector provision. Individuals, private organizations and Adam Smith’s invisible hand, rather than the state or even democratic politics, know best. Moreover, within these dynamics of individualization and privatization, a new and virulent politics of class has emerged, contrary to predictions about the latter’s demise. Democratic politics and processes have weakened in the neo-liberal, privatized political economy, as responsibility has shifted from public and collective solutions to personal troubles, towards individuals taking responsibility for everything happening in their lives, including illness, unemployment or other misfortunes. Broadly I take a Keynesian view of macro-economic management and believe there is convincing evidence, as in Wilkinson and Pickett’s (2009) work, that more equal and collectivist societies, such as in Scandinavia, generate better mental well-being for everyone. We have, I suggest, responsibilities as citizens, academics and educators, to question powerful neo-liberal trends and to illuminate their effects, and how they can be resisted in processes of democratic, dialogical community education. We must work to chronicle and explain the psychic, social and ecological costs of the present dystopia, and how intercultural and community education can help forge new collective resources, at a time when cultural super diversity seems, for many, a threat. I draw on research in a post-industrial city to illustrate how a politics of hopelessness breeds racist and xenophobic politics, but also how hope can be restored.

I suggest that we need new ways of conceptualizing educational processes, beyond a narrow cognitivism, or radical thinking reduced to a detached, transcendental criticality. I consider, psychosocially, drawing especially on psychoanalysis, the importance of processes of splitting at an individual but also group level: where the world gets divided into binaries of self and other, idealized and disparaged worlds, the superior and inferior, success and failure. There is, for instance, a process of self-idealization among elites, and the tendency to project on to others, like the working class and people deemed as ‘failures’, what they most dislike in themselves, such as dependence, vulnerability and incompetence. There is a tendency for elites to believe that their achievements are entirely due to their own efforts, while the poor lack sufficient motivation, desire and moral fibre to improve their lot. Splitting can also be applied to the dynamics of racism and fundamentalism: a kind of defence against anxiety by splitting off those parts of ourselves that we most dislike – like greed, misogyny or the capacity for violence – and projecting these onto the other. The consequence in Melanie Klein’s (1998) terms is paranoid-schizoid modes of functioning, in which what is split off comes back to haunt us. Individual psyches and whole groups are correspondingly depleted: idealized or stigmatized, to the detriment of all. Adult education can be reimagined as a space in which we own our messy feelings, inadequacies and strengths, and realise a common humanity in our need for the other in profounder educational experience and to enhance self and collective well-being

The dangerous, disturbing political economy of neo-liberalism necessitates, in other words, a renewed imaginative effort to think about adult education in new ways: including transcending the old either-or binaries of psyche and society, self and other, therapy and education, as well as critical and personal reflexivity. Both to analyze pathology, and to better understand how new and healthier forms of learning and resistance to stigmatization can be created. New space is opening for a more feminized and inclusive deliberative engagement, where emotions and vulnerabilities are better acknowledged, liberating thought and heart in a kind of therapeutic and questioning process, beyond the clinical hour. Inspired by analytic psychologist Andrew Samuel’s (2015) work, political economy itself (and adult education?) really could benefit from time on the couch, but in dialogue with others: economists, sociologists, social activists, critical theorists, environmentalists and educators who question the health and sustainability of present trends or older ways of doing politics. We need to better understand the dynamics of inner and outer worlds, interdisciplinarily, if we are to build more nuanced understanding of the problems of how power works, and to reimagine how social and personal transformation, and a diffusion of power is possible, from the bottom up.

Dialogue

The argument derives in part from a confrontation between my own biography and the effects of neo-liberalism in a frighteningly unstable world. It became important for me to dialogue with particular sociologists and critical theorists, combined with psychoanalysis, which provides, as I experienced it, profounder insights into our troubled times, at both a personal but also collective level (Formenti & West, 2018). Sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman & Haugaard, 2008) question the quasi-liberatory individualization thesis of Giddens or Beck, in which late modernity offers new opportunities for individuals to compose lives on their own terms. If we cannot escape the inevitability of new life politics and the necessity to compose a self in the fracturing of inherited templates, this is located within frightening discontinuities and paranoid-schizoid dynamics, as a defence against powerlessness. Class positioning matters here: Bauman insists that the more indiviualized consumer society retains forms of structural domination, not least in the privatization of political and collective issues (notably personal responsibility for unemployment and security).

