HAUNTING IN AN AGE OF INDIVIDUALIZATION: Subjectivity, relationality and the traces of the lives of others

This paper uses the notion of ‘haunting’ to explore how even those who might be considered to be particularly individualized are inhabited by the traces of the lives of others. The paper works with a single detailed case study taken from UK based research on the personal lives and values of people living outside the conventional cohabiting couple. It develops a psycho-social-analysis of interviews with Ben, a black English man in his 50s who is a ‘strong’ case of the individualization of personal life. Ben represents himself as highly self-reliant and self-sufficient, yet his narratives repeatedly return to the central importance of his long dead father; the paper suggests that his interviews, and his subjectivity, are ‘haunted’ by the ghost of his father. It explores the ways in which conflicted issues of gendered and racialized belonging and identification, and questions of ethical subjectivity, are worked out in relation to his dead father. The paper is informed by psychoanalytic and sociological writing on psychic and socio-cultural processes of haunting, particularly the work of Christopher Bollas and Avery Gordon. It contributes to the re-thinking of sociological theories of individualization, challenging sociology to take seriously a psychoanalytically inspired ontology of relationality, and the impacts of past relationships on subjectivity.

Interviewed as part of a research project about the personal lives and values of people living particularly individualized lives, Ben Edmonds¹ repeatedly asserted that the most important person in his life was his father, who had been dead for 16 years. Others interviewees identified dead mothers and dead partners as central actors in their relational worlds. This article attempts to understand this rather perplexing phenomenon, which I describe as a form of haunting. Taking the accounts given by Ben as my case study, I develop a psycho-social-analysis of some of the ways in which the traces of the lives of others are experienced as permeating everyday life and subjectivity under conditions of individualization. I offer this ‘microscopic’ (Scheff 1997) study of the internal interplay between the self and the haunting other as a contribution to this special issue's engagement with the tension between ‘fate and choice’ in the contemporary world. The relationship that I explore in the paper, between someone who is living a highly individualized life and a dead loved one, who carries a highly significant socio-biographical history, suggests the importance for sociology of an understanding of relationality and subjectivity that exceeds the powers of the conscious, reflexive, choosing self emphasized by individualization theory. Even the most individualized person, such as Ben, remains enmeshed in a relationality that carries the past into the present in ways that, perhaps, speak more of ‘fate’ than ‘choice’.

In ‘On the theory of ghosts’, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that human life has become detached from its history, and individuals from a sense of continuity of memory. Writing in 1944, their analysis of the reduction of individuals ‘to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which leave no trace’, and of the ‘expunging’ of the dead from the memories of those who live on (Adorno and Horkheimer 2008: 216) prefigured a central theme in more recent sociological diagnoses of the social condition. The idea of modernity's ineluctable wrenching of individuals from their past resonates through contemporary theories of individualization. Bauman, for example, understands ‘the individualized society’ (Bauman 2001) and ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2003) as a world in which life is lived in the present; all commitments and bonds are temporary, things and people are disposable and replaceable.

This article works with a psychoanalytically informed notion that relationships leave residues, that we are inhabited by our histories of past relationships, and that past experiences, our own and those of others, structure our inner experience and relational possibilities in the present. My project here is psycho-social-analytic (see also Roseneil 2006a, 2007, 2009), in that it is concerned with both psychic and socio-cultural ghosts, with ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds, personal biography and socio-historical conditions, internal, unconscious conflict and social power relations, and the complex, multitudinous ways in which these are intertwined. In the spirit of Adorno and Horkheimer, and of the Frankfurt School, the article is informed by both psychoanalysis and sociology. It seeks to contribute to understandings of a radically individualizing world, in which people increasingly face the expectation that they will act as autonomous, self-determining, choosing individuals (Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), but it also poses a challenge to theories of individualization which fail to recognize the complex ways in which ‘individuals’ remain always already ‘fated’ to be constituted in and through present and, as discussed here, past relationships. The article's focus on the ghostly dimensions of relationality pushes further recent interventions by feminist and family sociologists who have emphasized the ongoing importance of familial ties and the values of care and commitment between kin (biological and chosen).²

