Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

etc.? What is the place of mistakes or tidied up quotations? There was an ever-present
temptation, duly resisted, to lightly edit in order to make sense and facilitate coherence,
rather than allow a rough, ragged, open-ended text that is authentic but not always
comprehensible. Several interviewees commented that they found it difficult to accept the
difference between their perception of how articulate they were, and the hesitant, at times
rambling, transcript of the interview.
Fourthly, obtaining transparent ethical permission from each interviewee was important.
Yet it was only on producing the final transcript that I knew what quotations I was going to
use from the interviews. I experienced an anxiety that interviewees would withdraw
permission at the last moment. Several interviewees took the opportunity to correct and
alter the manuscript text I sent to them, usually adding in words that I had edited in a long
quotation. Others due to illness, being out of the country, or impending publication
deadlines delayed responding, which was anxiety-provoking in itself. One rang me at my
workplace on a Friday, did not get hold of me, although the message he rang did, and I spent
a weekend imagining the worst, which was not the case. It was a helpful reminder of how
much of my persona and being I had invested in this research. I am not an objective and
disinterested spectator, the research is a vital part of who I am and what I am doing.
Fifthly, I am aware that the sample size is small. The sixteen initial interviews, led to
eleven interviews being selected for a thematic analysis and six interviews for the
psychoanalytic interview process offering a greater reflexive engagement. One justification
for this relates to the size and scope of the thesis. Putting these interviews into a context of
a narrative that had not been fully told before required a considerable space within the
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