Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Psychoanalytic Intersubjective Interview Methodology
I previously developed an autobiographical reflexive narrative to engage psychoanalytic and
spiritual thinking that formed the basis that underpins this current research. It was uniquely
in this work that I discovered my own voice and owned my personal narratives by telling
my story (Ross 1997). Like Leavy ‘I have learned to draw on my own language, history,
and imagination to further my efforts to understand others’ (Leavy 1988: 10). Orsi takes
this further in valuing an intersubjective reflexivity 355 where an autobiographical voice is
not a lone voice; it is one that engages in dialogue, at the very least a dialogue with the
reader where knowledge and meaning are discovered in intersubjective dialogue. I therefore
give my account of the experience of the interviews conscious that the textual engagement
subject to the thematic narrative analysis does not fully recount the experience (Kvale 2007)
and introduce each interviewee with brief bio-data setting the context. In this thesis I build
on these foundations by specifically utilizing psychoanalytic techniques, rather than
psychoanalytic theory. 356 In this way I therefore address an under-explored area of
qualitative research (Gough 2009). 357
355 ‘Willing to make one’s self-conceptions vulnerable to … genuine encounter with an unfamiliar way of life.
This is no in-between orientation, located at the intersection of self and other, at the boundary … it entails
disciplining one’s mind and heart to stay in this in-between place … This in-between ground upon which a
researcher … belongs neither to herself nor to the other but has come into being between them, precisely
because of the meeting of the two (Orsi 2004: 198f.).
356 The use of psychoanalytic ideas has been adopted by qualitative researcher’s examining discourse (Parker
1997) and narratives (Hollway and Jefferson 2000), with a particular focus on Lacanian and Kleinian ideas
(Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman 2003).
357 Loewenberg has developed a hermeneutic methodology that was too complex for my purposes. ‘The
following are a few guidelines derived from the hermeneutics of the clinical psychoanalysis sensing and
formulating latent unconscious meanings that I have found useful in researching history, biography, and
political psychology’ (Loewenberg 2000: 108). Loewenberg’s list includes: affect; imagery; behaviour;
sexuality and gender; money; character; repetition; fantasy; humour; internal conflict; absence of material;
action or inhibition; frustration tolerance; aggression and hostility; rationalization; splitting; symbolic politics
and anxiety; trauma; narcissism; crises; and life space. ‘In each case, the psychoanalyst, historian, and
humanist - using their subjective sensibility - become the decoding cryptographer, interpreter, expositor, and
translator, culling and unpacking different levels of comprehension and thus transforming the analysand, the
present historical experience, the reader, and the future’ (Loewenberg 2000: 111).
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