Intersubjectivity and the Knowing of Inner Experience

A Foundational Framework for Qualitative Research Methodology

The qualitative approach to social scientific research highlights the complexities of human beings’ subjective experience as meaningful in the development of the understanding of inner experience (Creswell, 2002). Qualitative research engages with individual subjectivity through the channel of intersubjectivity that is co-created in the encounter between researcher and participant. The term qualitative refers to a unifying intent within the research process to articulate human experience as it is objectively perceived and subjectively felt, acknowledging the feint boundary between these two experiential modes. The process therefore relies strongly on the researcher’s ability to access the subjectivity of another through empathic correspondence with the participant (Valle & Halling, 1989). In relation to this, the data gathered in the course of a qualitative study is made meaningful through the researcher’s self-reflective engagement with his or her self, with the participant, and with the narratives generated through the course of the data collection process (Giorgi, 1997).

Qualitative research has its philosophical roots in the thinking of continental philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976, 1979, 1984), Martin Heidegger (1962), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, 1948/1968). These philosophers introduced a range of modes of reflection on lived experience that were not restricted to positivist ideologies, viewing interpretation as the process of locating the described experience within a specific subjective context. Through this, richer understandings of experience from within the participant’s lived world could be developed, as the potential space of meaning making was widened. The phenomenological concept verstehen (Heidegger, 1962) is useful here, which denotes a felt subjective engagement with the lived experience of another, in which one subjectivity witnesses the depth of experience of another. This is reliant on the researcher’s empathic involvement and reflects the importance of the researcher’s own self, as that self is located immediately within the process of inquiry. Parker (1994) identifies the researcher’s subjectivity and consciousness as a constituting component of that which becomes knowable and thinkable through the course of a qualitative research process. This article explores the established notion that there is inherent within the qualitative paradigm a prioritization of the intersubjective or relational dimension of human experience (Dahlberg, 2006; Spinelli, 2006). The relationship between researcher and participant is therefore framed as a vitally informative potential space (Winnicott, 1965) from which new meaning and insight relevant to the research question can be derived. As such it is a primarily reflexive space in which the researcher’s subjective self-awareness, located within the intersubjective space between researcher and participant, influences what happens in the research (Brown, 2006; Savin-Baden, 2004). This influence is framed in terms of the researcher’s role as a facilitating environment within which the participant narrates his or her story, directed toward the formulation of previously unformulated experience (D. Stern, 1997).

This article demonstrates the synthesis of narrative case study, phenomenological hermeneutic and psychoanalytic research, and proposes such a methodology as well suited for a study exploring unconscious/representational processes and internal representations of self and other. Hollway and Jefferson (2000) provide theoretic support for a psychoanalytic case study methodology. Considering the place of psychoanalytic theory in explorations of the experiences of the self, the authors emphasize the importance of reckoning with the self as guarded by intrapsychic defensive processes. With this in mind, the language of psychoanalysis is proposed as a fundamental tool, enabling a deeper reading of the story as it is told. Psychoanalysis allows us to explore and narrate the layers of experience and is ideal for research that attempts to clarify links between unconscious and relational/behavioral processes (Day Sclater, 2003; Kvale, 1999).

Relationality and the Theory of the Intersubjective in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

In this section, I discuss the place of relational psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity theory in psychosocial research, considering on the one hand the application of psychoanalytic theory within phenomenological hermeneutics and on the other hand the uniquely psychoanalytic atmosphere created within the relational space between researcher and participant. The psychoanalytic orientation that I offer emphasizes the relational and intersubjective aspects of the analytic process, considering these within the process of hermeneutic phenomenological research.

The writings of Buber (1970, 1992) are at the philosophical foundation of intersubjectivity theory. Buber emphasized the ontological primacy of relationship, articulating dialogue between and within selves as constitutional of being (Friedman, 1999; Goldberg, 2000). He conceived of relationship between self and other as mutual and reciprocal and central to the emergence of the self into being. The emphasis here is on the primacy of dialogue and relationship, and this emphasis found a home in the ascendency of the relational psychoanalytic movement (Aron, 1996; Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988; Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997; Stolorow & Atwood, 1992; Stolorow, 2000, 2002).

