Evaluación de talleres

As noted above, most of the literature on psychoanalytically-informed research pertains to the research interview. Cartwright (2004) attempted to address the gap in psychoanalytic research methodologies by presenting his project to develop a Psychoanalytic Research Interview. He proposed that associative material to a particular topic can be gained over the course of three or four interviews and that the data so gathered may be interpreted in a way that:

offers an opportunity to broaden the psychoanalytic lens and gain access to phenomena not encountered within the limits of the psychoanalytic treatment setting, while at the same time affording the analytic researcher a focus on very specific areas of interest (p.211).

While representing an ideal, his proposal that each participant should be interviewed three or four times is not practical in most research settings where a larger sample of participants is required, in order to gain a broader collection of experiences than a single case or a very small sample could provide. On the other hand, his insistence on the need to pay attention to the “context and the interactive nature of the interview process” (p.216) resonated with my thinking about the interview process, and while his grounding in an object-relations frame differs from

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mine, his assumption that “the interviewer and interviewee co-construct a narrative around a particular focus in the interview” (p.217) represented an important point of resonance for me.

Kvale (1999, 2009) has written extensively on the topic of the interview. He suggested that the clinical psychoanalytic interview contains important pointers for psychoanalytic researchers, such as knowledge production through interpersonal relations, generalizations from case studies, and validation through communication and action. He particularly underscored the influence of the interpersonal interaction of the interview situation, hence his frequent use of the term “inter-view”, to denote that “[a]n interview is literally an inter-view, an interchange of views between two persons conversing about a theme of mutual interest” (Kvale, 1999, p. 101).

An important aspect of the usefulness of the psychoanalytic approach, as he sees it, lies in the fact that “knowledge is built up over a considerable period of time, allowing deeper and more informed understanding” (Midgley, 2006, p.218). As Kvale (1999) noted:

A classical psychoanalysis would imply 5 hours of therapy a week over several years … An emotional attachment of therapist and patient will arise over the many hundreds of hours of therapeutic interviews [and] this intensive personal therapeutic relationship may open to painful, hidden memories, and deeper levels of personality, which may be inaccessible through a brief research interview (p.103).

In truth though, unless one is writing a case study, the contact between researcher and research participant is usually very brief. There is little chance of developing the depth of knowledge of the interviewee which may allow the researcher to make an informed psychoanalytic

interpretation in the way that Kvale envisions. Holmes (2013b) has noted this problem but suggested that:

a first psychoanalytic encounter has just as much potential to be analytic as any other: ‘there is no difference in the analytic process in the first meeting and the analytic process in any other meeting’ (Ogden, 1992: 226). Understood this way, there is potential for interpretation but that interpretation cannot include comparisons of present and past situations (Holmes, 2013b, p.1191).

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It seems though, that Holmes, like Kvale, still accepts the singular role of the researcher in the interview setting, in the creation of meaning via interpretation. This notwithstanding his proposition that

the researcher/interviewer attempts to formulate interpretation-like responses in the research setting, based on a procedure of entering a daydreaming state of ‘reverie’, then scrutinizing this with a greater degree of conscious awareness, then attempting to incorporate it into a response (Holmes, 2013b, p.1194).

His suggestion goes some way towards tackling the thorny issues of interpretation and authority that dog psychoanalytic research, as Midgley (2006) noted: “What kind of position does the qualitative psychologist take if we claim to have knowledge about the inner world of our participants that they themselves do not have?” (p.226). But I find myself wondering why Holmes suggested that it is the researcher who should make ‘interpretation-like’ responses. Why would he not engage the participant in the clarification of meanings and intentions?

In posing this question, I have in mind Aron’s (1996) conception of a shift from the traditional view of interpretation as taking place primarily from the analyst to the patient, towards a “view of interpretation as a bipersonal and reciprocal communication process, a mutual meaning- making process” (p.94). It seems to me a logical step to transpose this idea of ‘mutual meaning- making’ from the clinical situation to the research interview, but this view is not consensual in the literature concerning the psychoanalytic research interview.

Clarke (2002) for instance, is insistent on the need for the interviewer to confine psychoanalytic interpretation to the data analysis component of the project, on the grounds that most

researchers are not trained in psychoanalysis. It seems though, that he has in mind the traditional conception of psychoanalysis as something that one does to the patient or

interviewee, rather than a method of inquiry and meaning-making, for he wrote: “In the method I have described I have been very careful to avoid any suggestion that I would, or could, psychoanalyse the research subjects during the interview” (p.187). It would seem that this mystified, and perhaps even anxious, view of what psychoanalysis is, is still prevalent and

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perhaps is part of what instigates the regular criticism of psychoanalytic methods as ‘top-down’ (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008).

