Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil.
The study draws on a post-structural epistemology to interrogate ‘the truths’ of marriage, to foreground the interplay between the institution and society as the site of poetic and political struggle, and in particular psychology’s influence (on marriage) as a dominant knowledge system. This exploration of marriage shows marriage to be anything but ‘neutral’; it highlights marriage as the receptacle of societal, ideological struggle and in the process it highlights the tensions inherent to our subjectivity, in relation to marriage. It then asks the question as to how psychology and in particular marital (couple) therapy has played a role in the sedimentation of certain dominant stories of marriage and self (in relation to marriage), how it has reified marriage as the preferred form of heterosexual pair bonding and how it has reified ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ as dominant templates of being.
The implicit question here concerns, one, the silencing and marginalization of alternative descriptions of marriage and, two, alternative ways of pair-bonding. The critical analysis of the knowledge/power interrelationship, as it plays out in the sphere of intersection between marriage and psychology, raises questions about the (ideological) accountability of the profession: for the kind of world we manufacture and maintain. The critical-affirmative paradigm of the thesis compels an engagement with ‘alternatives’ in response to the critical deconstruction of marriage. In the final analysis the study then moves into the arena of ‘challenges’. The latter constitutes an attempt to construct an agenda for action (on the level of psychological practice) that would allow for re-description and alternative descriptions of pair-bonding and self.