and June Melody
This chapter deals with the intersection of two issues which are central for any research in the social sciences – the issue of the place of our own subjec-tivity in the research process and, inside that, the issue of emotion and unconscious processes. It attempts to engage with the place of emotions in the construction of research accounts through our understanding of issues concerned with surveillance, truth, fictions and fantasies in the research process. The tricky issue of the place of one’s own subjectivity is not new and has been a central issue for feminist research. Other chapters in this book raise important issues about the problems of reflexivity. In particular, we want to draw attention to Beverley Skeggs’ discussion in Chapter 17 of the way in which the reflexive self is formed through the technology of the bour-geois self in which self-narration becomes confession. It is often seen as enough for researchers to assert their own subjectivity without also under-standing the production of that subjectivity itself. This authorial self is not a core self which somehow shores up the possibility of the account. That self, like those of the research participants, is created as both fiction (in the Foucauldian sense) and fantasy. How then can we take the issue of subjec-tivity in research seriously? If research and subjecsubjec-tivity are produced through fictions and fantasies, then the issue of the narratives of the researcher and participants becomes more complex than the telling of differ-ent stories. Nor is it helped very much by a simple reference to Foucault’s notion of the confessional, important as that is, as though that somehow obviated the necessity to engage with how the intersections of competing fictions and fantasies are lived by the subject. However reflexive researchers might be about their complex relation to the Other, trying to tell a story about themselves as part of the research, in order to avoid problems of speak-ing for those Others, nevertheless, issues of subjectivity do not disappear. We want to explore how we might begin to work with the multiple constitution of those discourses through which the subject is produced, to examine how this works emotionally, that is, how the intersection of fiction and fantasy is lived for both participants and researchers and how, out of the intersection of these, certain research stories get to be told. There is a level at which the practice of data collection suggests that we are seeking a truth about our research participants and that further, the deeper and more delving our
questioning, the more profound that truth of the subject will be. This idea is seriously disturbed by Foucault’s writings on the confessional and the idea that such an approach could be part of a will to tell the truth about the human subject – a desire to ‘know’ them psychologically rather than an understand-ing of the way in which they are produced as subjects by the very narratives and discourses that position them in the social world. However, subjectivity is not simply about being the ‘sum total of positions in discourse since birth’
(Henriques et al. 1998), but rather a complex understanding both of discur-sive constitution and the ways in which the relations between positionings are held together by and for the subject in ways which can be quite contra-dictory and conflictual. This works both for the researcher in the unsteady task of uncovering discourses and narratives and for the research subject and indeed for the dance between them which produces the stories told within the research. Understanding subjectivity therefore demands an under-standing of emotions not because it seeks to uncover an essentialist depth psychology but because the fictions of subject positions are not linked by rational connections, but by fantasy, by defences which prevent one position from spilling into another.
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Elliot and Spezzano (1999) specify this in relation to what they take to be the building blocks of a postmodern psychoanalysis:
The development of a postmodern orientation to psychoanalysis is intended to draw attention to the decline of traditionalist, modernist approaches to knowledge and experience. Such a decline, however, is not coterminous with its disintegra-tion. On the contrary, we argue that what is emerging today is a kind of psycho-analysis of psychopsycho-analysis: a running together of modernist and postmodernist psychoanalytical currents, the rediscovery or invention of psychoanalysis as a vibrant theory and practice, the sharpening and differentiation of models of mind, the restructuring of methodology, and the rethinking of interactional configura-tions in which the self is understood in relation to others. (Elliot and Spezzano 1999: 28, original emphasis)
They go on to argue that there are three key points. First, that the linear model of the subject is challenged by notions of multiplicity and fracturing, which has effects in an approach to intersubjectivity which emphasizes the link between unconscious desire and otherness. Second, while traditionally, psychoanalysis aims for the translation of unconscious fantasy into rational understanding, the postmodern version ‘underscores the centrality of imagi-nation, desire and affect’ (1999: 28) and intersubjectivity. Third, postmodern approaches internally critique the desire of psychoanalysis to be scientific and relate that critique to issues of epistemology and interpretation within the social and human sciences, aiming for a model of interpretation which is at once historical and personal. We would add to this one that is at once social,
cultural and psychic. Hence our attempt to produce a new methodological turn, one which recognizes the critiques of psychoanalysis, of empirical work, of interpretation in the social sciences and tries to find a way forward.
