of grievance with the world, these communities had mainly cast themselves as victims of ‘the system’, whose needs and rights had been passed over, the argued bitterly, in favour of ‘immigrants’, black people, social security ‘scroungers’, ‘thugs’, single parents and other contemporary ‘demons’. The team’s psychosocial understanding of this community’s grievances as grief, unmourned and ‘nursed’ and unrelinquished, was insightful in comprehending its static nature – how community work interventions had foundered on a resistance to change. Similarly to ‘truth and reconciliation’ initiatives in e.g. South Africa, the need for grieving, mourning, settling accounts and forgiving (a psychosocial bereavement model based on Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia, 1917) was understood as a pre-requisite for repudiation of a passive victim position. With support for grieving the relinquishment of grievance was possible, and a capacity for moving on established (Hoggett et al 2007). Conclusion The above example can perhaps stand in as a coherent definition of ‘the psychosocial’, in that it encapsulates the various dimensions and processes that one might wish to say about it: a useful beginning to a summing up. To continue, then: what this paper has argued, is that psychosocial theory is in the process of a It considers where it is being generated, and in what contexts. It looks at what it is not, as a discipline, and what, though still in process, it seems to be. It outlines its tradition in critical theory, and in social work. Having set out the context, the paper then focuses on some of the history of the relationship between sociology and social work theory, mentioning difficulties and areas of mutual support. The focus then shifts to specifically looking at some of the tensions in using post-structural and
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