Social Research As a Painful (but Rewarding) Self-Examination

Abstract

As early as 1967, the French ethno-psychoanalyst Georges Devereux proposed adopting a radical perspective on researchers’ subjectivity to the entire field of “behavioral sciences.” Whenever our research confronts us with other human beings and thus with ourselves, he argues, we are confronted with anxiety. Instead of fighting against this anxiety and other painful irritations that go hand in hand with any social research, Devereux’s proposal can thus be understood as an invitation to work with this anxiety and use it to gain deeper insights. This article suggests that we re-read Devereux in the light of the contemporary discussions on reflexivity and subjectivity based on (a) an outline and short interpretation of Devereux’s central argument, (b) a subjective re-reading by the author herself, and (c) an examination of some contemporary readings by other qualitative researchers.

Keywords

de-centering psychoanalysis radical subjectivity reflexivity

The one behavioral scientist I criticize most consistently is: myself. A rough count shows that some forty passages discuss my own blind spots, anxieties, inhibitions and the like. That is as it should be: for the behavioral scientist, insight must begin at home.

—Devereux (1967); From the introduction to From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, originally written in 1966, here quoted from, p. 14

“Begin at home”—Is that already radical subjectivity and does it imply “strong reflexivity”? When I started to (re-)write¹ this article taking into consideration the differentiation established between weak and strong reflexivity in the editorial of this Special Issue, I suddenly felt irritated—disappointed—by the very quotation I had originally chosen to illustrate the French ethno-psychoanalyst’s central argument. Both parts of the phrase—“begin” and “home” now sounded weaker to me than I had remembered Devereux’s claim. They seemed somewhat too smooth, perhaps too comfortable in comparison with what I now thought they implied. Had I projected more epistemological radicalness onto From Anxiety to Method in Behavioral Sciences than the text actually contains? Or what else might lie behind this disappointment?

This question leads directly to the core element of Devereux’s argument—because irritations like that are exactly what the French psychoanalyst and anthropologist (or ethno-psychoanalyst) is interested in. Therefore, I will first introduce what I think is Devereux’s central argument (a). Then I will show how this could be applied to my own sudden disappointment—thereby experimenting with the very claim I am trying to re-examine in this article. This experiment led to some fundamental reflections on doing critical qualitative research in general and some specific reflections on the possible contribution of a psychoanalytical perspective to this debate. Part of my self-exploration will be a “dialogue” with two contemporary readings of Devereux, one by the American anthropologist Weston La Barre (who wrote the introduction to the English translation of the book) and the other by Melford Spiro (b). In a third step, I will look at some recent 21st-century readings, taking the journal, Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS),² as an example. Is Devereux still a relevant point of reference for qualitative researchers today and if so, what is it that contemporary authors refer to? Do they just quote Devereux or do they apply his thoughts to their research (c)?

Re-Reading Devereux: A Psychoanalytical Contribution Toward Strong Reflexivity

For Devereux, an emotional reaction to a quotation from a book would be treated like a reaction aroused by any other “datum”—it is a “datum” just like a reaction to an interview quotation or a field observation or whatever may count as social science data. The examples (he calls them “cases”) in his book are taken from everyday life experiences as well as from his ethnological research and his clinical experience as a practicing psychoanalyst. The crucial point is, he would argue, that in all these cases, be it research, psychotherapy, or just daily life, a human being is reacting to another human being. In an early review of From Anxiety to Method, the anthropologist Melford Spiro read it in the light of contemporary anthropological discussions and summed it up as follows:

Any investigation of other human beings is necessarily, Devereux argues, a self-investigation as well, because the beliefs and behavior of his subject arouse in the investigator his own unconscious (and usually infantile) fears, wishes and fantasies. This counter-transference phenomenon . . . evoking, as it does, much anxiety, is, extremely painful. (Spiro, 1969, p. 95)

One of the core theoretical suppositions underlying this idea is that in human communication of any kind, one unconscious always reacts to the other unconscious. In this perspective, on an unconscious level, we understand each other much better than we might think we do.³ For Devereux, who sees himself as a Freudian analyst, the central aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to help patients to understand themselves better, to become clearer about unconscious wishes and fantasies—“to make the unconscious become conscious” as Freud said. To do so, the analyst is trained to use his own unconscious reactions to the patient’s unconscious and here, for Devereux, the interaction between analyst and patient can be directly compared with the interaction between observer and observed in the social sciences. In Devereux’s own words,

