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Chapter One – An introduction to the study - Page 22
Consideration of psychoanalysis and group analysis against this framework reveals
some interesting notions. One is that the joint field has no apparent home in any one
chronotope. At the same time, the joint field has elements of many of the chronotopes.
This leads to the possibility that psychoanalytically informed investigation belongs not
within qualitative enquiry but rather within another meta-discourse altogether. This in
turn leads to the notion that a research method of any kind will be a poor substitute for
experience in the world under study.
Another thought around this gap is that this is an example of creating methodology out
of clinical method. This is highly consonant with a post-post-modern acknowledgement
of the importance of different means of representation. At the same time, the direction
of this creation, from clinic to research setting, runs directly counter to the recent history
of psychological and psychosocial intervention. In this history, the pressure for
standardised, evidence-based practice has led to demands for provision of forms of this,
and hostility to approaches that derive from reflective clinical experience.
The gap is that there isn’t a method that is satisfactory for the investigation of some
aspects of training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, particularly the role of the learning
group. The question then becomes, can a method be constructed that values and
privileges the philosophical world-view underlying psychoanalytic and group-analytic
psychotherapy, and which can fruitfully yet critically investigate aspects of those
practices themselves? Below, I repeat table 1.1 displaying the first gap, and then display
this current and second one next to that in table 1.2.