Intersubjectivity theory was influenced by the continental philosophies of Binswanger, Lacan, and Wittgenstein (Frie, 2000). Binswanger argued that communication through language is possible only in the context of a shared intersubjective world. Being human consists in being-with-others in a mutually articulated world (Frie, 2000). Wittgenstein identified a similar ontological link between language and being. He proposed that language and agency are interwoven and cannot be thought of separately (Medina, 2004). Wittgenstein approached the word as a situated gesture, taking place in a relational context, functioning as an active, performative, dialogical gesture of the self (Moyal-Sharrock, 2000; Scalzo, 2005). Thus, language, for Wittgenstein, is shaped as a medium, an instrument, and a form of life (Ribes-Iňesta, 2006). Moyal-Sharrock (2000) argues for equivalence between words and deeds, on the one hand, and mind and body on the other. This equivalence identifies a dualistic representation of self, in which word and deed, mind and body, self and other are co-constituted within the intersubjective space. Intersubjectivity theory proposes that it is through the interrelated web of meaning, symbolism, and beliefs contained within language, that the self comes into being as nonreified consciousness (Orange, 2010). The self, as a subjectivity located within an intersubjective surround, is constituted by a linguistics that is both internally and relationally formed in the ongoing process of being and relating.

The emergence of intersubjectivity theory represented an ontological shift away from conceptualizations of self as an autonomous ego and toward acknowledgement of the self as primarily relational and dialogical. This theory of subjectivity emerged as a discourse on the intersection between the psychological lives of selves. To this end, intersubjectivity theory explores the space between self and other, the mutual influence of selves in relation, and the ways in which that influence registers at the level of conscious and unconscious experience (Friedman, 1988). This has been described as a shift from a one-person to a two-person psychology (Rasmussen, 2005). As a movement toward a two-person psychology, intersubjectivity theory rejects the notion of “the isolated mind” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) and emphasizes the contextually embedded nature of experience. In relation to this, intersubjectivity theory designates qualitative research as an exploration of the phenomenological contextuality of being (Stolorow, 2002).

The intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis, as informed by the theoretic and philosophical orientations described above, reflected a shift in focus toward mutual unconscious communication between analyst and analysand (Gerhardt & Sweetnam, 2001). Relational psychoanalysis attends to the emergent product that comes into being through the intersection of two unconsciously communicating subjectivities. This system encourages a focus on the verbal/explicit as well as the nonverbal/implicit modes of intersubjective exchange. This dialectic considers what is processed in the individual beyond conscious awareness and attends as well to processing which enters the declarative/verbal level (Beebe, 2003). The structure of the analytic process, in which there is an emergent third in the space between one self and another, has been applied analytically to the study of the development of self. Relational psychoanalytic theory articulates the premise of self as relationally structured, both in its representations to the other and in the internalization of object relationships (Howell, 2005). At the core of relational psychoanalysis is the notion that the self’s relationship with itself, at the level of internal dialogue, is influenced by and influences intersubjective, or relational, experience (S. Stern, 2002).

The application of psychoanalytic theory to qualitative research, which I am offering here, draws on ideas of the hermeneutic phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s (1976) languaging of the phenomenology of inner and intersubjective experience provides a useful lens through which we can consider the role of the relational psychoanalytic disposition in the qualitative research process. By disposition, I imply the natural attitude of receptivity to the intersubjective space that is held within the framework of analytic/psychotherapeutic work and phenomenological exploration. This disposition is a tendency toward being in a particular way. In the case of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and hermeneutic phenomenological research, it is a tendency toward being with the other in a manner of coparticipatory creativity. Orange’s (2011) psychoanalytic phenomenology explores Gadamer’s concept of participation, as it relates to the process of hermeneutic analysis. She suggests that Gadamer’s hermeneutics prioritizes the theme of participation, defined as an experience of sharing what is common and knowable between selves. She offers the following passage, taken from Gadamer’s (1984) text The Hermeneutics of Suspicion:

Participation is a strange word. Its dialectic is not taking parts, but in a way taking the whole. Everybody who participates in something does not take something away, so that the others cannot have it. The opposite is true: by sharing, by our participating in the things in which we are participating, we enrich them; they do not become smaller, but larger. (Orange, 2011, p. 33)

The element of the participatory, as it relates to qualitative research, instills in the process a relational atmosphere in which both the subjectivity of the researcher and that of the participant, and the conversation which emerges through the encounter between the two, are held in a hospitable and mutually respectful manner. Orange describes this in terms of the “climate and style of trust” that shapes and informs the investigative encounter. The participation of which Orange (2011) speaks, and the climate of intersubjective welcoming and safety which it cultivates, is given as a condition of safety which enables the psychoanalytic movement toward the deep knowing of the experiences of the self.