The psychoanalytic interaction also produces a third—and even more latent—kind of data which are, in principle, the most characteristic of all behavioral science data. Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of the “revelation” of the patient’s unconscious in analysis. This statement is carelessly worded. The unconscious is no more directly observable than is the heat of the bowl of water . . . What is directly observable, and therefore constitutes a datum, is the reverberation—the disturbance—which the patient’s utterance sets up in the unconscious of the analyst. It is the inspection of these internal disturbances which yields data “at the observer” and, naively speaking, even “within” the observer. These data are then assumed to have originated . . . “out there,” i.e., at or within the patient. In interpreting their reverberations within himself, the analyst professes to interpret also the unconscious of the patient. (Devereux, 1967, p. 303f., emphasis in original)

This passage is taken from Chapter XXIII of the book titled, Partition Theory and the Nature of Behavioral Science Data. It is interesting to see that the author here seems to choose his words with even more care than elsewhere in the book, using phrases like “are assumed to” and emphasizing that the analyst “also” and not primarily interprets the patient’s unconscious. Furthermore, it seems important for him to mark a difference between his own understanding and a more naïve notion of a “revelation” of the patient’s unconscious. Such a phrasing carries the ideal of an analyst or researcher who is aware in an almost humble way that he is merely offering subjective interpretations. One might expect that such a notion of radical subjectivity would lead the ethno-psychoanalyst to reject the idea of objective truth to be revealed and thus of objectivity as a goal of social research. However, Devereux does not reject but explicitly advocates a specific notion of what he then calls “authentic objectivity”: When summing up the central ideas in the second chapter of the book (“The distinctiveness of behavioral science”), the author calls subjectivity a means to gain objectivity. In his words, subjectivity should be used “. . . as the royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious objectivity” (Devereux, 1967, p. 17, emphasis added). I will come back to this unusual connection between subjectivity and objectivity later on.⁴

It is noteworthy that in this initial passage and throughout the book, instead of “reverberations” Devereux prefers the psychoanalytical term “transference/counter-transference,” which carries a slightly different, more positivistic notion. The term “counter-transference” has remained essential for psychoanalytic theory and practice to the present day and can be understood as a more theoretical interpretation of the abovementioned “reverberations within the analyst.” In this concept, human beings unconsciously transfer their primary (old) experiences of important relationships to their new relationships, the classical example being an experience of a strict and critical father, which is then projected onto teachers or other authority figures. Counter-transference would then be the specific reverberation of a specific transference and would allow more direct access to the patient’s unconscious. And it is this (mostly implicit) claim of a direct access what I propose to call a “positivistic notion” or “positivistic hope.” The difference between these two versions of unconscious “reverberations” is more relevant than it may first seem to be, both from an epistemological perspective but also for research practice. For example, Maya Nadig, a contemporary ethno-psychoanalyst from Germany/Switzerland, explains why she thinks this marks an important difference and illustrates that with her teaching experiences: She introduces the psychoanalytical idea of unconscious reactions and reverberations throughout the research process and encourages students of qualitative methods to be aware of their reactions and take them seriously. But, at the same time, she prevents them from using the concept of “counter-transference.” As Nadig states in an interview about her anthropological research and teaching experiences, the use of the concept of counter-transference can lead to a “terrible confusion” between “projections, ideological thoughts and feelings” (Hegener, 2004, p. 35). Counter-transference in general, Nadig adds, tends to be mystified and it can seduce students “into playing with grandiose fantasies” (Hegener, 2004, my translation). Instead, she encourages young researchers to look for “irritations” and “reverberations” and to write good reflective “diary notes” about their research encounters.

