Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERSUBJECTIVE
INTERVIEW METHODOLOGY
This chapter is an account of entering into the lived experience of psychoanalysts and our
intersubjective encounter. The interviews took place in the space in which the analysts
worked, 361 offering a place of security and familiarity where I was: an ‘outsider’; a
professional colleague; an academic researcher; and a ‘non-patient’. This use of a
therapeutic context has a capacity to evoke unconscious dynamics as the researcher, who is
both a psychodynamic therapist and a minister of religion, becomes a reflexive participant
in examining the lives of others through conscious and unconscious processes. Experiences
or beliefs about religion and spirituality cannot always be fully expressed in words but
rather in ‘felt presence’ and the researcher was open to the possibility of intersubjective
presence of the unconscious becoming conscious in the room.
1. Contextual Issues
The following accounts utilize the same structure for each interview using the categories of:
• The past in the present – ontological assumptions
• The personal present – conscious encounter
• The unconscious present – unconscious encounter
• The shared present – intersubjective presence
This research encounter has the potential for generating new insights into psychoanalytic
being as well as religious and spiritual presence. Such a unique person-to-person encounter
cannot be easily replicated at every level, as the unconscious is uniquely different due to the
361 With one exception.
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