Structural Displacement Theory

Structural Displacement Theory develops William Gomes's original Lacanian psychosocial account of displacement as a disturbance in the co-ordinates through which a life can be spoken, inhabited, recognised and sustained.

Against accounts that reduce displacement to movement, legal status, trauma, humanitarian suffering, adaptation or resilience, the book argues that displacement reorganises the subject's relation to speech, body, time, law, fantasy, mourning, race, institution, faith, non-faith, social bond, jouissance, home and the Other.

Across a wide theoretical architecture, Gomes develops the co-ordinates of liveability, the Structural Displacement Matrix, the Institutional Other, bureaucratic temporality, administrative legibility, sensory-symbolic displacement, micro-identificatory disturbance, the libidinal border economy, moral injury as collapse of the moral Other, and subjective re-coordination.

The result is a non-diagnostic theory of displacement for psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, refugee and forced migration studies, critical psychology, law, political theory, theology, trauma studies, social work, pastoral practice and institutional life, while refusing to reduce the displaced subject to victim, patient, case, category or example of theory.