Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)

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Complicated Conversations between Interviewing and Psychoanalytic Theory / Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

 

Abstract:

 

 

Introduction: Why Psychoanalytic Theory?

 

<1> The lyrebird is an endangered Australian creature, almost a strange peacock with a steely grey body and tail feathers flanked on either side with an ostentatious whorl. What makes this bird unique is that in order to attract a mate, the lyrebird sings a song that consists of every notable birdsong, forest noise, or human-generated sound the bird has ever heard, sung in a sequence composed by the bird. The lyrebird faithfully mimics these noises in timbre and resonance, and repeats them exactly as they were originally heard: the impersonation is so good that it fools practically all other creatures who have the privilege of eavesdropping in on the vanishing bird's song. The researcher attracted to interviews is not a lyrebird[1], for she interprets what she hears and it is impossible for her to reproduce the experience of the interview. She has neither the faculties to reproduce the talk of the interview accurately (memory, experience, or the unconscious gets in the way), nor the technology (even the best recording will fail us at least once, often when we need it the most). Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes that "[f]or many of us the best way to be neutral is to copy reality meticulously" (95); or in other words, the model offered by the lyrebird. An unforgivable mistake that research falls prey to is the promise made by positivism and empiricism that interviewing is a way to hear the real voice of the interviewee, which may then be re-presented to others as a truthful depiction of what really happened in the interview, untainted by the researcher. Many common strategies that are used in interview research reporting implicitly aim at telling the "truth" about the interview (examples of these strategies include the use of large block quotations excerpted from interview transcripts, the creation of comparative thematic categories to classify the transcripts, and software such as NVivo and NUD*IST). These strategies can have the effect of obfuscating the researcher's involvement in the interview and promising to the reader that the reporting of the interview is objective. I find this position on the space of the interview to be inadequate, and hope to open up a different kind of space for the interviews in my research that enables the reader to actively engage in the process of interpretation alongside me as the researcher.

<2> This paper critically examines the use of psychoanalytic theory for interpreting interviews, as well as the possibilities of using interviewing in cultural studies. I am particularly interested in the ethics of combining interview methodologies with psychoanalytic methodologies as a researcher, rather than as an analyst. Further, I want to problematize common practices in the humanities and cultural studies to analyse cultural phenomena and ephemera with an undivided focus upon "the text" to the exclusion of social science approaches such as interviewing  [2]. In her doctoral dissertation on the recovery movement, Erica Meiners beautifully expresses my own observations and concerns over this approach when she says that she made the decision to include participant observation alongside textual analysis because she "became dissatisfied with [her] own ability to suture text: there was no friction" (3). I understand Meiners' statement to mean that working with text makes it easier to distance oneself from the human who wrote it in a way that is more difficult when one is working with interviewees (for example): this it is easier to "suture" texts together in a way that is pleasing for the researcher. This paper is a working-through of two major methodological issues in my own research. First I discuss how psychoanalysis might be used as a research methodology and epistemology, and what that methodology looks like. While there is an abundance of scholarship that takes up psychoanalysis as a critical approach to multiple cultural phenomena, very rarely does the author explicate the process or effect of this approach in relation to the res arch [3]. The second matter I consider is the opening up of possible understandings of the interview from the perspective of a psychoanalytic methodology. As we might expect, psychoanalytic therapy uses interviews in a much different manner than social scientific research. In psychoanalysis, the interview operates primarily as a space within which the patient and analyst can draw out a course of therapeutic treatment. In the social sciences, the interview functions as a way for the researcher to gather data from others who are invested in her research topic in order to create or develop her argument. Combining these perspectives on interviewing from a psychoanalytic perspective compels the researcher to use innovative methods to re-present the interviews, and also brings the new and common issues with interviews into relief.

-– and I would have to affirm this uncertainty: is a translated interview a written or spoken object?
Interview: an antiquated device of documentary. Truth is selected, reviewed, disputed and speech is always tactical. (Trinh 73)

<3> What is the interview? As far as we can tell, the word comes from Old French, and means something like "to see one another" (Narayan and George 454). But how does this become possible? ‘Interview' is a word that encompasses a variety of experiences and encounters. It is at once an encounter and an exchange (a seeing of one another) that becomes a transcript, translated (an object). Unlike in life, the interview fixes a story into stillness yet breathes a life into the research, enriching it with a wholeness, unavailable to the researcher without an encounter with another person both inside and outside of the project. As researchers, we have an obligation to the interviewees through our co-construction of the interview-gift.