Psychoanalysis As a Painfully De-Centering Perspective?—A Subjective Re-Examination of Devereux

What Maya Nadig is describing here not only applies to how the word “counter-transference” is used, but also illustrates a fundamental problem with the attitude that Devereux wants us to take toward research. The psychoanalytical perspective of the research relationship does not automatically lead to the humble, de-centered attitude that I outlined above in the rather long quotation. On the contrary, it can actually feed the imagination to create—using the elaborate means of psychoanalysis—a superior knowledge about the “other.” Speaking in psychoanalytical terms, psychoanalysis can feed precisely those fantasies of omnipotence that it aims to shed light upon and do away with. And this takes me directly to my own sudden feeling of unease that came over me when I (re-)read the quote at the beginning and which—as a small experiment with Devereux’s request for more radical subjectivity—I now want to take a closer look at.

Writing Doubts

As soon as I start trying to write about my self-exploration, I am reminded of intense discussions in my Frankfurt work environment as a psychoanalytically oriented social scientist, especially at the Sigmund Freud Institute. How can we document our reflections in an adequate way, how much does the reader need to know about the process of interpretation, if we suppose she is more interested in the subject matter than in our self-disclosure? How can we avoid what Bourdieu (2004) referred to as “narcissistic reflexivity”? How can we link reflexivity back to the original research question and avoid getting lost in performing it as a kind of self-serving act (Kuehner, Langer, & Schweder, 2013)? Apparently, the challenge with introspection, self-investigation, and reflexivity does not only lie in doing it (which is already demanding enough) but also in writing it.

The step from introspection to writing about introspective processes (and their results) once again pointedly evokes core epistemological questions. This fits well with the fact that writing (see “writing culture”) is one of the points of culmination in the debates around the crises of representation. At this point, it may be useful to remember the idea that research is a performative act. In this perspective, knowledge emerges both from the act of writing itself and from the act of receiving what is written. If the interrelationship between the (reflective) writer and her “recipients” is a knowledge-generating process in its own right (see Kuehner, Ploder, & Langer, 2016), the question of adequacy in representing reflection loses its urgency.

Nevertheless, the worry concerning an excessive presentation of the self-referred to above is not without some justification. It is in the nature of qualitative research that questions can repeatedly change in the process and research projects therefore rarely fit in with the planning template required for funding anyway. At the same time, an academic text or lecture generally still has a more or less clearly defined question to which it is seeking an answer. The impression of there being something excessive at play arises when it is not clear why a certain irritation or association is important for the subject matter at hand (Hegener, 2004).

The First Irritation: Is Devereux a Relevant Reference for Doing Critical Research Today?

Having said all this, I finally have no more excuses to delay writing about the content of my own subjective irritations. After taking a closer look at what I called disappointment or discomfort with Devereux’s phrasing that “insight must begin at home,” I realized that I have to distinguish two different kinds of discomfort with this phrase. The first one I understood to be a more general doubt about what I was setting out to do: Building up my argument by focusing so much on one famous White man’ s contribution to a multifaceted, multivoiced debate suddenly felt like a sharp contrast to speaking about de-centering, de-constructing, and de-colonizing methodologies. The second doubt turned out to be a typical example of what Devereux himself would have called a reverberation—it was the feeling that “something important is missing” in the above quotation.

I will start with the general doubt about my endeavor, which I will first illustrate with a quote from the post-colonial theorist, Stuart Hall:

With respect to the modernity’s promise of a great future: “I am, I am the person from the West, therefore I know everything. Everything starts with me.” Says Modernism: “Slowly, slowly. What’s with the past? What’s with the languages you speak? What’s with the unconscious life, about which you know nothing? What’s with all the things that speak to you?” (Hall, 1999, p. 86, quoted from Supik, 2005, p. 18)

