Psychoanalytic Methods

Psychoanalysis is both a clinical psychotherapeutic practice and a body of theory concerning people's mental life, including its development and expression in activities and relationships. Empirical findings are basic to psychoanalysis, but rather than being based on a claim to objectivity, these findings are recognized to be the product of both the patient's and analyst's subjectivities. Objections to the scientific status of psychoanalytic data have been on the grounds that the psychoanalytic method was based in the consulting room, not the laboratory, and produced single case studies, not generalizable findings. However, following the challenge to positivist methods in social science research, the resulting linguistic, qualitative, and hermeneutic turns have opened a space for psychoanalysis in qualitative methods.

Psychoanalytic theory has proved influential in questioning the Enlightenment subject—the rational, unitary, consciously intentional subject that usually underpins social scientists' assumptions about research participants. The premise of unconscious conflict and defenses casts doubt on the idea of a self-knowledgeable, transparent respondent, an idea underpinning interview-based, survey, and attitude scale research (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). Such unconscious contents necessarily require interpretation, and these are warranted by psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., the idea of denying an action when its recall would be painful). Such concepts have been built up and refined through clinical psychoanalytic practice (Dreher, 2000).

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Psychoanalytic methods require modification if extended beyond the consulting room, where research findings are subordinate to therapeutic purpose. Clinical and research applications both use psychoanalytic interpretation. In the consulting room, analysts' interpretations are a small part of their therapeutic method, offered directly to patients whose emotional responses provide a test of the interpretation's correctness. In generating and interpreting research data psychoanalytically, other methods of validation are sought (e.g., looking for supporting and countervailing examples in the whole text or detecting a recognizable pattern of defenses).

The method of free association, on which psychoanalysis is based, encourages patients to report their thoughts without reservation on the assumption that uncensored thoughts lead to what is significant. The use of free association can inform the production and analysis of interview data (see free association narrative interview method), tapping aspects of human social life of which methods relying on the selfknowledgeable transparent research subject remain unaware (e.g., the desires and anxieties that affect family and work relationships). The concept of transference refers to the displacement of unconscious wishes from an earlier figure, such as a parent, on to the analyst, where they are experienced with the immediacy of feelings for the current person. Albeit diluted in a nonclinical setting, researchers sensitive to their own and participants' transferences and countertransferences can use these as data (e.g., Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001). Epistemologically, these concepts enhance the critique of objectivity and supplement the understanding of researcher reflexivity, an important but undertheorized concept in qualitative social science.

Interviewing and observation both include psychoanalytic influences. Kvale (1999) argues that knowledge produced in the psychoanalytic interview is relevant for research. Two currents of observation work use psychoanalytic methods—namely, ethnographic field studies (Hunt, 1989) and baby observation (Miller, Rustin, Rustin, & Shuttleworth, 1989). In Germany, ethnopsycho analysis applies psychoanalysis to the study of culture. Psychoanalytic observation—dating from the 1940s in England, when detailed once-weekly observation of babies in their families became a part of training at the Tavistock Institute—now extends to research on wider topics.

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