This is akin to the ‘third space’ which Cohen and Ainley (2000) characterize for youth research, in which the social, cultural and psychic are researched together and ways found to develop methodologies which respond to the demand for inseparability at the level of explanation.
Of course, many would argue that even keeping a notion of the uncon-scious and working with psychoanalysis, albeit in a postmodern fashion, uses a mode of explanation which removes historicity from the account. It is important therefore to recognize the way in which psychoanalysis is being used here and what psychoanalytic concepts are referred to. The central issue is to understand the way in which historically specific subject positions are held in place and the relations, conflicts and contradictions between them experienced both by the subject and as producing the subject. Our argument is that postmodern psychoanalysis potentially provides one way of understanding these issues by reference to concepts of fantasy, desire, anxiety, affect, defences, in short, to unconscious processes, and attempts to move away from any simple depth concept of a ‘self’ (Henriques et al. 1998).
We would argue that such an approach is perfectly compatible with narra-tive and discourse approaches to the understanding of subjectivity and considerably adds to them (Frosh 2001). Moreover, if we understand the research process itself as the construction of its own fiction, the storying into being of an account, then the researcher is both written into and writes that story. The researcher’s own fantasies become singularly important. So how can we explore the implications for method of taking account of both the subjectivity of the researcher(s) and the subjectivity of the participants as constituted through fiction and fantasy?
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The background to this chapter is a long trajectory of work which attempted to make sense of the relationship between the work of one of us, Valerie, as an academic who grew up in the British working class, and working-class families who were the object of her research, who were both the object of a surveillant research gaze and the object of her own fantasies about their rela-tion to her. When she was conducting some research on young girls at home and at school for a project in the early 1980s, she became aware of the ways in which the families she was working with might ‘read’ her as a middle-class researcher, while she, in fact, wanted them to be able to see the very part which was painfully invisible, indeed well hidden, that is the working-class child, who she imagined to be more like them and who, of course, did not want to look on them with a surveillant gaze. This work was subsequently written up as ‘Video replay: families, films and fantasy’ (Walkerdine 1985) and has been much discussed, debated and critiqued (see Walkerdine 1997
for a review). In particular, we want to dwell on the issue of the way in which we tried to understand the research process as surveillant – what is it that social and psychological research wants to know about the Other and why, what does this mean for the place of one’s own subjectivity in the research process? If the issue of her own class background was such a potent emotional issue for Valerie in conducting the fieldwork, what place did it have in understanding the data? In the 1985 chapter, she speculated about meanings made by the working-class participants on the basis of her own fantasies, associations and identifications with them. But, as one critic clearly argued, how on earth could he know that she was not just projecting onto her research participants her own fantasies that in fact had nothing to do with them? Of course, he was quite right. How could she know and yet how could she not take account of both her own fantasies and those of the parti-cipants as these were so highly significant if we were attempting to under-stand not just subjectification (the discursive production of subject positions) but subjectivity? Since then the three of us have attempted to develop this line of thinking more systematically, to think about both the tricky surveillance of the research endeavour, our impossible desire to know what is really going on, to get up close and the importance of understanding our own place in research. The discussion which follows forms an attempt to begin to take seriously what it might mean to use psychoanalysis to understand the subjec-tivity of the researcher as it intersects with the participants and to argue for taking the fantasies and defences of participants seriously. In particular, we discuss the issues of transference and defences as they relate to attempts to take the place of subjectivity seriously in a systematic way.
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We want to begin by making reference to a body of work contained in our study of transition to womanhood in Britain (Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody 2001). Here is one of the participants, 18-year-old Sharon, who did poorly at school, but harboured the ambition to be a judge, an ambition her working-class family knows about and endorses. Sharon has tried to undertake a BTEC (an alternative to A levels in Britain leading to university entrance).
