Psychosocial studies is a relatively new area without an agreed genealogy or settled shape, while this contributes to its fertility and inclusiveness, it also signals a need for a Major Reference Work that will lay out the parameters of the field, giving readers access to thinking on its formative and constitutive elements, its controversies, achievements and characteristics, and its likely future lines of development. The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies aims to offer such a 'state of the art' account by (a) reflecting back on texts that have influenced the development of psychosocial studies from a 2020s perspective; (b) exploring current major topics with evaluative reviews; and (c) identifying newly emerging areas of work. It will appeal to students, scholars and practitioner-researchers in the fields of pychosocial studies, psychoanalysis, sociology, critical psychology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies.

Stephen Frosh is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies (which he founded) at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Founding Member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Group Analysis. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is the author of many papers and over 20 books papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis including, most recently, the edited collection New Voices in Psychosocial Studies (2019), published in the Palgrave series, Studies in the Psychosocial which he is co-editor of. Marita Vyrgioti is Lecturer in Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Studies at the University of Essex. Before joining the University of Essex she taught psychosocial studies at the University of East London, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck College. She received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2018 for her thesis, The Cannibal Trope: A Psychosocial Critique of Psychoanalysis. Her latest work involves a book chapter included in the collective volume 'Wilding Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life' in Routledge's Beyond the Couch series, edited by Shaul Bar-Haim, Helen Tyson and Elizabeth Coles. She is a trainee psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, London. Julie Walsh is Senior Lecturer in the department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is the author of Narcissism and Its Discontents (2014), and co-editor of Narcissism, Melancholia, and the Subject of Community (2017) and Shame and Modern Writing (2018). Julie is also a psychoanalyst working in private practice, and a member of the training committee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London.