In the relational politics of neo-liberal austerity, structuring processes continue, if in more fragmented form, and those on the margins are held responsible and stigmatized, for their condition and poverty. Insecurity, anxiety and hopelessness haunt individual lives, and whole communities of poor people. Liquid modernity, Bauman also claims, has created a culture in which we behave like competitive hunters, without regard for others, in search of the latest kill, whether a new job, relationship, iPhone, or even a degree. We can find fleeting bliss in the kill but it does not last as we restlessly seek new stimuli: the hopefulness of modernity is replaced by fear, deepening anxiety about the future and addiction to the latest fad, including social media. In such circumstances, Adam Phillips (2012) suggests, young people on the precarious margins may not get what is happening to them and their communities. This can be resolved by finding gangs of their own, which offer inclusion, recognition, and powerful but ultimately defensive stories in which ‘we’ are idealized and the other – ‘Jew’, ‘white trash’, ‘Paki’, or ‘Asylum seeker’ – are denigrated. This is the damaging political economy of our times and the territory of Brexit and Donald Trump.

An Autobiographical, Narrative and Psychosocial Imagination

I have applied psychosocial ideas to the stories told by diverse people living, learning and working in marginalized communities. People located in poverty-stricken coastal towns or post-industrial cities, where the collapse or weakening of working-class self-help institutions has created an epidemic of hopelessness. I interviewed people on working class estates where racism found purchase, or in Muslim communities, where Islamic fundamentalism appealed to particular young people. Interviews were held as many as five times, over a period of months, and even years, in what can become a kind of transitional relational space of increasing trust, collaboration and relatively open, exploratory storytelling and, in effect, of self-negotiation. It is not psychoanalysis, or even therapy, but an attempt, in a sustained, in-depth and collaborative alliance, to work with people, respectfully, and to chronicle and interpret their stories with them, over time. While, to repeat, this is not psychotherapy, the effect of seriously and respectfully listening can be therapeutic (Merrill & West, 2009; West, 2016).

I draw on diverse theoretical friends, including Winnicott, Freud and Axel Honneth, the critical theorist, to make sense of stories, and the interplay of self/other, psyche and society. Winnicott’s (1971) ideas on transitional objects and spaces are helpful. Transitional objects may be a new idea that speaks to us, or an inspiring other with whom we identify, or characters in literature. We feel recognized and encouraged to claim space, in which anxiety is minimized, in the language of psychoanalytic object relations theory. Attuned, empathic and committed professionals can, in such terms, come to represent “good object parent-figures”, who intuitively recognize the primitive fear (that we all share) of being exposed, stupid, incapable and unlovable. When people feel accepted in their entirety, and understood – legitimate in these intimate, relational processes – playfulness, risk taking, narrative and self-experimentation become more possible. Spaces can open, in fact, for collective, participative democratic experiment. I have described, how particular professionals encouraged nervous, diffident young mothers to enter transitional spaces of self/other negotiation – in a management group or encounters with professionals – on a so-called ‘sink’ estate, and eventually learned to talk back to power (West, 2009). These professionals, including educators, walked a demanding, dialogical, emotional as well as cognitive walk, rather than simply talking the talk. The walk included giving time to others and imagining self in their shoes, auto/biographically. These are basic, largely unconscious dynamics of self/other recognition, in Honneth’s terms, on which democratic relationships depend.

Honneth (2007, 2009) takes us into thinking at a group and collective as well as a more intimately inter-subjective level. He uses the term self-respect to describe what happens when people feel part of a purposeful, valued group, with rights and responsibilities. Where they internalize the right to be listened to and fully participate, which nurtures a sense of responsibility towards others. Self-esteem is created when people become aware of their importance to the group and value to others. Crucially, we then better recognize and appreciate others, and symbolic otherness, as a basis for social cooperation and new forms of social solidarity. It is important to emphasize that this is a relational, often unconscious, as well as an intellectual and imaginative process. We may find, as noted, self-recognition in a character in literature, with whom we identify, which generates new understanding as they speak to our experience. This, psychoanalytically, is projective identification: where we project parts of ourselves into another’s experience, someone we admire for their resilience and courage, perhaps, and then introject these qualities into our own internal dynamics, changing the quality of self, and self-other understanding (West, 1996, 2016).