The ghosts that I have seen in the interviews, and the haunting that I discuss in this paper, might not be apparent to everyone. Indeed the terminology of ‘ghosts’ and ‘haunting’ was not used by the people I interviewed. My interpretation of the narratives offered in the interviews is informed by the theoretical and ontological assumptions which framed the research through a particular psychoanalytically orientated methodology. And my analysis draws, in particular, on the work of theorists, particularly Christopher Bollas (1987, 2007) and Avery Gordon (1997), whose engagement with the idea of ghosts and haunting has attuned me to the possibility of their presence and has helped me make sense of what I have thought I have seen, inspiring me to follow the traces.

I am not talking here about the phenomenon of ‘idionecrophany’, as studied in the sociologies of death and religion, where research suggests that experiencing contact with the dead is relatively common following the death of a partner or sibling (MacDonald 1992). Nor am I addressing the issue of spiritualism and interest in the paranormal. This is also not an article that is centrally concerned with loss and mourning, and certainly not with the diagnosis of pathological mourning. The analysis I develop is, therefore, less in the tradition of Freud's classic writing on ‘mourning and melancholia’ (1917), which addresses the problem of incomplete mourning, in which the bereaved fails to detach from the dead loved one, and so fails to move on emotionally; rather, in a Kleinian (Klein 1985) and post-Kleinian tradition (Bowlby 1980; Baker 2001), the article is interested in the non-pathological persistence of attachment after loss, and the ongoing relationships that the living might have with the dead (Klass et al.1996).³

The case I discuss here, based on two interviews 16 months apart, is drawn from a set of 75 interviews with 51 people, carried out in northern England.⁴ The research was informed by Hollway and Jefferson's (2000) free association narrative interview method, which aims to explore the non-rational, unarticulated, unconscious dimensions of the experiences interviewees recount, as well as attending to that which interviewees expressly formulate in discourse.⁵ The analysis of the interview texts carried out for this paper draws on psychoanalysis in that, as well as focusing on the consciously articulated stories, explanations and descriptions offered by the interviewee, and on the conscious structure of meaning in the interviewee's narrative, it is also concerned with the unconscious meanings which co-exist with the manifest meanings (Bjerrum-Nielsen 1999).⁶ This means investigating the ways in which that which cannot be, or has not yet been, thought, what Bollas calls the ‘unthought known’ (Bollas 1987), surfaces in the emotionality of speech, its rhythm, speed, density, and tone, the silences, gaps, elisions, contradictions and avoidances, the jokes, moments of irony, the use of metaphor and understatement, where stories begin and end.⁷ Above all, the analysis is concerned with the ‘logic of sequence’ in the interview, the narrative order and links between ideas, because the interviewee's ‘free associations’ offer a way of encountering unconscious processes, latent mental contents and internal conflicts (Bollas 2007). So, in the analysis which follows I quote at some length from the interview, in order to give the reader a flavour of Ben's narrative voice, and to show how I have interpreted his narrative, its ordering and free associations.

Of course, what can be understood of an interviewee from two all too brief interviews bears little relationship with what can be understood by the clinical practitioner in the course of dozens, or even hundreds, of hours with a patient, and so I wish to emphasize that the analysis presented here makes no claims to be a psychoanalysis of Ben; it is merely a reading of the texts of two interviews with him. Moreover, in the task of analysing the data and writing this paper, my own subjectivity and unconscious are inevitably at work. The ghosts of my father and mother, long dead and recently dead respectively, undoubtedly haunt this paper and have attuned me to the hauntings in my interviewees’ narratives.

