Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Interviews as a qualitative research tool offered this form of intersubjective engagement that
Ellis and Berger describe as ‘reflexive dyadic interviewing’. While the interviewer asks the
interviewee questions, the interviewer may choose to disclose personal experience or reflect
on the process of communication taking place.
The interview is conducted more as a conversation between two equals than as a
distinctly hierarchical, question-and-answer exchange, and the interviewer tries to
tune in to the interactively produced meanings and emotional dynamics within the
interview itself (Gubrium and Holstein 1997). When telling the story of the
research, the interviewers might reflect deeply on the personal experience that
brought them to the topic, what they learned about and from themselves and their
emotional responses in the course of the interview, and/or how they used knowledge
of the self for the topic at hand to understand what the interviewee was saying (Ellis
and Berger 2003: 162).
In my case I evolved a psychoanalytic intersubjective interview process, utilizing
psychoanalytic techniques to further examine the presence of conscious and unconscious
processes. 535 How these differing forms of knowledge, themes, and conscious and
unconscious subjectivities can be interpreted as sacred psychoanalysis is the focus of the
next chapter.
535 Discussion of this qualitative method is found in chapter twenty-one.
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