Like Clarke, Hollway and Jefferson (2013) made the point that it is psychoanalytic clinicians who have, presumably, the knowledge and experience to interpret during the interview, whereas “researchers, not being therapists, will be careful not to interpret at the time the information is being provided by interviewees” (p.72). Kvale (1999) too pointed to the researcher’s lack of training in psychotherapy as reason to refrain from making interpretations during the interview process, while even Hoggett et al. (2010), who firmly advocate the need for interpretation during the interview process, refrained in their study:

from making countertransference-based interpretations, largely because some members of the team, particularly those who had not been trained as psychotherapists, felt cautious about using them. For researchers who have not themselves been through intensive psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, the use of the countertransference as data runs considerable risks (p.184).

There can be no doubt that a consideration of the possible risks and benefits to participants of any form of intervention needs to be carefully weighed and debated, and that the prime exhortation of ‘do no harm’ should guide all research processes. And it is certainly

advantageous that a researcher who utilises a psychoanalytic method should be well-trained and qualified in this paradigm, preferably having had his or her own analysis if not an active

clinician.

And yet, from the available literature (Cartwright, 2004; Clarke, 2002; Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, 2013; Holmes, 2013a), it seems that these authors consider the inclusion of the

researcher’s countertransference to be a valuable addition to the information that can be yielded by the use of psychoanalytic methods, as long as this does not take place during the interview process itself. It seems to me that these researchers take a greater ethical liberty by including their countertransference reactions only at the stage of data analysis, which precludes the participants from any engagement with or clarification of meaning, and removes from them the

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right to agree or disagree with how their information is being understood. It seems possible to me that it is this kind of approach to the handling and ownership of data that has led to the critique of psychoanalysis as a ‘top-down’ process (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008), despite the fact that the approach appears to be rooted in a fear of doing harm by disclosing the reactions of the researcher. In my view, it may, paradoxically, open the way for equal if not greater harm to be done by including researcher reactions outside of the awareness and contribution of the

participants.

Strømme, Gullestad, Stänicke and Killingmo (2010) seem to be making a similar point: participants may be interested in contributions from a research interviewer provided they are presented as genuine comments to the participants, not as the researcher’s final interpretations. Participants may experience such comments as expressing a respectful attitude, giving them opportunities to reflect upon the researcher’s hypotheses (p.229).

In their study, Strømme et al. (2010) adopted a psychoanalytic interview approach that eschewed a question and answer format, focussing instead on an interaction in which the interviewer followed the material as presented by the participants on the given topic. The interviewer responded to this material with what they called “common clinical interventions in psychodynamic therapies, in some cases also including interpretations” (p.217), and, like Hoggett et al. (2010), posed their comments or questions in the form of “thinking aloud” (p.217). This allowed participants greater freedom in choosing whether to take up these prompts and elaborate further, or stay silent, or perhaps disagree. In this way, Strømme et al. (2010) introduced a more reflective component into the interview situation, which they believe allowed participant responses on the verbal level to include “not merely conscious processes easily revealed but also ‘preconscious’ processes, that is, content they have conscious access to but which they probably would not have included in their spontaneous utterances had they not been stimulated to reflect about it” (pp. 217-218). While I would not necessarily use the term ‘preconscious’ for this kind of interaction, since my Relational psychoanalytic frame inclines me to think in terms of greater or lesser degrees of dissociation and symbolization, I believe that

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Strømme et al. (2010) make an important contribution in noting the potential for the

researcher’s thoughts, associations and intuitions to provide important stimulation for further elaboration, amplification, resonance or non-resonance in the research interaction in much the same way that this occurs in the clinical situation. It is this kind of interaction that is an element of what is meant by my understanding of the term ‘co-creation of meaning’. Although not specifically psychoanalytic in their theoretical framework, Holstein and Gubrium (2003) suggested a very similar process of active and interpretive engagement in the interview process in order to “provide an environment conducive to the production of the range and complexity of meanings that address relevant issues” (p.75).

Strømme et al. (2010) are the only researchers I encountered in this review who suggested that what is accessed in the verbal component of the interview relates to ‘preconscious’ material, and that unconscious material is not available to verbal processing within the space of, in their case, four interviews. Precision of description and definition of terms is a striking element of the Strømme et al. (2010) study, and is an aspect that could contribute to a wider acceptance and understanding of psychoanalysis as a research method if it were more widely practised, in my view. I have noted above a number of studies (Clarke, 2002; Hollway & Jefferson, 2013; Lucey et al., 2003) that were somewhat vague about the specific steps that were undertaken, and which omitted to define their conceptual and theoretical standpoints in any detail. It seems to me that this creates an esoteric ambience around the understanding and workings of psychoanalysis that has perhaps contributed to the lack of wide acceptance of it as a viable research methodology. To that end, I shall say more about my understanding of ‘the unconscious’ and other concepts in the next chapter.

Cartwright (2004) is another who was not entirely clear and precise about each of the steps he envisaged in his research interview, but he did suggest that, within the interview itself, clarification, confrontation and tentative interpretation on the part of the interviewer can and should take place. He proposed that this should occur in the third or fourth interview, allowing

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the participant’s narrative to emerge freely during the first two sessions. He was not clear on whether he sees a place for the participant to question or confront, although he does say that: “Responses to these tentative interpretations are useful in testing various hypotheses present in the interviewer’s mind, as well as in analyzing the defensive system of the interviewee” (p.225). This statement about the way in which he might treat his participants’ responses implicitly suggests, to this reader in any event, that he maintains the position of the interviewer as the only holder of knowledge and understanding, and this is a view that I find problematic. Whether or not participants are familiar with psychoanalysis, they have much to contribute to the project by way of challenges or additions to our conceptions.