<4> In an interview included in the collection Framer/Framed, Trinh problematizes the category of "scholarly" for academics, exposing it as a normative framework. She implies that the creation and boundary maintenance of this category limits what counts as "theory" through establishing norms about theoretical style and contents (Trinh 138). If we extend her hyperbole, sanitized scholarship excises and disposes of the personal, affective, and sensual experiences of research, maintaining the peripheries of public/private, objective/subjective, and the distinctions between disciplines [4]. Trinh goes so far as to say that although interdisciplinary work is presently chic, what counts as interdisciplinary research is work that simply collects the disciplines together, side-by-side. This diminishes the radical threat that interdisciplinarity poses to academic scholarship and the notion of expertise and ownership, which Trinh calls a "politics of pluralist exchange" (138). Disciplinary boundary maintenance is often propped up using methodological explanations and limitations, and from a psychoanalytic sensibility both of these manoeuvres can be interpreted as a way to manage the anxiety generated by the experience of conducting research [5].

<5> It is important to address the distinction between psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytic approach to research in their definitions and applications. In this paper, I will attempt to make this distinction as simple and clear as possible; as a result, the definitions I offer are open to interpretation, expansion, and critique because of their simplicity. I explore in much greater depth the psychoanalytic approach to research in terms of how the subject of research, the researcher, and data are delineated in a psychoanalytic approach to research. While the way we intersect psychoanalysis and research sometimes differs, I have found Jennifer C. Hunt's book Psychoanalytic Aspects of Fieldwork to be invaluable to my thinking around these issues, as it is the only full volume devoted to thinking about how psychoanalytic insights might be applied to fieldwork. Psychoanalysis is the process of undergoing a therapeutic analysis with a trained analyst who has also undergone an analysis as a component of their training. A traditional analysis typically involves meeting three to five times a week over the course of several years. Thus, a relationship develops between analyst and analysand through which they can determine the course of treatment together based upon a deep and developing understanding of the analysand's history and present. In contrast, a psychoanalytic approach to research is a theoretical position that posits first and foremost an unconscious component to individual, social and cultural life. A researcher using a psychoanalytic approach may or may not be a trained analyst, and may utilize a particular psychoanalyst in their work that defines their approach as Freudian, Lacanian, Kleinian (and so on) or otherwise employ a combination of these perspectives in their work. Most frequently, psychoanalytic researchers study cultural texts and products as a channel to negotiate the complicated ethical impasses that might arise from conducting qualitative research with human participants. Interviews undertaken from a psychoanalytic perspective occur in a very different context than the intersubjective exchanges of talk in psychoanalysis. Often, researchers meet with the interviewees once or twice, and the interviews are conducted according to the questions and topics that are determined by the researcher. A therapeutic result is not identified as an objective for the research interview, because there is not enough of a relationship to foster therapy (and, as previously mentioned, many psychoanalytic researchers are neither trained as analysts nor is it appropriate to conflate the aims of therapy and research). Instead, the researcher's focus is directed towards her own responses to the interview and the interviewee (especially strong emotions like boredom, anger, love, or irritation), and the interview story as a text, rather than towards the interviewee as a person. A particular advantage of this approach is that the researcher is able to think more deeply about the absences, gaps, and leaps of logic within the interview story.

<6> In this paper, I suggest that psychoanalytic theory has much to offer qualitative research methodologies, and in particular, interview methodologies. Bringing a psychoanalytic sensibility into interview methodology can offer researchers strategies for thinking about the silences and leaps of logic that occur within interview narratives. The research experience is a conflicted emotional encounter between the researcher and her theoretical and methodological frameworks: in the case of interviewing, whether it is because the researcher's values differ from the interviewee's values, or because the researcher struggles with how to best present an interview narrative, both scenarios are emotional encounters. Most of the time, scholars seek to minimize the affective dimension of research, choosing to understand it as an interference to the research process. Sometimes (as in some feminist methodologies), the analysis of the subjective elements of research goes as far as a list of identity qualifiers describing the researcher and the researched. Pierre Bourdieu says that a researcher should "observe the effects produced on the observation, on the description of the thing observed, by the situation of the observer-– to uncover all the pre-suppositions inherent in the theoretical posture" (60). This is a lovely aspiration, but it is simultaneously a wish for a researcher in control of both her consciousness and unconsciousness, working with materials and persons who are similarly knowing. I am not implying that it is a terrible idea to work reflexively, or mull over our motivations for selecting our research topics and interpreting our data in a particular way. However, I am suggesting that both the feminist identity checklist and the reflexive sociological approach can be taken up in facile ways that assume our decisions fully conscious. Nevertheless, if these strategies are taken up from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, they can go further to consider the irrational (in this paper, irrational according to a conscious logic), affective, intrapsychic experience of research.

