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Psychoanalysis had an important impact on my research, if only because of my training and experience as a psychodynamic clinical psychologist.

Nevertheless, it did not constitute my main methodological approach. In recent years, the use of psychoanalysis for qualitative research has been

demonstrated and discussed extensively (e.g. Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, Kvale, 1999, Frosh et al, 2003, Parker, 2005, Midgley, 2006 Frosh and Baraitser, 2008) and arguments for and against its use and the ways it could be used have been made. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss in length these theoretical debates, but I would like to outline what aspects of psychoanalysis I found productive for my research and in what ways it was incorporated into the analysis.

1. While my psychosocial approach advocates the constitutive role of social, political and cultural ‘external’ forces in the construction of subjectivity, I accept the psychoanalytic argument that the social is represented and negotiated differently and idiosyncratically by each subject and that such representations are imbued with emotionality and phantasies rather than calculated rationally in order to achieve certain social gains. This contributes to ‘enriching and deepening the use of qualitative interviews in the social sciences’ (Kvale, 1999, p. 93). 2. Furthermore, my analysis attends to psychoanalysis’ portrayal of the

subject as inherently troubled and torn between contrasting social and subjective forces. Consequently the texts are bound to be fraught with multiple, often contradictory meanings and a psychoanalytic analysis allows researchers to ‘trouble sense making’ and serves as a ‘tool for “disintegrating”and “disrupting” text’ (Saville-Young and Frosh, 2010, p. 511) and to highlight the tensions in the text rather than its coherences

as structuralists such as Gee (1991) or Labov (1972) seek to

demonstrate. Such a psychoanalytic reading of the subject looks at the

efforts to construct a linear explanatory account of themselves as

coherent ‘national’ subjects (i.e. as ‘Israelis’).

3. The concept of transference relationship (i.e. the pattern of emotional relationship that the interviewee develops towards the interviewer as authority figure) in the interview encounter has been discussed extensively (e.g. Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, Frosh and Baraitser, 2008). While I agree with Hollway and Jefferson that a transference relationship between interviewee and interviewer develops (even prior to the encounter) and is reflected in the interaction and consequently in the text produced, I take Frosh and Baraitser’s view (2008) that unlike a therapeutic setting, this transferencial relationship cannot be explored and substantiated within the interview text analysis for ethical,

methodological and structural reasons. Nevertheless, it was important for me to be able to contextualize the interview text (also) in terms of the interviewees’ prior expectations and personal agenda which, I believe, played a major part in their decision to voluntarily attend the interview without clear financial or social incentives. This position draws on psychoanalytic thinking that assumes that subjects are motivated by some personal discomfort or anxiety and that they would want to

address it through the interview. For instance, for Ariella, who was about to return to Israel after 11 years of living in London, the interview

seemed to offer an opportunity to re-state and ground her decision. For Na’ama, who described her life as ‘on hold’, the interview seemed an opportunity to try and ‘resolve’ a decisional deadlock. For Yariv, who only recently completed a long psychoanalytic therapy, it could have been another occasion to ask if his decision to stay in Britain was motivated by his ‘personal issues’ - growing up as a gay man in a militaristic Israeli society - or whether it was based on ‘objective’ dislike and non-adaptation to the ‘Israeli existence’. In these three interviews the agenda was clearly articulated either explicitly by the subject or through the recurrent engagement and negotiation of these key topics in the texts produced. Thus, I included in the analysis specific references

to the interviewee-interviewer relationship only to the extent that they clearly emerged out of the interview text and/or the encounter could be corroborated with other textual data and were relevant to the topic I am studying.

4. Additionally, in the course of a relatively long psychoanalytic

relationship, the analyst gets acquainted with the patients’ idiosyncratic or private usage of specific signifiers and their potential subjective meanings. Pavon-Cuelar argues that ‘for each position the language is

a language’ (2010, p. 164). Due to the short interview encounter it

would be impossible to accumulate such linguistic reservoir. One of the interviewees, Nira, described herself as an IDF orphan (i.e. someone whose parent was killed in the army). This orphan status was very significant in the text and shaped her criticism of Israel and of Israeli culture. Nira talked about the need to be aggressive in Israeli daily living in order to be heard. By contrast she described her experience in British society as follows: ‘There's less of a need to… to push or… Because you don't have to, there is someone… There is some reaction, reaction {in English} to what you do’.

It was tempting to contrast the feeling that ‘there is someone’ in Britain with the lack of someone in Israel, and to explain it, psychoanalytically, in terms of the constant absence of her father in Israeli existence. Such psychoanalytic interpretation argues that only by leaving behind the social context where she is destined to be an 'IDF orphan' – i.e. someone whose father is absent – can this sense of constant absence be replaced with a feeling that 'there is

someone'. However, I felt it would require many other corroborating references in order to ground this link.

To summarize, I find that psychoanalysis’ portrayal of subjects (interviewees and interviewers) as driven by emotional engagements, rather than by rational, conscious thinking contributes immensely to qualitative research. A

psychoanalytic approach offers a way to explain the ‘stickiness’ (Hook, 2008) of certain discursive positions or the ‘attachments’ (Stavrakakis and

Chrysoloras, 2006) of certain groups and individuals to certain social positions. Finally, it points to the inevitable gaps in the narrative and includes disruptions within its analysis of texts. Therefore I have often paid special attention to

moments of emotional intensity and confusion marked by humour, hesitations, frequent disclaimers, linguistic lapses etc. The psychoanalytic tradition and its emphasis on countertransference as an important tool for making sense of the clinical encounter has also informed my reflexive thinking - i.e. the role I played in the construction of research data.