Abstract
This book offers a unique insight into and tells a moving story about British military wives’ emotional experiences of relocation. Drawing upon both sociological and psychoanalytical theories and using a psychoanalytically informed reflexive research method, Jervis weaves together and analyses both the external social conditions and the internal psychic processes that are likely to produce stress in the military wives who accompany their husbands on relocation overseas.
The book is divided into seven chapters. In the introduction chapter, the author explains how her own experiences as both a military wife and a psychosocial researcher inspired her to take on this project. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with sociological issues of gender, emotion and institution. These two chapters show that despite recent changes, the military remains a total institution with patriarchal values, which requires wives to be incorporated into it by supporting their husbands’ careers and adopting their ranks. When relocated overseas, military wives have to abandon their former careers and existing social relationships, and are treated merely as the wives – ‘appendages’ of their husbands. As such, wives are not only deprived of autonomy but also lose some aspects of their identity and sense of security (which are sustained by the continuity of familiar social relationships and external environments), and suffer cultural shocks. Chapter 4 analyses the intra-psychic processes corresponding to the external losses. It suggests that the losses caused by relocation reactivate depressive anxieties, which have remained dormant in the unconscious since infancy. The author argues that talking about their losses and anxieties and making sense of them verbally would help wives to cope. The task of bringing together the external and the internal is done in Chapter 6. Detailed individual accounts illustrate that relocation results in losses that cause emotional stress and ambivalence. However, military communities overseas do not have the opportunity to form meaningful interpersonal relationships, which are vital for emotional support due to frequent relocations. Furthermore, by being incorporated into the military, wives unwittingly identify with military stoicism and try to deny rather than verbalise their emotional distress. These serve to impede the recovery process. In the context that wives are increasingly resistant to military mobility due to negative experiences, the author spells out policy recommendations in the concluding chapter.
For those interested in research methods, Chapter 5 provides an illuminating account of a reflexive psychoanalytical research methodology. Drawing upon psychoanalytical theories and empirical examples, the author shows that unconscious communications between the researcher and the researched are both valuable and problematic for data interpretation. While informants can unconsciously evoke similar feelings in the researcher and thus enhance mutual understanding, the two parties may also collude unconsciously in order to avoid painful emotions. The author also warns against the danger of researchers’ confusing their own psychic materials with those of the informants and suggests strategies to minimise it. In sum, the book is worth reading for those interested in either military wives or psychosocial research methodology.