<7> Felicity Callard's provocatively-titled "The taming of psychoanalysis in geography" examines the way that psychoanalytic theory is taken up by geographers. I think parts of her analysis are valid for a variety of disciplines outside of geography, and in particular I appreciated her elucidation of why psychoanalytic concepts like abjection and the ego are enthusiastically accepted within geographical analyses of space (and, I would add within the social sciences more generally) while concepts such as repetition compulsion and the death drive are not. Callard argues that the former concepts are easily domesticated and assimilated into "models of resistance, agency, and resignification" (308) common to a social constructionist approach. To do this is to miss what is arguably psychoanalysis' greatest discovery and insight: the unconscious (I will return to the unconscious later in this paper when I take up the process of interviewing). Callard writes that her "own attraction to psychoanalysis is founded on what I see as its incommensurability with many other theories that aim to understand the process of socio-cultural formation – particularly social constructionism" (298). Extending this appreciation, Steimar Kvale asserts as a postulate that positivism and psychoanalytic research are utterly irreconcilable (89). Psychoanalysis is appealing to me as a researcher for matching reasons, in that I see within its theories possibilities to think through the individual psychical aspects of socio-cultural life such as emotion in a manner that honours the individual experience within the social. Mary Thomas' assertion that "for feminist research to be politically useful might require a loosened grip on the logical world and a consideration of the seemingly illogical, the unspeakable, the deniable, and the invisible connections between social action and psychic life" (543) rings very true to me. This is particularly true as I am grappling with how to represent the stories that seven women have told me about their bodies and their cosmetic surgeries, because a social explanation of these stories would encompass only a part of their lives and exclude their important affective, irrational experiences.

<8> A common critique of psychoanalytic analyses by academics is that they are difficult or perhaps impossible to verify, compromising the validity of the research. One technique often used by qualitative researchers using interviews is to check that their analysis correlates with the interviewee's analysis, and if there is agreement the researcher's analysis is deemed to be a "valid" or "correct" one. This has been a critical intervention into research particularly by researchers committed to feminism and anti-oppression, with an idealized vision of the research as a collaborative project co-created by researcher and interviewees. However, this vision imagines both the researcher and the interviewees to posses the faculty to logically consider interview texts outside of their own emotional, political and intellectual investments in order to create an accurate analysis. Further, this approach often presupposes in advance that the interviewees will probably agree to the researcher's analysis of the research situation: it is more common for the researcher to report correlating her findings with the interviewees' analyses [6], but it is far rarer to find examples of researchers working through a disagreement when utilizing this method of validating analyses. Checking with interviewees can be a means of circumventing the responsibility that all analyses of interviews are necessarily interpretive (Roseneil 865)[7] and ripe with the researcher's emotional, intellectual and political attachments, shoring up positivist hope for a pure knowledge gained by observation. My argument here is not that academics ought to be able to write about others with impunity, or that it is not important for researchers to make the research accessible to participants; rather, I am arguing that this method of verifying research findings is often used uncritically. Certainly for community-based research projects and other action-based research projects that seek to effect change in policy (for example), it is crucial for researchers to consult with participants about their analyses, to ensure that the recommendations and findings are meaningful to the communities that the research seeks to assist. Further, if the analysis does not coincide with the analysis that the research participants might offer to our project, it is important to consider very seriously why this may be as well as the consequences of competing analyses.

 

Approaching from Psychoanalysis

 

<9> Using psychoanalytic theory as a research method is a way of complicating and adding to an analysis that considers the strictly social aspects of subject formation and instead thinks about how the individual is formed psychically and in relation to others. As such, the participant in psychoanalytically-informed research ought to be distinguished from the subject of sociological study, in two important ways. First, the participant in psychoanalytically-informed research is assumed to be non-rational and non-unitary. Roseneil defines this as an ontological theory of the subject, insofar as this perspective recognizes the role of the unconscious in social and psychic life in addition to the importance of intrapsychic conflict (866). Second, the participant in psychoanalytically-informed research is not expected to be able to narrate their life completely (nor, for that matter, can the researcher). This methodological approach acknowledges and embraces the ineffable, emotional content of our lives that cannot be fully held by discourse. It also recognizes that when we speak, we convey more than we intend. One benefit of this approach is that as we acknowledge that there is more to the participant than her rational, chronological explanations of her life, we become more open to the illogical facets of life that do not make sense according to a conscious logic. We no longer need to feel pressed to offer an artificial interpretive closure to interview narratives, smooth over discrepancies in the interview story, nor do we need to hold on to the fantasy of research ending in solid answers. Instead, we can think about the complicated questions that arise when we involve other (non-published) voices in our research, and consider research as raising more questions than it answers.