The psychoanalytic understanding of haunting on which the paper draws rests on the long tradition of theorizing ‘object relations’ from Freud, through Klein and the British object relations tradition, to the recent work of Christopher Bollas, who has explicitly addressed the notion of ghosts.⁸ Building on the idea of the centrality of processes of projection and introjection as ways in which people, from infancy onwards, relate to external objects, Bollas argues that ‘we are internally shaped by the presence and actions of the other’ (Bollas 1993: 56). He describes how when we think about someone in particular:

Over time the traces of encounters and relationships with others are left within us, and we come to contain ghosts, ‘the feeling of being inhabited by our history and its objects’ (1993: 61). Alongside his theorization of this fundamental process by which subjectivity is constructed, Bollas uses the Kleinian concept of projective identification to understand other aspects of the shaping of personal relational worlds.⁹ Projective identification involves the projection of unwanted aspects of an individual's self onto an other. These parts of the self might be bad, but are not necessarily so; it might be a question of locating good parts of the self in the object. ‘In human relations’, Bollas says, ‘individuals regularly project parts of themselves into their others, shaping their relational world according to the idiom of their internal world, creating a village of friends who constitute a secret culture of the subject's desire’ (Bollas 1993: 50).

This psychoanalytic ontology is, however, limited from a psycho-social perspective, concerned as it is solely with the impact of intimate relationships within the personal history of the individual concerned. A psycho-social-analysis that seeks to theorize the mutual imbrications of the psychic and the social must move beyond this to consider how subjectivity and a person's sense of their relational world are related to wider historicized configurations of social relations, and to their power dynamics. In this task the work of sociologist Avery Gordon is exemplary. She argues that the social sciences must pay attention to the ways in which both people and social institutions are haunted by communal ghosts, that which ‘modern history has rendered ghostly’ (1997: 18), ‘the phantoms of modernity's violence’ (1997: 19).¹⁰ For Gordon haunting is a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977), a form of mediation between institution and individual, social structure and subject, history and biography, in which ‘vague memories’ and ‘bare traces’ hint at what is missing – lost lives, or paths not taken (1997: 63–4) – or sometimes gestures towards a future, better, possibility. She uses fiction to explore the ghosts of slavery in the United States and of the disappeared in Argentina, and to discuss how they continue to haunt social-institutional and psychic worlds. Whilst I do not share Gordon's choice of empirical material, her attention to ‘the living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with’ (1997: 195), to ‘the lost subjects of history’, and to the structure of feelings of the hauntings of state power, slavery, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy offers a generative way of thinking about how the social-historical lives in memories, imaginations and cultural texts (including interview texts) in the fleeting, the ephemeral, the almost invisible. Her work suggests the need to concern ourselves with the latent social, that which is barely socially speakable or knowable.

Where Bollas draws our attention to psychic ghosts, Gordon emphasizes the importance of socio-cultural ghosts; both are concerned with the impact of the past on the present, although Bollas's ghosts are not necessarily dead. My analysis in this paper is concerned with both psychic and socio-cultural ghosts.

The interviews with Ben that I discuss here speak of the processes of individualization that I found in the wider sample. I am not claiming representativeness or typicality for Ben, as he has a unique biography and highly particular narrative. Rather I have chosen to explore Ben's story in detail because his is a ‘strong’ case of individualization. Whilst all the interviewees could be characterized as ‘individualized’, in the sense that they were living outside the cohabiting conjugal couple form, the structure of Ben's relational biography exemplified a large number of the processes which are seen as characteristic of an individualizing era – divorce and relationship breakdown, solo living, lone-parenthood, non-cohabiting and short-term relationships, internet dating, and transnational relationships (Beck and Beck-Gernscheim 2002; Bauman 2003; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004; Roseneil 2006a, 2006b). His story also offers a particularly fruitful case for the exploration of both psychic and socio-cultural haunting.