Knoblauch (2011), in his reflections on an analytic process narrated by Joye Weisel-Barth, describes Weisel-Barth’s notion of intersubjective intimacy. Knoblauch formulates intersubjective intimacy, a new concept to the relational psychoanalytic literature, as an experience of immersion within the psychoanalytic encounter. He suggests that the concept evokes an experience that somehow moves us beyond the conception of empathy as an imaginative knowing of the other (Rogers, 1951) and toward the creation of a space for knowing the manifold meanings that emerge through the encounter between self and other. Knoblauch identifies intersubjective intimacy as a psychically innovating space, in which the condition of safety is central to the possibilities for knowing the truths of the patient’s experience. I am considering this in relation to the imperative for research exploring inner experience to hold in mind the other’s position within the research process. A relationship between researcher and participant that is shaped by an orientation toward intersubjective intimacy, as defined within the relational psychoanalytic literature, could facilitate the research process. The researcher’s immersion within the intersubjective space situates both researcher and participant in a position of what Knoblauch (2011), following Grand (2000), refers to as a “ruthlessly honest witnessing” (p. 483). This situation highlights the relational qualities of the research process and is central to a methodology that aims to elicit consciously known and unconsciously defended experience in the self.

Case Study Methodology and the Psychoanalytic Disposition

The qualitatively oriented research procedure that I describe in the following section embodies a methodology that facilitates the research relationship. Such a research relationship, and the researcher’s place within it, is mindful of the intersubjective space as richly informative and relevant to the data collection process. The case study approach is an ideographic research method that involves intensive research with single individuals. The study of a personal narrative is fundamentally a form of case-centered research (Mishler, 1999). The psychoanalytically oriented case study research process is framed by an “empathic introspective observational stance” (Kohut, 1977, p. 309; see also Ulman & Brothers, 1988). I emphasize the insights drawn from the contemporary fusion of self psychological theory with relational psychoanalysis and offer the case study as a form of encounter between researcher and participant, which emphasizes the place of empathic responsiveness, mutuality, and the intersubjective space.

Case study methodology is a transparadigmatic approach and can be applied to a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques. This process enables a detailed exploration of a particular phenomenon as it is lived by the person experiencing it. It is known as the study of the particular (Midgley, 2006; Rosenberg & Yates, 2007) and is applicable to the exploration and analysis of phenomena that are complex, contextualized, and resistant to the control and manipulation inherent in more directive methodologies. In this article, I endorse a contemporary working definition of case study research provided by Creswell (2002). Creswell defines case study as “a problem to be studied, which will reveal an in-depth understanding of a ‘case’ or bounded system, which involves understanding an event, activity, process, or one or more individuals” (Creswell, 2002, p. 61). Creswell conceptualizes case study research as an approach that engages with the many-layered, multitextured quality of experience. The “case” is defined as a system, emphasizing the notion of internal relationships between the parts constituting that system, thus echoing the hermeneutical quality of case study methodology. Such a definition engages with the depth of experience in a way that is applicable to qualitative psychosocial research and for this reason is an appropriate means of understanding case studies for this research.

Van Wynsberghe and Khan (2007) outline features inherent to case study research. First, case study research requires the in-depth analysis of a particular individual or phenomenon, and so a very small number of instances of the particular phenomenon are investigated. Second, case study methodology aims to generate for the reader a sense of experiential closeness with the individual or phenomenon. It is a contextual methodology, and as such is closely linked with narrative and phenomenological hermeneutic approaches. Third, the methodology engages with the contextual embeddedness of experience. The aim is to approach the phenomenon in a manner that does not direct or construct the world in which that individual or phenomenon exists. The fourth feature of case study methodology connects with its appeal to multiple sources of data in an attempt to gain a multilayered reflection of the phenomenon. The final feature of current adaptations of case study methodology that Van Wynsberghe and Khan (2007) offer is that of extendibility. This speaks to the impact which case study methodology could have on the reader’s experience of the phenomenon. The case study aims to analyze the essential constituents and internal system of relationships existing within a particular phenomenon and its surrounding context. Case study methodology aims to clarify this system of essential relationships in a manner that could deepen the reader’s understanding of the phenomenon and their relationship with it.