<10> The researcher is also conceptualized differently in psychoanalytically-informed research. The self is considered to be the "primary instrument of inquiry" (Hunt 13), a phrase that acknowledges the researcher's subjectivity and also her agency in interpreting fieldwork data. Considering the researcher's self to be an instrument of research calls for particular attention to the intrapsychic facets of research, and does not require the researcher to void her emotional conflicts with, and attachments to, the field. Instead, the researcher is obligated to pay attention to moments of friction and it is assumed that every field of research is likely to provoke emotional conflict in the researcher (conflicts that are both unforeseen and predictable) (Hunt 27). Her choice of research topic and setting in particular is conceived of as structured not only by a rational decision, but also by inner subtleties and unconscious dynamics (Hunt 29). Rather than understanding our decisions to undertake certain research projects and not others as an uncomplicated choice determined by rational factors, we can consider what other factors structure our decisions (these are often the uncontrollable factors). Thinking about the research participant and the researcher in these ways opens up the research project and analysis of narrative to examination that holds the synchronous and diachronous elements of psychic experience.

<11> In addition to conducting interviews, participant observation, and other kinds of fieldwork, research that employs psychoanalytic theory as its methodology collects other forms of data. Because the intrapsychic is so key to understanding the construction of the research, the researcher's dreams, jokes, parapraxes, and fantasies are conceptualized as data (Hunt 62). This data is used to understand the how the researcher's identifications and transferences create particular research situations (interviews, in this paper), and also how the researcher's subjectivity and past structure the present fieldwork. Recording field notes and post-interview reflections becomes a matter of critical importance, rather than a prosthetic device of the transcript and the researcher's memory. The notes should not only include material on the physical reality of the interview or parts of the interview that were not recorded on tape, but also the researcher's emotions and thoughts in relation to the interviewee as well as the space in which the interview is conducted. Because we are not psychoanalyzing the research participant (a practice that Freud would have called "wild analysis") and therefore cannot really sense any intrapsychic experiences from their perspective, all we have are our own intrapsychic processes (transference, identification) and these field notes can be incorporated into the interview story as clues to what is happening for the researcher.

 

Interviewing through Psychoanalytic Theory

 

<12> The conceptualization of the interview that I hold in my research is not that the interview offers a means to a genuine, unmediated knowledge for the researcher to report back to a research community, but that the interview is a mediated encounter between researcher and the research participant that can disrupt and enrich the research project. Interview research is an exchange for both contributors, the exchange of telling and listening to someone's story. This is not a romantic conception; there are possibilities for deception and manipulation in this encounter. John Shostak writes of the "inter-view":

A simple hyphen that splits the word – a textual sleight of hand that disrupts, puns and opens alternative readings – enables a change of focus. What it does is allow a suspension to take place, its meaning unfolding through practice, taking on the meanings of particular project purposes and experiences rather than imposing a dictionary definition…. It creates the basis for engagement with others, the openings for dialogue, the modes of drawing out views, the strategies for forming and framing questioning, the critical approaches to analysis, the strategies for representation politically, ethically, and textually, and an approach to writing views. To say the inter-view is a way of seeing as a condition of asking and hearing is at this stage misleading. But it will have to do. It has a resonance with two other key terms, intersubjectivity, and intertextuality (3-4).

Shostak understands the inter-view as an open process that generates an intersubjective and intertextual commitment between the researcher and an other (the participant), which offers a foundation that is dedicated to ethical engagement between researcher and research participants. As Shostak cleaves the word in two – inter-view – he is proposing a reconsideration of a practice of speech (interviewing) that is so pervasive in North America through talk shows, job hiring, market research and sales, not to mention our contact with professions such as medicine, law and policing. This tear in the word inter-view compels us to think more deeply about the seeing that happens between people when research interpellates the research participants' lives. Noting the interview as a fragmented encounter and experience from the outset, this section seeks to articulate a psychoanalytic understanding of interview research. I will begin by thinking through the interview in terms of the intrapsychic process of transference, and then I will move into my conclusion, which discusses the implications of the interview as it becomes a text and fixed object.