Describing himself as ‘black English’ on the self-complete questionnaire at the end of the interview, Ben was in his early 50s when interviewed. He had left school at 16 but returned to education later in life, and was now employed in a professional occupation. He had many short-term relationships during his 20s, 30s and 40s, particularly whilst on holiday. One of these relationships led to a girlfriend moving to the UK for a few months, becoming pregnant, and then returning to Jamaica with the child. He was divorced, his brief marriage having ended when his wife left him a few months before their child was born; a battle for access to his son ensued. At the time of the first interview he had been involved in a relationship for four years with Eva, who lived in South America. They saw each other twice a year and he was hoping she would come to live with him permanently, but in the periods between visits he was seeing other women, although she did not know about this. By the time of the second interview, Eva had come to England to try living with him, but their relationship had floundered when she found out about his internet relationship with Magda, who lived in the United States. In this context, and also experiencing immigration problems, Eva decided to return home. They had not formally split up, but neither were they in contact. Shortly after this, Ben had travelled to the US for a holiday, to visit Magda. Asked about his relationship status, for the second socio-demographic questionnaire, he replied:

Permeating Ben's descriptions of being alone, of difficult relationships and their endings, was a narrative of haunting: the haunting of a son's life by his father, of a second-generation immigrant by the first generation and its values. A central theme in his interviews was his oft-repeated declaration that he was ‘self-sufficient’ and ‘self-reliant’, characteristics that are valorized under conditions of individualization. Yet he immediately positions these capacities as relationally acquired, taught to him by his father, and constructed in response to a hostile, racist social context.¹¹ The first two places where he spoke in this vein were in his response to the opening question of the first interview, which asked him to talk about the most important people in his life. He talked at considerable length about his father, who had been dead for 16 years: his father was a Jamaican immigrant, who decided to stay in the UK after being demobbed from the British army after the Second World War, meeting his mother not long afterwards. Drawing attention to his father's experience of being black in a northern city where ‘there were only 12 folks, only 12 West Indians back then, back in the 40s’, and ‘everybody knew everybody else’, he said:He went on to talk about the ‘taboo’ and ‘stigma’ surrounding mixed-race relationships such as his father's and mother's, especially one in which there were two pregnancies before marriage, segueing into talking about the ongoing importance of his dead father again:The last time he spoke like this was near the end of the second interview, when he described himself as ‘fairly content’, and said, ‘I can sleep nights, I don't worry’. He then immediately started talking about the only times he hadn't slept, returning to the subject of the losses in his life – of his father and his son:Looking at the logic of sequence in the interview text, as suggested by a ‘free association’ analysis of the narrative, suggests that Ben's self-representation as self-reliant and independent is bound up with his relationship with his father. It was his father, he says, who taught him to be self-reliant, who made him everything that he now is, and instilled in him all his values. And his father is omnipresent in the interviews; his train of thought repeatedly returns to his father. As well as identifying his father as the most important person in his life in response to the first question, when carrying out the visual relationship mapping exercise which came after this first question, it was his father's name he wrote on the map first, closest to himself.

In addition to beginning, then, with his father, he brought his father back into frame near the end of the second interview. In response to my question if he was at all religious, he replied:

In this story Ben seems to be navigating a difficult path in relation to the ongoing presence of his father in his life. On the one hand he appears to be dissociating himself from religious belief and spirituality in general, and relating this to the loss of his father, whilst at the same time accepting his Jamaican relatives’ account of having seen his father's ghost, and believing that his father is watching him and that he will see his father again ‘one day’.

I want to suggest that Ben's vital, on-going relationship with his dead father can be understood as connected with his own wrestling with issues of racialized and gendered belonging and identification. Ben's subjectivity is constructed in relation to his father, and experiences that are hard to speak are articulated through reference to his father. Keen to locate himself socio-historically, he spoke right at the outset about his father as one of the earliest Jamaican immigrants to Britain, expressly acknowledging the racism his father faced. Then immediately after his statement (in extract I above) that England is still ‘a racist society’, he said:

This is an important passage, speaking both of Ben's strong identification as a ‘Yorkshire lad’ and ‘one of the lads’ and of the moments when he is reminded that he is also black. It is Ben's father who carries the history of migration and of racialization, and Ben tells stories of the intense racism he experienced in the late 1940s, such as being repeatedly refused accommodation by landladies who had rooms to rent. His father, Ben said, had it ‘ten times a lot worse’ than he had. And as a West Indian immigrant, his father encountered deep hostility to his relationship with a white woman:Like his father, Ben had problems with his white partners’ parents, both the parents of his ex-wife, as we shall see later, and more widely:But, unlike his father, he has not overcome the parental disapproval; he has not proved himself, despite the fact that his father had it so much worse than he did. And this, perhaps, is the crux of his story: it is a matter of ethical subjectivity.