The approach to case study methodology that I am describing here is one that is enriched by the primarily intersubjective qualities of a hermeneutic phenomenological research orientation. With this in mind, I emphasize the place of relational psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity theory within the research endeavor. Within this methodology analysis occurs partially in the interviews, in the exchange between researcher and participant. The researcher reflects on the participants’ descriptions in the interview, sharing these interpretations with the participants as they arise, and asking the participants to state whether they feel that their experience are accurately reflected by the interpretations. Moustakas (1994) describes this process of intersubjective validation as an interchange of ideas, perceptions, feelings, and judgments between researcher and participant. This orientation aligns well within the narrative research method outlined by Moen (2006), who stresses the importance of arriving at a joint, intersubjective meaning within the context of the researcher/participant dialogue. This interchange is an analytic process occurring in the interviews, which aims to clarify the participant’s lived experience, and supports the phenomenological return to the things themselves (Husserl, 1964, 1972). This core maxim of phenomenological process promotes an attempt to elicit the essential structure of an experience, as it is revealed in consciousness and felt subjectively by an individual in his or her own lived world. The dialogue between researcher and participant is structured as a search for the essential features of the participant’s lived experience and is a tool that resembles psychoanalytic and phenomenological praxis (Tubert-Oklander, 2006).

Phenomenological Hermeneutics, Psychoanalysis, and the Narrative of Inner Experience

This article emphasizes the “phenomenological contextualism” (Stolorow, ¹ 2007, p. 1) of subjective and intersubjective experience and proposes a research orientation that centralizes such a contextualism. This reflects an intersubjectively grounded positioning of self and other within a shared affective space that is similar to Heidegger’s (1962) notion of Befindlichkeit. That we find ourselves in a world of lived experience that is both deeply felt and intimately shared is an important fact of human existence and emotional development that needs to be held as primary within the process of research. The central axiom of the phenomenological approach, as articulated by Valle and Halling (1989), frames it as “the rigorous and unbiased study of things as they appear so that one might come to an essential understanding of human consciousness and experience” (p. 6). Giorgi (1997) describes consciousness as a system of self, world, and body existing in co-relation. Phenomenology is directed toward describing the consciousness of self with the aim being to elicit essential understandings of the subjective meaning of human experience (Knaack, 1984), although not necessarily in an unbiased way. The bias is the researcher’s self-reflective awareness, and the interactions of the researcher’s own self with the self of the participant. I promote the bias of the researcher’s self as one that adds to the meaning-making potential of qualitative study. This has been defended by Spiegelberg (as cited in Willis, 2004), who suggests that although the object of phenomenological investigation is the phenomenon itself, that phenomenon is a subject-related, not subject-dependent object. Giorgi (1970) adds the following on this subject:

We feel that within the context of the human sciences it is essential for the researcher to be present in a human way and not in a neutral way. (p. 131)

Polkinghorne (1989) echoes this sentiment and states:

Understanding experience merely as a mental projection onto the world (the idealistic fallacy) or as a reflection of the world (the realistic fallacy) misses the necessity of the person-world relationship in the constituting of experience. (p. 42)

In these contributions, we see a phenomenological ontology and epistemology that is primarily relational. The phenomenon is experienced within the participant’s intrapsychically and relationally constituted world. Contemporary interpretive methodologies emphasize the researcher’s subjectivity as key to the research process. Spinelli (2006) identifies links between phenomenological inquiry and interpersonal psychotherapy, suggesting that both practices prioritize relatedness as a central mechanism. Spinelli (2006) identifies what he calls a “coherent and cohesive inter-relation between the enterprise of phenomenological inquiry and the enterprise of psychotherapy” (p. 2). Qualitative research is therefore geared toward a nonreductionist understanding of human experience. Within this endeavor, the relationship between self and other, as well as between self and world, is central to the development of new meaning.