The good, in other words, that lies between people, in intersubjective space, can, over time, be internalized, to become part of a young parent’s intrasubjective life. The dramatic script or play of psyche shifts, and new and positive dynamics are created (West, 2009). Anxieties are contained, listening is to the fore, collective help, support but also challenge is created to enable groups of young parents to learn, albeit fragilely, the power of an agora, a meeting place, for participative democracy. Unfortunately, such phenomena and programs, including children’s centres, are much diminished because of local and national government austerity.

Freud (1953–1974) is helpful in theorizing some of the above in his great anthropological insight that humans are carried by the mother for much less time than other mammals, and from this experience of premature separation, the human is heavily dependent on a protective environment for survival. Herein lies a profound educational, political and cultural imperative, and source of hope, in what can seem frightening super diversity, fracture and collective abandonment. Primitive anxieties can be evoked in young people when they feel abandoned and stigmatized, but we also have new insights into the loving work we must do to counteract this.

Decline of Public Space, Local Government and Popular Education

The consequences of globalization and neo-liberalism stalk the landscape of the city where I was born, Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands, as they do similar communities across the Western world. Rapid economic decline – of pottery manufacture, mining and iron and steel production, in this instance – combined with the collapse or marginalization of working-class self-help institutions, like trade unions, cooperatives, workers’ education and non-conformist churches, has been catastrophic. There has been a dismembering of traditions of municipal socialism too, undermining the capacity of local government to act in meaningful ways. All these trends evoke feelings of crisis, anger, collective depression and despair.

In 2009, when I began my research, racism was on the rise and a mosque was pipe-bombed. Private security firms were employed to protect other mosques (West, 2016). Stoke-on-Trent City Council had nine councillors from the Fascist British National Party (BNP) and the BNP percentage of the vote overtook social democratic Labour. All this happened after a period of dysfunctional local politics when the city was placed under ‘special measures’, and the national government or its agencies took over the running of the city. It seemed the far right would form a majority on the City Council by 2010 (West, 2016).

This was my city – a place I still thought of as home – and the crisis mattered greatly. Austerity, post 2008, brought cuts in local government funding, which added to feelings of hopelessness and abandonment. Mental health services were stretched while the safety nets of the welfare state looked increasingly threadbare, and the pay day money lenders were filling gaps. Some young people were forced to truant from schools or abandon their education, as they took on the role of carers in their families. As Phil McDuff observes, “rolling back public services has created opportunities for the unscrupulous to take advantage of those with nowhere else to turn” (McDuff, 2018, p. 2).

There was once a regeneration project called Pathfinder – a mix of public and private sector housing regeneration – but the program was aborted midstream, in 2010, by national government, in the politics of austerity. Whole areas of the city were left in limbo, cleared but never rebuilt. Abandonment seemed an appropriate metaphor. As a psychoanalytical psychotherapist and academic, I was aware of the statistical evidence in the UK that mental illness affects one in three families in marginalized communities (Layard & Clark, 2014). Mental distress seemed ubiquitously embedded within the new dis-order of Stoke. As a historian, I understood the extent to which a once proud civic social democratic and popular education culture had unravelled over a relatively short period of time, including universities working in alliance with organizations like the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).

Feeling Stigmatized

A constant theme in the narratives of the 50 people I interviewed in Stoke was the feeling of being perpetually judged and stigmatized by elites, whether in the media, the bankers or politicians: as benefit cheats or scroungers, stuck in front of television, morally feckless. Two of my collaborators, Cheryl and Alan Gerrard, ran an art gallery in a poor part of town, which they saw, in part, as an act of resistance. They told me that neither of them painted but saw the potential of art to evoke a better understanding of the city, its history and industrial heritage, and how it could be improved. They sought a broader political project of civic and emotional regeneration, using art as living history.

Alan was angry at what had happened to Stoke and wanted to recover its traditions of solidarity. He was especially agitated about how it was stereotyped and stigmatized:

… there’s a misconception that … local people … are sitting in front of the television watching football … they’ve got the Sky [satellite TV provider] channels on …. But they do like art and it’s local working-class people that are coming in and buying original pieces … the perception of Stoke-on-Trent is …. It’s portrayed as being worse by the councillors and the offices that run the city … people outside the city I think have a bad perception ….

Such negative perceptions dug deeply into Alan, making him angry and depressed.