In Ben's evaluation, his father was a good and wise man, moral and decent, married and stable, the transmitter of values to his family. He had stayed in England ‘because where he came from, Jamaica, was really poor’, and ‘he thought, well, I might as well stay here. I can contribute, and send money home’. He remained connected to where he came from, to Jamaica:

Perhaps most significantly, running through the interviews I discern an anxiety in Ben's speech about his masculinity and his ethical subjectivity as a father, which is played out in relation to his own father. Ben is clearly hyper-conscious of his father as his role model, and he repeatedly draws attention to his father's ‘proper’ performance of responsible masculinity. Interviewed in the early 2000s, there can be little doubt that Ben would have been aware of public discourses in Britain about absent and irresponsible black fathers and their negative impact on their sons and on society.¹² He never explicitly refers to such discourses, and nor does he explicitly describe his own masculinity as less adequate. However, there is considerable evidence that he might unconsciously feel that he is failing as a man; it is possible that his inadequate masculinity is an ‘unthought known’ (Bollas 1987) in his story. There were parallels between his father's parenting history and his own, in that both of them conceived two children outside marriage, and both experienced hostility from their white partner's parents. But, as Ben pointed out, his father made good of the situation; his first born, a daughter, ended up being brought up by her maternal grandparents, but he ‘were round every week, he used to pay her money’. And, after he deliberately made Ben's mother pregnant a second time, as an active, properly masculine intervention in her parents’ attempts to split them up, they were married; their marriage was stable, life-long, happy and successful, producing two further children and a close family, and his mother remains loyal to his memory to this day.

In contrast, Ben's experience of sexual partnership and fatherhood is troubled. His two children were born to different women, only months apart, which he says, ‘doesn't look good, does it, on my cv’. Ben met the mother of his first child whilst on holiday in Jamaica; he brought her over to England, but after six months, he had met someone else. His narrative of this time is confused and hard to follow, perhaps reflecting his conflicted state of mind and conscience:

Through his account of these two relationships and the fathering of his children, Ben appears to be struggling with his super-ego, admitting ‘this sounds awful’, and seeking to explain himself to the interviewer, to whoever will be judging his ‘cv’; perhaps, above all, to his father who lived his life so differently. He reports trying to take responsibility for the partner who has come from Jamaica to be with him, but he failed to do so. And he is attempting here, it seems, to take responsibility in the interview for getting two women pregnant at the same time. Yet, the responsibility and his agency slip away somehow in the language of ‘disaster’; a ‘disaster’ suggests a force out of his control, an act of nature or God that he could not help. ‘She falls pregnant’ – to fall is to be unlucky, a fall is an accident. The reference to being ‘sex-mad’, his super-ego speaking, gestures to his wider world view of male sexuality, and the heterosexual self he narrates elsewhere in the interview. He is a man who has his ‘needs’, who is often driven by sexual desire, and he cannot quite accept responsibility for the ‘disaster’ that is his intimate life.

The story continues to unfold: his Jamaican partner went back home and had their child there; he has only met this son twice, and he admits ‘there's a few months when I don't send anything at all’. This contrasts with his father, who sent money home to Jamaica, and supported his first child who was being brought up by her maternal grandparents. Meanwhile, his wife, who was only 21 (a fact about which he, aged 38, had been very pleased: ‘I'm thinking, oooh, I've got a nice bit of skirt’), walked out on him after just a few months of marriage, seven months pregnant. When she had the baby, she gave the child her maiden surname, incurring Ben's outrage: he was married to the child's mother, and believed that his son should take his name. Bitter conflict ensued when her parents took over the care of the baby from their daughter who ‘didn't want him’, and they proceeded to exclude Ben from contact with his son. Ben's relationship with his wife's father was particularly difficult, and became violent. It is worth quoting at some length here:

He went to court nine times over the next two years to get access, eventually achieving supervised visits with his son under the eyes of the grandparents, an experience he found difficult:This story is told in a voice infused with emotion, almost in tears.