She has not been very successful and in fact dropped out of one course, but has begun another and met a sympathetic lecturer who is trying to help her in her ambition. This ambition is at one level obviously a laudable post-fem-inist one, but she is a very long way from achieving or even knowing how to achieve university entrance to an undergraduate degree. What we are inter-ested in here is the way in which this expressed ambition sits alongside the fol-lowing extract from an interview conducted by June Melody when she (June) was heavily pregnant. The conversation in the interview turns to relation-ships, sex and pregnancy. Sharon has begun a new relationship with an older man with whom she is having sex without contraception. June and Sharon are discussing the possibility of becoming pregnant as a result of unprotected sex.
Sharon: It’s the chance that you take though in’t it. Really
J.M.: Yeah sure, but so I mean you don’t – if it happened it happened kind of thing, it doesn’t cause you any anxiety –
Sharon: I – me and my mum said to me if it happens, it happens. Just cross that bridge when we come to it.
J.M.: Right. And you what – do you use contraceptives?
Sharon: No
J.M.: You don’t – not at all?
Sharon: No
J.M.: So it’s possible that you might get pregnant?
Sharon: Yeah
J.M.: And are you hoping that you will?
Sharon: No not really. Hope in a couple of years I will but not yet.
J.M.: Right – so it’s quite likely that you will, if you’re not using any contraceptive.
Sharon: That’s the chance innit.
J.M.: Right. Um
Sharon: S’pose I’d be scared if I didn’t have my mum and dad’s backing.
J.M.: Right – so do you think you’re trying to get pregnant?
Sharon: No
J.M.: On some level.
Sharon: (untrans.)
J.M.: But if you’re not using contraceptives then it’s very likely that you will.
Sharon: Yeah it’s likely that I will but I’m not like going out of my way to get pregnant or nothing like that.
J.M.: Right. But you’re not avoiding it so – um and is your boyfriend quite happy about that possibility?
Sharon: Oh he don’t he don’t want me to get pregnant.
J.M.: So what – he doesn’t use any contraceptives?
Sharon: No
Here June is finding it incredibly difficult to come to terms with the idea that at some level Sharon is not trying to get pregnant. We want to discuss this extract in two ways. First, it is possible to understand the probable yet unplanned pregnancy as being produced at the intersection of two compet-ing positions – the post-feminist judge and the workcompet-ing-class young mother.
If Sharon retains the fantasy of becoming a judge, a fantasy so very hard to live out, the unplanned pregnancy could be understood as offering a way out to another known and sanctioned position, the mother, a position so much easier to deal with for her family and well known and trodden (as her mother admits), without ever having to apparently give up on the ambition to be a judge. This interpretation demands an understanding not only of the contradictions between multiple subject positions but also of unconscious processes as a place where such conflicts and contradictions can be appar-ently worked on, resolved or kept at bay. This relates to the issue of how sub-jectivity is lived that we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. However, the second and related issue is that the research participant is one part of the production of this in terms of a research narrative. The researcher has also to
make sense of this conflict. For June, as interviewer, Sharon’s response brought up some very difficult feelings, in this case, feelings of anger and irritation, which she expresses in her field notes:
I felt incredibly irritated with her. I wanted to tell her how bloody stupid she was.
It was nothing to do with morality. I don’t have any strong feelings about whether she gets pregnant or not. I felt she was being quite hostile towards me (or was I feeling hostile towards her?) and was very ambivalent about being interviewed. In fact I really don’t think she wanted to be interviewed at all. It seemed that she would do anything rather than give me a straightforward answer and that she was hoping to give me as little information about herself as she could get away with.
Possibly in the hope that I would not be able to build up an accurate picture of her.
Of course, June’s desire to ‘build up an accurate picture’ of Sharon can be counterpointed by what June projects onto Sharon as a desire to avoid this.