Part of my analysis of the city has been historical, inspired by the work of Jonathan Rose (2010), and interviews with a number of those involved in the adult education movement (West, 2016). Rose challenged the tendency, among some Marxist historians, to disparage the contribution of the alliance between progressive elements in universities and workers organizations, such as the WEA. On the contrary, the testimonies of worker students themselves suggests the alliance was crucial in building self-other recognition, active citizenship and strengthening social solidarities (Rose, 2010; West, 2016, 2017).

To reiterate, a central part of the work is auto/biographical. I began my academic career as a social historian, focusing on the history of working-class education. I tended to dismiss the significance of this, maybe in the arrogance and insecurity of youth (West, 2016). Workers’ education involved 30 or more ordinary people – potters, miners and elementary school teachers, for instance – meeting together weekly, in what at best was a highly dialogical culture, in which all were teachers and learners. I now read these workers’ classes as good transitional spaces of self-negotiation, individually and collectively, where engagement with the symbolic order, and with diverse others, facilitated by good enough, empathic, robust tutors, built a more cosmopolitan and active citizenry. Bigotry, racism and even fundamentalism found expression in the classes but adult educators who were university professors, like R. H. Tawney or Raymond Williams, challenged the bigotry while keeping dialogue going. They encouraged the group to take tea, for instance, afterwards, to share stories, sing songs, recite poetry together, and harmony was restored. This world has largely died. Representative democracy has hollowed out, too, in many places and countries, with fascist parties like the British National Party and racist populists like UK Independence Party (UKIP) filling the vacuum. The hollowing out has also to do with the decline of more participatory forms of democracy across civil society, which includes adult education. Representative democracy can only thrive, I suggest, if the wider civil society pulses with democratic, participative life.

As indicated, I applied the insights of critical theory and psychoanalysis in the reassessment of my own earlier work on the tutorial class movement. We can observe across student testimonies the commitment to serious learning and social purpose and how the dynamics of self-other recognition found expression. Feeling understood by significant others, operates at a primitive or early emotional and unconscious level as well as cognitively; feeling recognized, in short, provides a building block for self in relationship. Self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem are created when people feel themselves to be accepted and acceptable, and that they have things to say which are then valued by people they admire and respect. And their role in a group is enriched and enlivened.

Of course, negative dynamics happen in groups and in the psyche too, as individuals can close themselves down to difference and the other, because they are not like us and feel threatening (the basis of which is partly projection); or the other is in some way inferior, or, at an extreme, to be attacked and even annihilated, as with the racist gang or Islamist group (West, 2016). But a good, diverse group remains open to diversity and thrives precisely because of this. Experience is never ended, or another point of view denied, in the name of some absolute truth, because there is always a different perspective, another set of experiences, or questions, with which to engage. Education becomes a perpetual struggle to understand and build forms of dialogical knowing, which embrace the cosmopolitanism inherent in open and empathic encounters with others. Bigotry and prejudice are challenged, as chronicled in various and diverse worker student accounts (Dobrin, 1996; Rose, 2010). Such understanding of educational process and of the making of intersubjective, highly contingent, developmental, vulnerable but also potentially resilient, generous selves, is far removed from the autonomous, acquisitive, egotistical, materialistic subject that dominates the contemporary academic mind. Or the overly rational self of much adult education theorizing (West, 2016, 2017).

Resistance

Furthermore, there is resistance to austerity and democratic deficit in forms of alternative politics and democratic education – in anti-capitalist, or sustainable development/climate change/environmental movements – which provide elements of self – as well as collective learning but also healing for those involved (Samuels, 2015). This applies to several new community development initiatives in Stoke as well as in the history of workers’ education (West, 2016). The act of participation, in good enough groups, including adult education, can encourage new forms of thinking, feeling and action, and even a more feminized politics, in contrast to traditional ‘male’ competitiveness and omniscience. Take for example, the Lidice shall live campaign, led by Alan and Cheryl Gerrard or health groups that bring working-class white and Muslim women together in opposition to austerity. The Gerrard’s project was an attempt to create resources of hope. Here was an initiative enabling young children and their families to talk to each other and discover pride in their city and in what their grand- or great-grandparents had done. This was an example of a genuinely inclusive local curriculum narrative project in schools and community groups, helping pupils and families learn about the miners who took a stand against Nazi barbarities. Past entered present in new, refreshing and cooperative ways.