The synthesis of methodologies being described here is one in which the psychoanalytic case study is approached from the reflexive position of hermeneutic phenomenology. Hermeneutic phenomenology offers a useful concept known as immersion, which informs this investigative orientation described here. It is important to immerse oneself in the lived world of the participant. Such immersion involves the researcher asking himself or herself what it might be like to feel from within the participant’s experience, what emotions the researcher might feel were he or she living inside the participant’s world (Conroy, 2003). The overlap in the relational psychoanalytic and phenomenological hermeneutic nomenclature is a useful indicator of the parallels in perspective that these praxes represent. As stated above, Knoblauch (2011) used the term immersion in his description of the creation of a situation of intersubjective intimacy within the psychoanalytic relationship. Intersubjective intimacy is seen here as a situation of immersion, in which the coming-to-know of the other’s lived experience is facilitated by the relationship. Immersion, as framed within phenomenological hermeneutics, is both an internal and a relational experience, which situates the researcher as a subjectivity within an intersubjective surround.

To the extent that the analysis is an internal process taking place within the researcher’s own self, hermeneutic phenomenology, in line with psychoanalytically oriented research, requires that the researcher engage with those internal processes that influence the analysis. The researcher’s dominating psychic defenses, coping mechanisms, anxieties, morality, and relational history form part of the inner world from which the analysis grows. These factors need to be acknowledged within the analytic narrative and described in a manner that reflects their potential influence on the analysis. This aspect of the hermeneutic process prioritizes both the researcher’s and the participant’s location within a history of emotion, cognition, and relation and observes the interactions of these histories within the analysis (Savin-Baden, 2004).

Another aspect of the hermeneutic process, which echoes the psychoanalytic disposition, is that of incubation (Willis, 2004), in which the researcher holds the collected narrative internally. This involves a hermeneutic dialogue in which the researcher stays close to their own reflective awareness of the narrative, how they are influenced by it, and their own feeling response to it. Conlan, as cited in Willis (2004), uses the metaphor of incubation to describe this. This corporeal metaphor incorporates a representation of something contained, connected to that within which it is contained and growing within that contained space. The process of incubation is facilitated primarily by the researcher’s creative use of the stories. Writing, rewriting, breaking apart, and reintegrating the narrative all forms part of the hermeneutic dialogue, and this enables the creation of new meaning.

The Role of the Body as Intersubjectively Present

This section addresses reflexive embodied empathy (Finlay, 2003, 2005) as a primarily intersubjective and relational approach to phenomenological research. The method positions the researcher as engaged at the level of reflexively self-aware, intersubjectively informed, and affectively present within the context of inquiry. The researcher’s position as an embodied other in relation to the participant is considered in the light of the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference, emphasizing the unconscious dimensions of the relationship.

Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962, 1948/1968) existential philosophy observes the interconnectedness of human existence. Merleau-Pontian ontology views the individual as intimately related to the social world with “self” and “world” being co-constitutional, echoing the foundational premise of intersubjectivity theory. All experiences, thoughts, sensations, and phenomena are “caught up in the fabric of one sole being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/1968, p. 10, as cited in Dahlberg, 2006, p. 2). This connectedness of self with world is a tacit presence, which can be known implicitly, and recreated in language. Attachment related psychoanalytic thinking has made significant contributions to our understanding of intersubjective experience, addressing the concept of implicit relational knowing (Beebe & Lachmann, 1998; Lichtenberg, 2003; Lyons-Ruth, 1999; D. Stern, 2004); a pivotal psychoanalytic concept that I am linking with the quality of embodied intersubjectivity in phenomenological hermeneutic research. D. Stern (2004) describes this implicit relational knowing as a form of procedural unconscious awareness that is prelinguistic, but nevertheless influences our emotional and embodied knowing of the other. As a part of the nonverbal exchange that takes place between self and other, this form of knowing is held primarily in our memories of the meanings that we have attributed to the other, and meanings that the other has articulated for us, of the range of embodied gestures that communicate inner experience.

The priority of reflexive self-awareness in the analytic process links narrative, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological research methodologies. Finlay (2003, 2005, 2006) advocates a research process that is shaped by engaging reflexively with the “embodied intersubjective relationship” between researcher and participant. Working in a phenomenological frame informed by the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, Finlay promotes the body as a vehicle for expression and interpretation. In this she describes empathy as an emotional knowing and a felt, embodied, intersubjective experience. Finlay proposes embodied empathy as essential to the researcher’s understandings of the participant. Empathy is articulated as a process that involves the emergence of another being into one’s own perceptual field. This is followed by imaginatively putting oneself into the place of the participant (Finlay, 2003, 2005). Finally, there is a process of clarification, in which the participant describes his or her experience and the researcher is able to come to a deeper understanding of that experience. This emotional and cognitive knowing of an experience, suggests Finlay (2003, 2005), has come prior to notions of an embodied empathy in the theory and practice of research. Finlay advocates a model of empathy that takes the researcher’s embodied intersubjective responses as an a priori form of emotional knowing. She stresses the importance of engaging with the hermeneutic phenomenological approach in a manner which emphasizes the place of the body—the immediacy of the psyche-soma—in coming to know an experience.

