Emotional Literacy and Social Exclusion: A Psychodynamic Critique

This paper is set within the (UK) organisational context of schools, and rising concerns about the issue of social exclusion (Pierson, 2002). The (Labour) government set up the Social Exclusion Unit to encourage joined up thinking to a range of complex and inter-related problems, in particular: - the breakdown in social cohesion through the splitting of communities along differences defined by, for example, racial and religious identities, and - the increasing number of people who are either failing to take up or rejecting the role of citizen.