In many ways, we can understand this dance as a classic relation of research desire – the desire to reveal counterpointed by the desire to conceal – on both the part of the researcher and the researched, in many ways the classic aspect of research as surveillance. And indeed, the copious discussions of ethno-graphers’ differential treatment of their own field notes and their formal pro-duction of an account makes that ambivalent desire very clear. In that sense then, the idea of multiple subjectivity does not simply reside with the participant. We need to take account of the fantasies of the researchers and subjects in producing any account. How might we then make use of this multiplicity of both participant and researcher in the production of the research story?
We want to suggest that this takes us beyond a notion of reflexivity and towards this place in which the conflicts and contradictions of a multiple subjectivity are held in place.
While research in the social sciences is overwhelmingly premised on the notion of a rational, calculating subject, the subject of our discourse is alto-gether more irrational, anxious and ‘defended’ (Hollway and Jefferson 1997). Most qualitative research, including ethnographic research, is infused with a realism, with claims to an authenticity which purports to ‘tell life how it really is’. Adding the researcher’s voice in most cases is designed to fill some of the absences which ‘difference’ produces in order to construct a more complete, more ‘real’ ethnographic picture or which turns to the researcher because of the problems of Other discussed earlier. However, when attempting to take account of unconscious processes which are set in motion by all kinds of anxieties and fantasies, any notion of what constitutes the ‘real’ is seriously challenged. As Cohen (1999) argues:
the relation between the real and the imaginary is not fixed, but tactically deter-mined. By the same token the imaginary is not a distorted reflection of the real, nor is the real simply a site for a projection of fantasy. We are always dealing with a process of double inscription whose articulation varies according to a range of social circumstances. (Cohen 1999: 11, original emphasis)
The use of psychoanalytic concepts to theorize social phenomena and processes is growing in a number of disciplines. While the overwhelming majority of educational research is concerned with conscious processes, there is a growing and significant body of empirical work which is con-cerned to explore individual and institutional patterns of investment and disavowal which enter in the formation of pedagogic identities (Britzman 1995; Raphael Reed 1995; Shaw 1995; Pitt 1998). Oral historians have combined the techniques of life story research with insights from family therapy in order to explore the ‘mixture of conscious and unconscious models, myths and material inheritance’ (Bertaux and Thompson 1993) which combine to shape individual and family narratives (Ginzburg 1990;
Thompson and Samuel 1990). In the field of urban sociology and cultural geography, researchers and writers are drawing in particular on the work of the object relations theorists in order to explore the relationship between subjectivity, society and space (Pajaczkowska and Young 1992; Rose 1993; Pile 1996; Aitken 1998; Cohen 1999). In psychology, a number of researchers have begun using psychoanalysis (for example, Sayers 1995;
Frosh 2001).
However, with notably few exceptions (Raphael Reed 1995; Kvale 1999;
Hollway and Jefferson 2000) there is little sociological engagement with the intrapsychic dimensions of research methodologies. In the volume Psychoanalytic Aspects of Fieldwork, Jennifer Hunt (1989) examines the methodological implications of a psychoanalytic perspective for ethno-graphic fieldwork. She pays particular attention to the psychodynamic dimension of the research encounter, pointing to the issue of transference and counter-transference in fieldwork, by examining the issue of projection of the subjects onto the researcher and vice versa. The essential feature of using psychoanalysis as a research tool is that the researcher is the primary instrument of inquiry. Using psychoanalytic techniques and theory in research involves using ideas that have been developed in the context of individual analysis and applied to something that is not taking place in the analytic context. While we would not dispute the undoubted and well-rehearsed problems with the universalism of psychoanalytic theory, we suggest that social and cultural analysis desperately needs an understand-ing of emotional processes presented in a way which does not reduce the psychic to the social and cultural and vice versa, but recognizes their mutual imbrication.
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Usually the researcher listens to a story or makes an account but has no place to intervene or do anything with the account except to produce an academic narrative. This can be both comforting and distressing to researcher and researched alike. However, creating boundaries is quite different from being a detached observer. Detachment is often a form of defence. What is being