Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

European perspectives. The disadvantage was the costs involved – the trip to New York
and Boston was personally funded, however the trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco
became possible through a small research grant from Newman University College,
Birmingham.
In total, thirty-two analysts were approached, seven declined to be interviewed, three never
replied to e-mail or letter. 345 Twenty-two analysts were willing to be interviewed, although
three could not fit into my limited schedule in the USA and three were not interviewed for
other practical reasons, resulting in a total of sixteen interviews. In terms of theoretical
orientation within the psychoanalytic tradition the interviewees encompassed: contemporary
Freudian; post-Freudian; American object relations; British object relations; Kleinian; Post-
Kleinian/Bionian; Lacanian; and Intersubjective/Relational approaches.
The selection of research data
In selecting the data generated by the interviews for a thematic narrative analysis the
following factors were used:
1. The accumulation of data. Kvale cautions against collecting so much data - the ‘1,000
page’ scenario (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009) - that the qualitative researcher becomes
overwhelmed with material, making it difficult to focus on the research question/s. All
sixteen interviews were listened to several times as a way of immersing myself in the
material, a technique common to qualitative research (Borkan 1999). The subsequent
transcripts of eleven interviews generated 123,000 words and when formatted in the
required thesis layout came to 426 pages. Through a further process of immersion by
345 It is possible that they did not receive the e-mail or the letter did not reach them.
175