My thinking around the notion of empathy and the analytic process is informed by neo-Kleinian appraisals of empathy as a psychoanalytic construct. The specific neo-Kleinian interpretation of empathy that I am considering is derived from Richmond (2004), who identified a theoretic counterpoint between empathy and projective identification. Richmond quotes from Hinshelwood’s (1991) discussion on the same topic:

When one talks of “putting oneself in someone else’s shoes,” this is a description of empathy, but it is also a description of inserting a part of oneself, some capacity for self-perception, into someone else’s position—in particular it is an experiencing part of oneself that is inserted in order to gain, in phantasy, their experience. (as cited in Richmond, 2004)

The likening of empathy with projective identification reflects the notion that psychoanalytic research necessitates a permeability of selfhood between researcher and participant, in a manner that resembles, but is not identical with, the permeability between analyst and analysand. Richmond’s conceptualization of empathy as a psychophysical “being-in-others” provides a clear psychoanalytic foundation for an intersubjectivist methodology.

Finlay (2005) highlights the hermeneutic metaphor of movement in the research process, between parts and wholes, self and other, and between dialectical voices. In a research process that is guided by embodied empathy, there is an attendance to self and other; to the ways in which one resonates with the body (the movement, the immobility, the weight, tension, and pull) of another. There is also a focus on the impact that the other’s body has on one’s own felt sensation. Through becoming aware of the ways in which one’s own body as psyche-soma interacts with the psyche-soma of the participant—a process known as intercorporeality (Finlay, 2005)—we can learn more about implicit, unformulated lived experience. Through an attentiveness to “emotion’s bodily expression” (Orange, 2010, p. 64), we become able to access experience that, being unconscious, is felt but not thought, and so not known (Bollas, 1987). At the same time as manifesting a methodological closeness with hermeneutic phenomenology, Finlay’s model of reflexive embodied empathy shares similarities with the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference, which we understand as the therapist’s embodied emotional resonance with the patient. This strengthens the case for a research methodology that combines phenomenological hermeneutic and psychoanalytic theory.

Reflexive embodied empathy is seen here a central construct encapsulating a particular brand of phenomenological hermeneutics, which combines psychoanalytic case study methodology with hermeneutic phenomenological ideas. Willis (2004) describes this as a mutated phenomenology and identifies in it a marriage between classical phenomenology and contemporary interpretive methodology. At its roots, phenomenology is a descriptive methodology, which aims to unearth the lived quality of human experience (Giorgi, 1970, 1975, 1985). In this article, I have proposed the centrality of the psychoanalytic disposition to phenomenological hermeneutic research, emphasizing the position of the researcher as immediately engaged within the process as an empathic, introspective, reflexive copresence.

An important issue raised here is the conflation of the researcher/psychotherapist role. Methodologically, the approach to the human subject that I advocate is partially constituted by a duality of roles. The researcher is present in two modes: psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist (peripherally) and qualitative researcher (centrally). Developments in qualitative research have seen a movement toward the primacy of relationship as the field of analysis, and with this we have seen the movement of the researcher closer to the participant. This trend has enabled a capacity for emotionally rich analysis in qualitative psychosocial research (Saville Young, 2009). In relation to this, the duality of the psychotherapist/researcher role is supported by the ways in which this facilitates the depth of the investigation.

Psychotherapist as Researcher: The Intersubjective Curvature in the Relationship Between Researcher and Participant

Psychoanalytically oriented research is conducted by a researcher whose interests relate to her or his practice as psychoanalyst or psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Long and Eagle (2009) observe that the participant does not perceive this duality, elaborating on the multiple nature of the researcher’s role, and clarifying the implications of this for the participant and for the ethical rigor of a particular study. Long and Eagle (2009) identify the ethical tension that emerges when one’s identity as researcher becomes conflated with one’s identity as psychotherapist. The authors stress that a researcher who is trained as a psychotherapist may be primed to respond to the participant in the context of interviews in a manner more aligned with their identity as psychotherapist. The recommendation is that the researcher makes the division between researcher and psychotherapist known to the participant.

