Relocation, Gender and Emotion: A Psycho-Social Perspective on the Experiences of Military Wives

This book has two main aims: first, to provide a rare, detailed description of the use of a psychoanalytically informed, reflexive research method to achieve an in-depth understanding of social phenomena. Stressing the 'both/and' nature of psycho-social research, it demonstrates that utilizing psychoanalytic and sociological theories as complementary frameworks of understanding can enable researchers to discover aspects of human experience that ordinarily remain outside conscious awareness.

Second, the book throws some much needed light onto the complex, intrapsychic and interpersonal influences that impact upon military wives who accompany members of the Armed Forces to postings overseas. It describes the personal losses that these women commonly sustain each time they relocate, which inevitably evoke mourning, depressive anxiety and related defences. In addition, wives' unwitting collusion with the patriarchal military institution, which fails to recognize them as individuals, further undermines their identities. These largely unconscious emotional upheavals have potentially profound consequences, both for servicemen's wives and for the military itself. The book recommends various policy changes that would result in wives' losses becoming better recognized, enabling them to be worked through more quickly. These arguments are particularly relevant at a time when the military is over-stretched, given that unhappy wives can adversely affect the retention of servicemen.