<13> In order to think about the interview psychoanalytically, one must take the unconscious seriously: that every aspect of our lives is permeated with an unknowable component. In this endeavour, we are confronted with the idea of a psyche that is "deeply antagonistic to change [as well as the possibility of] the individual trapped in the repetition, rather than the suppression of traumatic formations; and deeply rooted, unsmiling fantasies" (Callard 307). This subject is deeply connected to Walter Benjamin's angel of history who looks back in sadness at the destruction of the storm we name progress. The unconscious is not a "cultural artefact" (Callard 300) and it cannot be resignified at will as a social constructionist approach might promise. In Jean Laplanche's words, the unconscious is "not a stored memory or representation" but rather a trace, a "waste-product of certain processes of memorization" (Laplanche in Callard, 304). In "The Ego and the Id" Freud (1923) explains that the role of the ego is to act as a mediating space between the unconscious id and the preconscious-conscious (perception-consciousness system and the external world), and describes the ego as "a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the superego" (Freud 397-398). There is no way of gaining unmediated access to the unconscious (nor would we want to!); however, because "repression is never entirely contained or complete" (Thomas 537), we can say that the unconscious (signifier) erupts onto the vocal scene through jokes, slips of the tongue, and the parts of the story that don't make sense.

<14> But in taking the unconscious seriously, the researcher may expose herself to potential criticisms. Holding the unconscious as a ubiquitous spectre that structures the bonds between the researcher, her research topics, and the data she collects (Hunt 9) is an approach that cannot be proven via triangulation, repeat studies, or other ways of asserting "validity." Indeed, as Mary Thomas remarks in her article about geography and psychoanalysis, truly taking the unconscious seriously "upsets the qualitative methodologies and social theories that [we] employ to interpret and figure social and spatial practices" (539). The psychoanalytically informed researcher gives up the desire for a participant whose contributions to the research project are completely "explorable and perhaps fully digestable [sic]" (Thomas 543) and similarly discards such hopes for herself as well. While psychoanalytically informed researchers cannot psychoanalyze individuals nor offer an analysis of "personalized unconscious libidinal workings" (Thomas 543), she can use qualitative interview research to put forward an ontological theory of subjectivity that complicates notions of identity to include what cannot be said or observed (543).

<15> Transference is a psychic process that is useful to consider when trying to work through the embodied practice of interviewing, and put simplistically refers to the process of transferring ones' emotions about one person onto another person. Freud discovered the transference when he noticed the common phenomenon that patients held understandings of their analysts that did not correspond to the ways the analyst felt or acted. The understandings that the patients held of their analysts rather corresponded to significant relationships in the patients' lives, particularly familial relationships. While Freud was initially troubled by the transference, perceiving it to be an impediment to moving forward with analysis, he came to take the position that the transference was in fact a vital moment in analysis that offered important insights into the patient's history (Hunt 59). He also posited the existence of the countertransference, a process that happens when the analyst responds to the patient's transference by developing their own transference reactions to the patient. This was a significant reason that Freud advocated for a training analysis as a part of the education of analysts, as the countertransference could interfere with analysis (Hunt 59)[8].

<16> So what does the transference have to do with interviewing? Does the transference interfere with the process of interviewing? Hunt argues that there are similarities between the transference of the clinical setting and the transference of the fieldwork setting, but that because the researcher is more likely to be surrounded by the world of the interviewee it is more difficult to notice the transference (Hunt 61). As mentioned repeatedly in this article, because of the brief nature of the interview encounter and the researcher's lack of psychoanalytic training, we cannot know anything about the interviewee's unconscious processes such as their transferences. However, as researchers we might find it quite useful to tease out our own transference reactions to the experience of interviewing someone. We can seek out similar cues as the analyst does to identify countertransference responses: as Hunt says, "strong emotions of anger, anxiety, love or shame, boredom, or annoyance may all indicate the presence of transferences" (Hunt 61).

<17> Taking these emotions seriously as an area of interest for investigation can deepen our analysis of interview texts, and also sharpen our skills as interviewers. Several of the above-mentioned emotions can gravely interfere with our ability to communicate and relate empathically to our interviewees, as they operate as defences against the material of the interview. They can lead us to misunderstand what an interviewee is trying to tell us, because we interpret their responses according to the transference response. If we feel strongly connected or disconnected to the interviewee because of transference responses, we risk putting interpretations in their mouths that resist hearing the interviewee. We can dismiss parts of or even entire answers to interview questions because they didn't make sense according to our research rubric, or because they seemed obvious or uninteresting. Because the transference may be mediating our responses to the interview narratives, it is highly important to pay attention to our emotional responses to interviewees as a way of linking the present of interviewing with our own past and ways of relating to other people.

