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Chapter Eleven – A Critical Reflection on the Study – Page 325
and others over many decades. These patterns have been familiar to me from the
practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and this is true in the application of my own
approach to ethnography. They illustrate well the other three criteria for intense
consideration of the data; inspiration and perspiration; decontextualisation, memoing
and recontextualisation; and theoretical candour.
In considering inspiration and perspiration, I had to learn to work as a researcher in a
way that was not rational or direct, and indeed, that at times made no sense to me at all.
I am reminded here of Bion’s (1950, p. 4) apparently casual remark in an account of his
qualifying case as a psycho-analyst, that during the whole of the first two years of the
analysis, he had great difficulty in being able to determine from his patient’s reactions
what validity to assign to his interpretations. Clinically, I have found acknowledgements
such as this to be exceedingly liberating, and I have been able to draw on this liberation
in the study. Clinically, it has often been only through perseverance, frequently without
any source of hope outside of myself, that I have continued to work with some patients
who eventually went on to make significant therapeutic gains. Yet at the same time, I
have had experiences that range from this through to epiphanies. In this research
experience, ideas, images, feelings, intuitions and thoughts have variously come to me,
and I have learned to hold, contain and reflect upon these, much as I do in clinical and
consulting practice. These two aspects well represent inspiration and perspiration
respectively.
Decontextualisation, memoing and recontextualisation were clear features in my
progress through various cycles of analysis of the data. I appreciate Stewart’s notion
that prolonged holding of the wholeness of a context is a feature of ethnography not
shared by many other qualitative approaches. In my view, methodologies such as