Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. RESEARCH ETHICS PROCESSES
Ethical consent is a vital but complex part of any research process and particularly for this
research as a unique aspect of this thesis was the identification of the interview subjects
(Bond 2004; Gabriel and Casemore 2009). The rationale behind this lay in the limited
number of psychoanalysts engaged with religion and spirituality so in quoting them their
distinctive ‘voice’ would be identifiable thus I could not guarantee confidentiality. 348 The
University of Birmingham operated a devolved ethical consent process, partly complicated
by the fact I was a lecturer in psychodynamic counselling employed by the same University
and a member of the Dean’s Ethical Review Panel that examined special cases within the
Schools of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Law. Discussion with my first PhD
supervisor in the Department of Theology and the Director of the Centre for Lifelong
Learning, where I was located, led to my research proposal and ethical consent form being
submitted to and approved by the ethics committee within the Centre for Lifelong Learning.
This consent form, signed by the research participants, gave permission for me to quote
them for the thesis and later publications. I undertook to provide the participants with a
transcript of the interview and a copy of the parts of the thesis where they were quoted and
the context that informed this.
Although all interviewees agreed to be named, in clarifying the final text with one
interviewee, they stated that they had not realised they were to be named. We therefore
agreed that their contribution be retained but that they were identified as anonymous (AN).
This revealed to me that ethical consent is not some box-ticking exercise, rather it is a
348 For example if I quoted an analyst in San Francisco who was also a Zen master, most people would know
or be able to make an educated guess that I was talking about Joe Bobrow.
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