A Psychoanalytic Approach to Good and Bad Object Relations in Qualitative Research

• In Event: 63.070 - Bad Girl Theory and Practice: Qualitative Research in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

A brief background on terminology and justification for the author’s approach: Psychoanalysis has deeply affected the methodology of qualitative research. It has done so through its theories of participant/observation, attention to in-depth experience and the valence of intersubjectivity founded on the transference, the importance of others in the lifeworld of the mind, and an abiding emphasis on research as an emotional situation carried out through the analysis of affect as central to narrative study (Forrester and Cameron, 2017; Forrester 2017; Kristeva 2010; Young-Bruehl 1998). Its key instruction to qualitative researchers is to follow the affects and counter-transference. That is, human research resembles and leans on the complexity of our emotional world.
Drawing from this history of psychoanalysis in qualitative research, the paper focuses on the problem of good and bad objects, surely a deep dilemma in political life, social network communication, education, and the administered society. Kleinian object relations forms the paper’s theoretical frame. In a nutshell, the “object” is a mental representation but also an internal experience of relationality that creates the mind and its passions. In this sense, the object constitutes an emotional situation and in the school of object relations, there are good and bad objects, and part objects and whole objects. Objects are kept apart through the defence of splitting, denial of mental pain and psychical reality, and confusion of good and bad. As a technical term the object is distinguished from the subject (the person). It is through the techniques of psychoanalysis that object relations and defenses against being affected become transformed; the paper develops from psychoanalytic technique as providing methods for research design, collection, and interpretation. The author gives particular attention to the idea of research as an emotional situation in the case of writing about Melanie Klein (1882- 1960).
The author illustrates the values and problems with writing into the lives of others with the case of introducing to educators the difficult theories of Melanie Klein (Author 2016). The paper develops the theme of the pathos of interpretation with a case study that involves the writer and reader in misunderstandings, breakdowns, resistance to symbolization, and working through of anxiety and the transference. “Data” is drawn the method of introspection, archival holdings and commentary on writing case studies, and discussions on technique in psychoanalysis. The author argues that qualitative research is affected by narratives of breakdown and repair and the significance of this approach is that some insight can be gained from understanding the attractions of post truth (bad objects) and the pathos of thinking and preserving the mind (good objects). The author suggests that for the significance of “post” to be more than a denial of experience and otherness, researchers can return to the “pre” of early life to understand the pathos of interpretation.

Author

• deborah britzman, york university