The Psychoanalytic Interview as inspiration for qualitative research

Abstract

A qualitative research wave has swept through the social sciences in the past decades. Interviews, textual analyses, and natural observations have come into widespread use as modes of inquiry. The qualitative research movement is interdisciplinary, and an opening of the social sciences to the humanities has taken place, drawing on hermeneutics as well as narrative, discursive, conversational, and linguistic forms of analysis.The science of psychology has until recently remained outside the qualitative research movement. This is rather odd, because key modes of qualitative research, such as the interview, work through human inter-relationships, which are the subject matter of psychology. In addition, substantial areas of current psychological knowledge were initially brought forth through qualitative interviews. In particular this pertains to Freud’s psychoanalytical interview, which has also inspired subsequent interview research. Piaget’s interviews of children’s thought and Adorno and colleagues’ interviews about the authoritarian personality illustrate this point. The Hawthorne interviews with industrial workers and the consumer interviews by Dichter were also inspired by the psychoanalytical interview.In an attempt to advance psychological interview research today, I take these historica interview inquiries as a point of departure. Rather than follow the methodological and paradigmatic direction of the qualitative research wave, I pursue a pragmatic approach, taking the significant knowledge produced by psychoanalytical and other psychological interviews as a basis for this endeavour. Pointing to the paradox that knowledge originally produced by qualitative interviews has become generally accepted but the interview method producing this knowledge has generally been rejected, I also address the methodological marginalisation of qualitative research in psychology. In the concluding section I outline two different therapeutic and academic paths of interview research by addressing questions about human interrelations and methodology, about objectivity of knowledge and ethical tensions, which arise when treating therapeutic interviews as research inquiries.