Closing the circle, to open a creative space: Can the intentions of avowedly psychoanalytic research methodologies be fulfilled in methods that are deeply congruent with this epistemology? A methodological study to inform future psychoanalytic research endeavours.

In this study, I have grappled with the challenge of developing a start-to-finish qualitative research method deeply congruent with the ontology and epistemology of psychoanalysis. I have drawn on the history of psychoanalytic research interviewing, most specifically the work of Hollway and Jefferson (Free Association Narrative Interview, 2000/2013) and Holmes (Reverie Research Method, 2017, 2019), which has been thoroughly analysed and taken forward by Archard (e.g. 2019, 2021). Through a process of sifting and synthesising existing literature, I have produced a nine-step guide for undertaking psychoanalytically informed interviews and four novel data-analysis questions. I operationalised my method with a research informant on the topic of her experience of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service’s (CAMHS) Initial Assessments. Questions of ethics permeate discussions around taking psychoanalytic concepts outside the context in which they developed (e.g. Holmes, 2019). I offer a contribution to this debate through consideration of how the unconscious is theorised in interview-based research. I draw upon Bollas’s theory of the receptive unrepressed unconscious (e.g. 2006) and Bion’s theory of thinking (1962/1991) to counter criticisms of researchers veering beyond the research brief, into analysing the informants themselves. This can happen when researchers interpret contents of the informant’s repressed unconscious that may emerge in the research context. I illustrate how psychoanalytic supervision can be used in a novel way, contributing unconscious data from the freely associative conversation this entails. I then consider my data through the concept of parallel process (e.g. Morrissey & Tribe, 2001; Sumerel, 1994) as an ethical alternative to the controversial transport of the psychoanalytic concept of transference-countertransference dynamics out of the clinic setting. I chose substantial transcript excerpts for the vivid way in which they seem to capture the dynamic unconscious-to-unconscious communication process. I show how I explored these using my four data-analysis questions and in so doing, I take a step towards filling the methodological gap identified by Attride-Stirling (2001) regarding the need to analyse data in a systematic and clearly disclosed way. I am guided throughout by Bion’s (1970/2004) proposition of the ultimately unknowable nature of reality and Allison’s idea of a modest epistemology (cited in Stänicke et al., 2020).