<18> Hunt offers an excellent analysis of how paying attention to the transference as interviewers can sharpen our interviewing skills. She gives several examples in her book of difficult social relations like sexism and racism that she classifies as "manifestations of cultural conflicts" (62) according to a sociological perspective. The process of interviewing often puts many researchers committed to anti-oppression in a bind when confronted with the prejudices of the interviewee. The interview is an encounter that is in many ways a gift from the interviewee to the interviewer, a gift of their time and their story. Without this gift, the research would cease to exist, so indeed it is quite precious. The gift-status of the interview thus puts the researcher in a precarious position, for she may feel less free challenging oppressive statements and relationships that develop over the course of the interview. And, because of this, the interviewer is more susceptible to shutting down communication between herself and the interviewee as a means to mitigate this discomforting exchange for she does not want to be complicit in the interviewee's prejudices. What this does to the interview narrative is that the narrative becomes blocked, making it less fruitful for the researcher's inquiries and less a possibility for the interviewee to offer their gift as fully as they might. An example that Hunt offers comes from Ruth Horowitz, who responds to an interviewee's sexist denial of responsibility for a girlfriend's pregnancy by inquiring why the interviewee did not use birth control. After she asked this question, he stopped talking about his private life and began talking about sports and fighting. Horowitz's psychoanalytic analysis of the situation proposed that the way she responded to the sexist story was by identifying with the girlfriend, and in responding as though she personally was involved in the pregnancy, she shut down the communication between herself and her interviewee about his intimate affairs (which would have been more useful to the research) (Hunt 66). This is a fairly simple example, but Hunt suggests that thinking through these uncomfortable encounters both in terms of what they might say about cultural conflicts as well as intrapsychic conflicts can deepen our analysis and allow us to interrogate these prejudices.

 

Conclusion: Re-presentation of the Interview Narrative

<19> As I alluded to in the previous section, the interview is shrouded in ambiguity. I suggested it was more appropriate to think of the interview as a constellation of sometimes connected, sometimes opposing experiences and objects. We meet with another person to talk about a facet of their lives that is of academic interest to us, though as I have also suggested, from a psychoanalytic perspective mere academic interest is unlikely: this is the interview. That conversation is recorded analogically or digitally, and we listen to it after the physical encounter is long over: this is the interview. As researchers we may wish to transcribe that digital or analog trace of conversation onto paper or screen, in order to better see what we have said: this is the interview. These disparate pieces come together in a report of what transpired that shows up in our writing and talk about the research we have conducted: these are re-presentations of the interview. The decisions we make about how to re-present the interview are highly important, and from the perspective of psychoanalytically-motivated research reveal very particular wishes for how we want the interview to be read and received. This conclusion begins with a consideration of the interview transcript as a translated object, and concludes with a discussion of the strategies for textually re-presenting the interview in my own research. It is my hope that this discussion will crystallize some of the important arguments I made in this paper about how the decision to incorporate the intrapsychic dynamic of research is nourishing and enriching.

<20> Shostak offers the significant insight that the transcript is not the interview, but is rather "a product of transcription" (68). To make this slight shift in thinking about the position of the interview within research, we must consider the interview and the transcript to be different and somewhat autonomous from one another: the interview is an encounter and the transcript is an artefact of that encounter. However, it is important to remember here that the transcript is not the same thing as the lyrebird's song: it is a mediated, translated document, the fragment of the fact of the interview's status as a methodology of "in-betweenness" (Shostak 92). Just as the translator makes interpretive decisions throughout their work, so too does the transcriptionist make interpretive decisions as she transforms the aural into the visual[9]. These decisions include the textual presentation, choosing a way to represent silences and pauses, whether to guess inaudible words or leave that space open, as well as many others, and these decisions do effect how we read the transcript. The transcriptionist's influence on the transcript as product of the interview confounds the notion of authorship, and she becomes a co-author of the interview. This extends an earlier question raised in this paper about checking with participants to assure that our analysis matches theirs. Instead, in this case the question is raised whether or not we want to bring the transcript to the interviewees to be edited. As Shostak points out, if we are taking a psychoanalytic point of view for our interview analysis and understand speech to have a manifest and latent content, the process of interviewees editing transcripts becomes a bit fraught (76). This is not just for the imposition of the task of editing (though this is a big favour to ask of the interviewees!), but also for what that editing might mean, if we always say more than we mean. I am not suggesting here that we ought not to offer the option to the interviewee of editing the transcript. However, I am suggesting that we earnestly engage this question when we make a decision to include interviews in our research, rather than take it for granted that interviewees can or will do this work for us.       