Reinhard Heydrich, author of The Final Solution of the Jewish Question, was assassinated in Prague on 27 May 1942. In retaliation, squadrons of Nazi terror units entered the Czech mining community of Lidice and shot dead all the men over 15. At the same time the women and children were rounded up and many were gassed, although the few who looked sufficiently Aryan were deported to Germany to be raised by families of the Reich. Out of revenge for Heydrich’s assassination, the Nazis declared that ‘Lidice shall die for ever’ and razed the mining town to the ground. The link between Stoke and Lidice was forged through the International Miners’ Union and the actions of a local councillor and family doctor named Barnett Stross. In that summer of 1942, the miners and others in Stoke organized a great public rally, under the defiant banner ‘Lidice Shall Live’. The rally was addressed by Stross, who became MP for Stoke Central in 1945. He was Jewish, and his own family were refugees from Polish pogroms. He was also active in workers’ education and was my mother’s GP.

Some 70 years after the massacre at Lidice, Alan and Cheryl organized a campaign to honour this working-class movement against fascism. The few remaining survivors were invited to Stoke in 2012, to commemorate the Lidice Shall Live campaign and to remember how the people of Stoke showed moral leadership and gave money to help rebuild the town after the war. This was the best of people’s history – a model of mutual recognition, solidarity, internationalism and principle, forged in the workers’ movement. Telling stories about Stoke’s history in the present was also part of anti-austerity politics as well as a counter to racism. Stross, Alan and Cheryl stated, was not a local name, and Barnett Stross did so much good for the city yet was himself an immigrant and a victim of racism. New qualities of understanding emerged from the storytelling among children and their families.

Stoke municipality is now formally linked to the project and the Lidice survivors visited the city, including local primary schools, to tell their stories. The school children were asked to talk to grandparents and relatives to find out what they knew about the Lidice Shall Live campaign and there was an appeal in the local media for people to come forward. Older people began to tell stories and a delicate thread of civic and familial recognition, as well as pride – in the political activism and struggles of previous generations – was woven. Barnett Stross is revered in the Czech Republic. My youngest daughter, Hannah was working in Prague in 2013 and went to visit Lidice after we had a conversation about its history in a synagogue in Prague’s old Jewish quarter. We talked about what the people of Stoke had done. Hannah was moved by the Lidice memorial, its rose garden and the road and museum venerating Barnett Stross’ name. He was after all her grandmother’s family doctor.

Another example of what we can call new democratic, educational and therapeutic politics is of Health Groups organized by the WEA. These consisted of white and Muslim working-class women, protesting against the closures of municipal swimming pools. An organizer stated:

So they [the participants] were … very upset and at the same time we were running this project … about how people can express themselves and … can protest against decisions. And we were being asked to write letters in protest at the decision …. We pulled people together and created that space …. And again there was a march, much of that was organised online ….

The women were anxious about being “too political”. It was the first time they had protested over anything. There was an evaluation and the women felt they had become more active learners as well as politicized. In the context of their biographies, it was a radical step.

These are small, fragile yet important examples of democratic educational activity against the politics of austerity. Therapy as well as learning is found in such activism: in deliberative and inclusive learning groups, where openness, tolerance, respect, dialogue and collective assertiveness are nurtured, alongside healing. Of course, we need many more such groups to learn our way, inclusively, out of the present democratic malaise and anxiety over the future. Even more reason to witness, understand and celebrate initiatives such as these.

Conclusion?

There were many stories about austerity and its distressing, demoralizing effects. The racists propose speedy alternative solutions: it is the Asylum seekers and immigrants, they say, who are stealing your houses, jobs and communities. A new, interdisciplinary imagination is required in response – focused on the interplay of economic, cultural, social, educational, democratic, relational and psychological dynamics. One that challenges the old binary between participative, inclusive democratic learning, and therapeutic processes. In the present ideological climate, the power of populist politicians and new strains of fascism can seem overwhelming. Except, we can take comfort from the fact that resources of hope are being created, despite rather than because of government, its agencies and the politics of austerity. We must chronicle and learn from them, in new, holistic and interdisciplinary ways. Maybe local universities should pay more attention towards their once and potential future role in building social solidarities via community education, rather than simply being obsessed with social mobility and conventional degree programs.