Two aspects of Long and Eagle’s (2009) discussion are relevant to the ethical struggles inherent in the exploration of the experiences of the suffering other. The first point relates to the notion of intervention. In the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship, the patient implicitly expects of the psychotherapist that he or she will facilitate the patient’s growth. However, the research interview is, for all intents and purposes, merely a data-gathering exercise. Additionally, the participant in a research process that explores the history of traumatically injured human beings may enter the process with an implicit assumption that the research process will help them.

A second consideration relates to Long and Eagle’s (2009) discussion of the concept of containment in the interview context. The authors describe containment as a process by which the therapist receives the patient’s projections, digests them, and reformulates them as an interpretation for the patient, which is integrated and used as a potentially mutative experience. In the psychoanalytic relationship, such containment concerns the emergence in the patient of unbearable anxieties, fears, and other unpalatable emotions, which it is the therapist’s work to incorporate, hold, and translate into an endurable form. In research interviews, it is possible that defenses may be mobilized within the participant, relating to the intersubjective context. The researcher may therefore find himself or herself in the position of analyst, having to contain the feelings of rage, fear, loss, and shame that such mechanisms could invoke.

Considering the ethical quandaries that may be present in relationship between researcher and participant, and in the conflation of the researcher/psychotherapist boundary, I return to Orange’s (2011) discussion of phenomenological hermeneutics and the psychoanalytic disposition. Exploring Levinas’s philosophical ethics, Orange (2011) discusses the “relation of infinite responsibility to the other person” (p. 46). Orange emphasizes the importance of approaching the “face” of the other person within the context of the psychoanalytic encounter, replete with infinite complexities and dimensions of being human. The other is not, in this sense, reducible to a category or a quantity and cannot be comprehended as such. This approach upholds the ethical imperative of recognizing the other’s humanness within myself, as researcher on the one hand, and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist on the other. I view this approach as placing the sanctity of knowing the other within the relationship between self and other.

A helpful concept explored by Orange (2011), following her reading of Levinas, relates to Levinas’s notion of the “curvature of the intersubjective space” (Levinas & Nemo, 1985, as cited in Orange, 2011, p. 47). Levinas proposes this as a fundamentally ethical relationship, in which the other is situated in a position of unequal and primary importance, above the self. This is offered by Orange as a psychoanalytic disposition, which I am considering in the context of the relationship between researcher and participant. It is a position of primary responsibility, which considers the potential affective dangers for the participant, when we ask of them that they explore their inner world, their systems of defensive self-preservation, their traumatic despair, and their suffering. The ethical imperative here, Orange (2011) suggests, is my willingness (as researcher) to be moved and affected by the participant’s narrative, such that I may know his or her experience, both through himself or herself and through my own imaginative potential as a feeling self. It is in relation to this that the researcher’s own self is central to the meaning that is made through the research process (Parker, 1994). Further to this, the position of being present as a self who holds fundamental responsibility for the other, and who is willing to be moved and affected by the other, consolidates such a research process as here described as an essentially ethical one.

Closing Remarks

This article has explored the combination of hermeneutic phenomenological and psychoanalytic case study methodologies with an interpretive framework constituted by relational psychoanalytic principles. Given the complexities involved in eliciting unconscious dynamic processes, it is considered essential to locate such an investigation within the realms of psychoanalytic inquiry and to position the researcher as specifically informed by the psychoanalytic disposition. The position of reflexive embodied empathy (Finlay, 2005, 2006), Knoblauch’s (2011) reflections on intersubjective intimacy, and Orange’s (2011) psychoanalytic phenomenologically informed the psychoanalytic stance described here, emphasizing the relevance of these positions to an intersubjectively grounded hermeneutic phenomenological research orientation. The duality of the role of researcher and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist was explored (Long & Eagle, 2009), considering the potential problematics of this for an ethically sound application of methodology. In relation to this, it was suggested that the psychoanalytic disposition offers to the research process an ethical integrity through situating the participant in a position of primary importance (Orange, 2011) and allowing an affective space within the researcher as self can be moved by the inner world of the other, so as to know her or his experience.