It is significant, I think, that the battle Ben fought for his paternal rights were largely with his wife's father: a battle between fathers for their patriarchal lineage. Ben continued to demand the right to name his son, and finally his wife agreed he could choose the child's first name:

Questions of racialized belonging and identification are enmeshed here with issues of masculinity, fatherhood and ethical subjectivity. Ben is ready to confront his wife's father directly, repeatedly, even violently, to claim his paternal rights, and he is adamant that his son should have his name, not his wife's father's name. It was, he said, ‘a man-thing’, and he confidently asserts his masculine potency (extract XII): ‘I'm a bit younger than him, and there's 10 years between us, and I'm not going to let an old man take me over principle’. His father had taught him to stand up for himself in the context of racism (extract III), and standing up for his rights as a father, which is also about asserting his son's paternal cultural heritage, becomes a major theme in his life. He struggles for years, facing deep humiliation (extract XIII), for this identity and role as a father, and for the linking of his son's identity with his own and his father's. Indeed, he broadens his fight from the purely personal, to become an activist with the organization ‘Families Need Fathers’, acting as an adviser to other fathers. Yet alongside this unequivocal assertion, there is also, in Ben's story, a poignant moment of ethical recognition of the problematic nature of his paternity: the child does not know him, and is scared, and Ben sees this (extract XII). This acknowledgement comes directly after his vivid, shocking reference to his son's physical appearance and skin colour: he describes the child's eczema as causing ‘green skin’ to ‘fall off’ him. This perhaps unconsciously links back to Ben's father, whom he described earlier in the interview (extract VII) as like ‘a Martian’ from the West Indies. His son, like his father, was an alien: his father an alien immigrant, a black person in the almost entirely white northern city of the late 1940s; and his son, a mixed-race child being claimed by his white grandparents as their own, did not recognize his own father, an alien child, alienated from his father and his black, paternal heritage.

To understand psycho-socially the central, defining, ongoing importance to Ben of his relationship with his father, I will return to the work of Bollas and Gordon. Ben is haunted by his father, whose ‘ghost inhabit[s his] mind’ (Bollas 1993: 56), whose being he has introjected. It is as if Ben cannot help but speak of his father, over and over again, through two interviews, separated by many months. Never asked directly about his father, his father comes repeatedly to mind, in association with thoughts about his own character, his way of being in the world, his ethical subjectivity. And Ben's conflicts about how he has lived his highly individualized life, about his sexual/love relationships, about his performance as a father, about his masculinity, are played out in relation to the internalized object of his father. His father is the idealised good object, who is never criticized, whilst his internalized father, his self-judgement, offers his own behaviour and character up for critique. Ben struggles to take responsibility for his actions in relation to his lovers and his children, and often fails; but the better part of him wants to do so. This ‘better part’ he regards as originating in and through his father: it is his father that made him what he is, who instilled in him values and character. One might wonder what work this projective identification of all the good parts of himself into the object of his father might do. It is here that Gordon's notion of the sociality of haunting is vital. The psychic object of Ben's father contains a history, a communal experience, linking Ben with the social memory of immigration, of coming to England after the war, having served the country loyally, and being treated as an alien. Holding on to that memory is fraught, growing up and living in an overwhelmingly white city, and Ben oscillates between thinking of himself as a Yorkshire man, one of the lads, and remembering that he is black, and that he must be self-reliant and self-sufficient, as his father taught him. Perhaps it is psychically vital, in a context marked by sporadic outbursts of racism, and in a personal life where his white partners’ families have not seen him as good enough for their daughters, for all that is good to reside in his black father, who in turn lives within him, and has made him who he is.

