Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER TWENTY. ANALYZING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
INTERVIEWS
The next stage of the research was to explore these emerging ideas in the person-to-person
encounter based on a face-to-face interview between the researcher and a range of
psychoanalysts in the UK and the USA. A value of qualitative research interviews is that
they have the potential to generate ontological, epistemological, hermeneutic and
intersubjective forms of knowledge. This is knowledge encountered as knowing and being.
All interviews were experienced differently offering unique insights and reflections, two
particular strands emerging. Firstly the interview mirrored the beliefs – ontological and
analytic – of each analyst in relation to religion and spirituality. Secondly, some interviews
provided ontological dialogue with moments of intersubjectivity, revealing and the sacred,
where connection between the Other incarnated in me as the interviewer facilitated
connection with the other person in the room and the Other. But how did I reach these
conclusions? To analyze the data in a transparent and reliable way I adopted three research
methodologies – adapted to my research focus: a psychoanalytic intersubjective interview
approach; a thematic narrative analysis; and a group intersubjective analysis. 354 These
methods potentially offer new insights and descriptions of the world of psychoanalysts in
their engagement with religion and spirituality. They also fit within a general hermeneutic
approach that elicits both surface and depth meaning from texts, which in a psychoanalytic
context requires a means of identifying the presence of the unconscious.
354 Although arrived at independently, these resemble the wider, narrative and socially constructed ideas
developed by McLeod and Balamoutsou (McLeod and Balamoutsou 2001). As a bricoleur the challenge for
each researcher is to utilize these in a unique way.
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