<21> A second implication of taking the transcript as an artefact of the interview is how we choose to read this transcript. The transcript is like a photograph, in that it fixes the interviewee's life into stillness: the one moment of the interview's time becomes the total representation of the interviewee. Shostak phrases it beautifully when he says that "A narrative kills…the profile is transfixed, borrowing its life from the interpretations made by others, haunting intertextually, later writings and readings" (141). The transcript itself is likely not a closed, linear product, but we are likely to present it as though it is in our research. Shostak compares this process of managing the transcript in the research to Lacan's notion that language destroys by substituting the vivacity of life with the dead, indifferent concept (141). This inevitability requires us to approach the process of reading transcripts and re-presenting them in research very carefully and thoughtfully. Shostak cautions us against this, and in particular our wish to fill in the absences of our transcripts. He evokes Lacan's story of coming across a tablet of ancient hieroglyphics in the desert: our encounter with this tablet confronts us with the wholly symbolic character of language. While we are utterly incapable of translating or understanding the hieroglyphics of the tablet without other information, we are capable of discerning that the hieroglyphics are signifiers and hold meaning. Shostak offers the caution that when we interview someone, we are at a disadvantage compared to an encounter with the hieroglyphics, because we "are all too familiar with the other who speaks" (72). This example confronts us with the everyday interpretive act of language, and how critical it is for us to blend our familiarity with the language of our transcripts with our alienation from the ancient hieroglyphics. This view further supports the collection of non-traditional data, such as researcher dreams and emotional reactions, creative writing about the research setting, and also deeper questioning as the interview itself progresses, so that we might glean additional information to supplement the transcript and present a fuller case. Shostak also poses several new questions that we might ask of the interview transcript including examining the text for its master signifiers (172), exploring the range of subject positions and desires described the interviewee (173), considering how the interviewee regulates their speech (174) arranges and distributes resources (174), understands the possibilities for action (175), and how experiences are realized for the interviewee (175). Asking questions such as these also gives us new information that can be useful in representing the interview transcript.

<22> A common strategy employed by researchers as a way of validating their interpretations is to incorporate copious amounts of quotations from the interview transcripts. By now I hope it is clear that I would consider this to be a strategy that is doomed to fail, for two reasons: first, the transcript itself contains many interpretive moves and decisions and is thus not the "pure" document that this strategy desires; and second, this strategy is a defence against the anxiety generated from interpreting other people's words and lives as offered through the interview encounter. Instead I would like to explore two possibilities to represent interview transcripts in research that take their lessons from poetry and creative non-fiction.

<23> In their introduction to Inside Interviewing, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium discuss Laurel Richardson's article in the collection about the use of poetry as a textual device to represent interviews. They say that poetry possesses a unique capability of representing that a text has meaning, and that this text can also fashion meaning as well (Holstein and Gubrium 20). In addition to this important cultural function, they go on to mention that poetry is often used when trying to communicate the unspeakable, that which is too much for words to hold (Holstein and Gubrium 20). These two abilities of poetry are highly appealing to me as a researcher who is working with interview narratives that talk about interviewees' relationships to their bodies and their experience of cosmetic surgery. Poetry offers the researcher an expressive medium with which to witness the interview narratives, particularly when they appear senseless and filled with ellipses and absences. Finally, poetry experiments with the visual component of language and offers many different visual textual methods of placing the interview transcript onto the page.

<24> The other place where I find great inspiration for writing about interview narratives is in creative nonfiction about science and nature. I read a great deal of science and nature creative nonfiction, and I admire two things in particular about this body of literature. First, many of these books are written from the perspective of non-specialists (and even non-scientists) for people who, like the authors, are interested in the topic because it is fascinating. And second, creative nonfiction about science is often truly interdisciplinary, written from the perspective of those who are journalists or English professors about a world that is outside of their own training and comfort. What happens in this interdisciplinary collaboration is that storytelling skills are employed to talk about subjects often considered outside of the realm of storytelling. An important skill I am learning by observation is how to weave together interview narratives to truly demonstrate their interconnectedness. Rather than offer my interview transcripts as cut up fragments of speech strung together according to topics I have selected or identified, I instead try to write a story about the interview narratives as though they happened together. I like combining this strategy with the poetic because it does not disguise or disavow the interpretive acts that happen when we have interviews as a part of our research projects. Instead, my processes of interviewing and transcription are opened up to critique, challenge, and analysis, along with a central tenet of my research practice, which is that story is all we've got.  

 

Works Cited

 

Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

Cargill, Kima. "Off the Couch and Onto the Streets: Toward an Ethnographic Psychoanalysis." Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society Vol. 11 (2006): 99-105.