A brief aside: the relative absence of his white mother in his story – she is only mentioned in relation to his father to emphasize how loved and what a good man he was – emphasizes that Ben's concern with issues of racialized and gendered belonging and identification were about his blackness and Jamaican heritage, and his masculinity and fatherhood, which were played out in relation to the figure of his father. It might be pointed out that the de-valuation of the mother, and the sexual objectification of women, are another important theme in Ben's story, which might be related in complex ways to the undoing of the sexual/love relationships that characterize his relational biography, and which in turn are implicated in his vociferous assertions of masculinity and paternity. Moreover, to pursue a feminist critique, it might be suggested that Ben's caring deeply about his long dead father, contrasts sharply with his failure to engage in everyday practical tasks of caring for his still living mother (it is his brother who takes this responsibility), or indeed to take on the everyday care of his children. And perhaps the passionate, oft-articulated love of an absent, now imaginary other, who makes no practical demands on the self, who does not impinge upon or interupt a self-directed life, is the quintessential love of the individualized actor?

It is my hope that this detailed psycho-social-analysis of the stories told by Ben might contribute to a reworking of sociological theories of individualization. It might be seen as adding to existing critiques of individualization theory for failing to recognize the ongoing ways in which family and kinship matter amidst all the transformations that are taking place in their meaning and practice. It also contributes to the project of investigating how ‘the coordinates of living in the frames of individualization’ are gendered and inflected by race and place (Hey 2005: 858). But my intention is more than this. By taking someone with multiple indicators of the individualization of personal life, whose stated values of self-reliance and self-sufficiency seem to exemplify individualization perfectly – and exploring how his story is haunted by the presence of a now absent other, I have sought to pose an ontological challenge to sociology, to take seriously a strong psycho-social notion of relationality, the ways in which ‘we are members one of another’ (Riviere 1952 Chodorow 1989: 158).

This case is a story of paternal haunting, and of the complex ways in which racialized and gendered subjectivity are worked out in relation to the ghost of the father, and to the traces of history conjured by the father's ghost. In the wider sample from which this case was drawn, there were stories of maternal haunting and haunting by dead lovers, in which the dynamics of these cases were individually different. For one woman, in her early 30s, her relationship with her dead mother was a life sustaining force. Deeply committed to a job with anti-social hours, in which she did not feel able to be open about her lesbianism, Chris told a story of isolation and loss, of fractured relationships with her father, his new wife and her half-siblings, and of friendships and love affairs that were hard for her to sustain. In this context, the continuing presence of her mother in her life was hugely important to her. Her mother granted her permission to be a lesbian, recognizing and loving her for who she was, and it was her mother's voice that she heard telling her to take care of herself through her depression. Another woman, Iris, a widow in her late 50s, had begun a relationship with her dead husband's best friend. She spoke about their shared love of her husband, and about how he was an ongoing presence in their lives and their relationship. They often wondered together what he would have thought about their plans and the things they were doing together, and they were guided by his imagined voice. What I think can be extrapolated from these hauntings is a rejoinder to Adorno and Horkheimer, and those who have followed in their wake in believing that memory, history and attachments to what has gone are things of the past: even the most individualized are fated to be inhabited by the traces of the lives of others.

Sasha Roseneil is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is also Professor II of Sociology in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo. She is one of the founding editors of the journal Feminist Theory, and is the author of Disarming Patriarchy (1995), Open University Press), and Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham (2000, Cassell). She is editor or co-editor of Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism (1994, Taylor and Francis), Practising Identities (1999, Macmillan), Consuming Cultures (1999, Macmillan), Globalization and Social Movements (2000, Palgrave), and special issues of Citizenship Studies (2000), Feminist Theory (2001, 2003), Current Sociology (2004) and Social Politics (2004). Her latest book is Sociability, Sexuality, Self: relationality and individualization (Routledge, 2009).