This is not to suggest that there is an equal positioning of subjectivities in the research situation however, nor that all parties are equally invested in the process or outcome of the interaction. Kvale (2006) has written eloquently on this topic, and while I am not in full agreement with all the points he made to support his argument, there is no doubting the truth of his observation that: “The interview is an instrument for providing the interviewer with descriptions, narratives, and texts, which the researcher then interprets and reports according to his or her research interests” (p.484).

It is certainly true that the interaction follows the topic and overall agenda as set by the

researcher, and that the ultimate product, the findings, privileges the views and interpretations of the researcher. However, this does not mean that the participants are without power in the research situation, nor that they are incapable of questioning or challenging the researcher’s comments and interpretations. While necessarily asymmetrical, mutual and respectful

relationships can and should be formed in the research situation as much as anywhere else, for as Lempert (2007) noted, “Respondents are not always without power and researchers are not solely ‘on the take’” (p.83).

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And yet, if there is to be an authentic and genuinely mutual relationship, it requires, in my view, a situated way-of-being within the researcher rather than an application of techniques or

‘guiding principles’. Hall and Callery (2001), addressing the important contributions that reflexivity32 and relationality bring to the GTM, described relationality as “rooted in caring and equity” (p.268) and then went on to say that, “During the grounded theory study, to develop trust and demonstrate caring, WH used empathy, affirmation, and self-disclosure “ (p.268, [my italics]). It seems contradictory to me though, that one might develop trust and demonstrate caring by using techniques, rather than trust and caring emerging in both researcher and participant from a way of being that reflects a genuine caring and interest in the other. Stern (2010) attempted to capture this when he wrote that:

Empathy is an interpretive process, not a direct apprehension of meaning, and it must be reciprocal … the ongoing process must be reciprocal in at least the sense that therapist and patient intend to understand what the other means by what she says and by her conduct … When empathy is reciprocal, it issues in mutuality, not in the grasp of one person by the other (p.31).

In the last decade or so, psychoanalytic research interviews that actively involve participants in interpretation and meaning-making processes have begun to appear, and represent a move towards genuinely mutual and reciprocal approaches to the research endeavour. For example, Jimenez and Walkerdine (2011) utilised a method which they called:

psychosocial interviewing, informed by relational psychoanalysis … [T]his means we see the space of the interview as a space of creation in which a ‘third narrative’ is produced, which is different from that which either interviewer or interviewee would have produced alone (p.186).

They interviewed their participants over three one-hour interviews, and used the third interview especially to explore and discuss in a co-constructive way the material that had emerged in the first two interviews.

Hoggett et al. (2010) speak of their method as adopting a ‘dialogic stance’, an approach greatly facilitated by their opportunity to have at least six interviews with each of their participants and

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Reflexivity is the process in which “researchers engage in explicit self-aware meta-analysis” (Finlay, 2002, p.209).

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permitting in this way a build-up of trust and relatedness over a period of 18 months. While this might represent a less common temporal form of psychosocial research, it is nevertheless

notable that their experience with their research led them to the view that “the validity of the

psycho-social method to some extent hangs on the capacity of the researcher to share his or her thinking with the interviewees and involve them in a joint process of sense-making” (p.173). Although they started out with the intention of confining interpretation to the data analysis component of the work, they found that this became untenable and in fact, was more likely to lead to ‘wild analysis’ than a close collaboration in the co-creation of meaning during the interview process. Like Jimenez and Walkerdine (2011), Hoggett et al. (2010) noted the

appearance of a ‘third narrative’ that could emerge in this way, belonging neither to each partner in the dialogue uniquely, but a joint production that emerged from the interaction between them.

The Jimenez and Walkerdine (2011) and Hoggett et al. (2010) studies both noted the influence of the work of Stopford (2004) on the necessary incorporation of Relational psychoanalytic principles into their research designs. Stopford (2006) noted that “research interviews can be more than vehicles for inquiring into others’ experiences; they are also an important site for intersubjective negotiation and interaction between the interviewer and participants” (p.97). Consequently, in her study, she used an approach based on the Relational psychoanalytic approach to the co-construction of meaning, which meant engaging with the participants in the moment about what they had said, and introducing her own perspectives, rather than confining this to the data analysis component of the work. This reflected her understanding that:

what happens in a conversation or dialogue – what is discussed as well as what isn’t – is reflective of the subjectivities of the two people involved. My approach abandons any claim to neutrality. Rather, I try to facilitate a conversational space where underlying questions, fantasies, thoughts and so on may emerge during the conversation (pp. 97-98).

I find much to resonate with Stopford’s (2006) Relational psychoanalytic thinking, in the way that it informs both her interview method as well as her methods of data analysis. And like