Felman, Shoshana. What Does A Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund [1923]. "The Ego and the Id." In On Metapsychology, trans James Strachey. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 339-408.

Holstein, James and Jaber F. Gubrium, eds. Inside Interviewing: New Lenses, New Concerns. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2003.

Hunt, Jennifer C. Psychoanalytic Aspects of Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1989.

Kvale, Steimar. "The Psychoanalytic Interview as Qualitative Research." Qualitative Inquiry Vol. 5, No. 1 (1999): 87-113.

Meiners, Erica. Inquiries into the Regulation of Disordered Bodies: Selected Sick and Twisted Ethnographic Fictions. Ph.D. dissertation, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, 1998.

Minh-Ha, Trinh. Framer/Framed. New York and London: Routledge. 1991.

Oswald, Ramona Faith and Katherine A. Kuvalanka. "Same–Sex Couples: Legal Complexities." Journal of Family Issues 29, 8 (2008): 1051-1066.

Pacteau, Francette. The Symptom of Beauty. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.

Roseneil, Sasha. "The ambivalences of Angel's ‘arrangement'" a psychosocial lens on the contemporary condition of personal life." Sociological Review Vol. 54, No. 4 (2006): 847-869.

Shostak, John. Interviewing and Representation in Qualitative Research. New York: Open University Press, 2006.

Thomas, Mary E. "The Implications of Psychoanalysis for Qualitative Methodology: The Case of Interviews and Narrative Data Analysis." The Professional Geographer Vol. 54, No. 4 (2007): 537-546.

Van Pelt, Tamise. The other Side of Desire. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.

 

Notes

 

[1] But perhaps the researcher is a liar-bird? [^]

[2] For example, a survey of the journal Cultural Studies over the past 2 years (2007-2008) indicates that only 6 out of almost 90 articles employ interview methodology, and instead focus on the reading of primarily visual and literary texts. [^]

[3] Two examples of this trend include Tamise van Pelt's The other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000) and Francette Pacteau's The Symptom of Beauty (London: Reaktion Books, 1994). Both of these books have been tremendously useful in my own research; however, while the authors read literature, visual art and film using psychoanalytic theories, their methodology is implicit and not stated. A notable exception to this practice is Shoshana Felman's explication of her reading practices in What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). [^]

[4] An example of this can be found in Ramona Faith Oswald and Katherine A. Kuvalanka's "Same–Sex Couples: Legal Complexities," recently published in Journal of Family Issues 29, 8 (2008): 1051-1066. This sociological article explores the legal difficulties faced by same-sex couples, a topic which blends the private and public spheres. However, the authors refuse to take a position on same-sex marriage (1052), and in their consideration of the implications of the lack of knowledge about the legal situation of same-sex couples, there is no recognition of the affective realm within their recommendations for policy, education, research, and practice (1061-1063). Arguably, the dispassionate tone that the authors take might be considered a political strategy, but also has the effect of maintaining the distinctions between subjective/objective and public/private, and working within the disciplinary boundaries of sociological legal research. This article isn't anomalous, nor do I think it is "bad" scholarship but it nevertheless is representative of the point I am making. [^]

[5] Psychoanalytic theory is, of course, a very large territory of knowledge and encompasses disparate positions that cannot be generalized into a single position. However, since psychoanalytic approaches to social scientific research are relatively scarce, I refer to my own approach as a "psychoanalytic sensibility." This means that while in my own work I am most influenced by Freudian and Lacanian theory, I can also appreciate certain insights from other psychoanalytic theorists (usually British and American) who do not come from this predominantly French and German tradition. [^]

[6] In fact, I myself have done this in the past! [^]

[7] In claiming that all sociological analyses are interpretive, Roseneil gives the example of common categories of demographic analysis (for example, "working-class," "person of colour") used repeatedly in sociology that often do not correspond to research subjects' own self-identifications. At first glance this seems to be a rather flimsy example; however, I think it is more profound than that and demonstrates how the way we "organize" people in research can alienate these subjects. If I categorize a group of people as "working-class," a label recognizable to other academics but not those within that group, how meaningful is it as a category of analysis? [^]

[8] It is for this very reason that I strongly recommend that the researcher and transcriptionist be the same person whenever possible. In my experience, transcribing an interview fosters a closeness to the interview, second by second, and then the transcript, line by line: I don't understand how this intimacy could develop without doing the transcribing. [^]

[9]The ways in which analysts engage or do not engage with the transference differs depending on the analyst's theoretical orientation; however, I will not elaborate on this phenomenon aside from noting it. [^]

 

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