Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

wider academic world. Expression of their motives ranged from: my persistence (JB); a
genuine desire to help research and scholarship (JB, AN, JG); previous personal contact
(AL); an opportunity to discover what they think (AP, AN); and for some a spiritual
responsibility (PM, JG). Others felt both a duty and a responsibility to themselves,
psychoanalysis, and the wider world of knowledge and human experience. A few were
simply intrigued by the subject and wanted to know more from me (JG, AL). My
experience with JB and JG particularly changed my expectations of what could occur in an
interview and I adopted this in terms of shifting my focus from knowledge generation about
religion and spirituality in contemporary psychoanalysis which I now reflect was my stance
in the first interview with David Black, to lived encounter with intersubjective potential for
the sacred.
This chapter has demonstrated that a reflexive psychoanalytically informed ‘entering into’
the research process elicits certain kinds of information not available otherwise. This
requires levels of openness and transparency from the researcher/interviewer that are costly
in terms of self-exposure, risking taking a position or making a statement that can be
critiqued or rejected by other researchers. Yet the interview text also offers other forms of
knowledge that are developed in the following chapter through a thematic narrative analysis.
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