Although Stuart Hall is not directly addressing methodological issues here, this quote encompasses what is at the heart of my interest in debates on qualitative methodology. As outlined in the editorial of this special issue, the editors share the experience that colleagues in search of “critical methods” may argue from different theoretical backgrounds such as post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism, or psychoanalysis—what Stuart Hall called “decentrations”—but the problems and dilemmas they face in applying their theoretical claims to concrete research decisions are very similar. As I see it, these common challenges call for a space to exchange them and to discuss different answers and the new doubts and difficulties they are giving rise to—with strong reflexivity being one of the possible answers to be discussed.⁵ I would always argue that there can never be solutions, and—somewhat ironically for a Frankfurt-based social scientist—I find myself wanting to use rude capitalist metaphors to illustrate what I hold to be one central dilemma: Whatever we do in order to do better (more critical, more relevant, more ethically sensitive) research, most of us will be forced to treat their insights and intellectual developments—research style, research experiences, and, most clearly, research results—as a commodity. For the academic world will always be both, a space of intellectual and creative exchange but also a market. This forces one to highlight one’s individual contribution and to downplay how others have contributed to one’s insights. In contrast to that, all the de-centering moves force you to acknowledge, first, that the research process and research encounters are structured by power relations and, second, that research results are always products of joint efforts. Perhaps the strength of Devereux’s account or the psychoanalytic perspective in general is that it forces you to acknowledge this in a most radical way. Devereux focuses on the epistemological side of the problem, but other psychoanalytical researchers, especially those inspired by the Swiss tradition of ethno-psychoanalysis (see Sturm, Nadig, & Moro, 2010 for a distinction between the Swiss and the French tradition) have highlighted the role of power relations in research encounters (King, 1992).

When I allow my associations to carry me further along this track of thought, I come back to another even more capitalist metaphor that often appears suitable when we are discussing research dilemmas: Isn’t the typical research situation, paradigmatically the research interview, always a kind of disappropriation or exploitation? If we acknowledge that an interview transcript is the result of a joint knowledge production, who owns the text afterwards? Perhaps auto-ethnography or discourse analysis is a way to escape such dilemmas—I am not sure.

But I would argue that the production of knowledge about “the other” always has something colonizing about it. To me, it does not matter whether I am arguing from a feminist, a Frankfurtian, a Foucauldian, a post-colonial, or a psychoanalytical perspective; the common idea when thinking about it is that of de-colonizing methodologies (Smith, 2012)—while acknowledging that it is impossible to really do justice to this claim.

Devereux, of course, would never have put it like this. If you look at the content of many of his case stories, you see a White European trying to explain the colonized other to other White Western men. In this, he wasn’t ahead of his time at all and it becomes clear that the link with a post-colonial perspective only emerges from a very specific re-reading.⁶

The Second Irritation: A Painful and Disturbing Claim

Whereas the first irritation is a result of a more general doubt, the second irritation I will now look at is closer to what Devereux describes as a kind of reverberation to a concrete utterance. As described above, re-reading the quote ending with “insight must begin at home” had evoked a diffuse disappointment in me and, after closer examination, the feeling that something important was missing. My first impulse was not to analyze these feelings and use this analysis for the purpose of the article, but to do what one would normally do in such a situation: look for something that seems to fit better and replace it. But when I started searching for more adequate, better quotes, I noticed that this process was accompanied by intense feelings. Almost like a hunter; I found myself underlining wordings that filled me with an astonishing relief. Interestingly, I did not find these seemingly better fitting phrases inside the book, but in two contemporary responses to the book, both written by anthropologists who were themselves strongly inspired by psychoanalytical thinking. Weston La Barre wrote a preface to the English translation of the book and Melford Spiro wrote a book review for the journal, American Anthropologist. Spiro sums up the basic argument in a few words, which I already quoted above. He repeats the idea that it is anxiety that motivates all kinds of defense mechanisms against new insight, but then he adds something that obviously seemed very important to me: “This counter-transference phenomenon . . . evoking, as it does, much anxiety, is, extremely painful” (Spiro, 1969, p. 95, emphasis added).

La Barre uses weaker expressions but his account points in the same direction: “This is a brilliant book. . . . it embodies that rare and disturbing phenomenon: a basic and genuinely revolutionary insight. We must be prepared to be deeply vexed with it” (Devereux, 1967, Preface, emphasis added).

When I was looking for a quote to replace the one that had irritated me, I underlined “extremely painful” in Spiro’s account and “disturbing” and “vexed” in La Barre’s—vexed being an English word I had to look up in the dictionary. Here again I was surprised by my own intense emotions because I found myself hoping that “vexed” had something to do with “torture”—and I was happy to find out it had. Thus, I had to admit to myself that it was exactly the idea of “insight causing pain” that I had missed in Devereux’s quote: Apparently, I had felt that Devereux in the initial part of the book was downplaying the extent to which his claim implies pain, disturbance, torture . . . Beginning “at home” does not evoke such associations and this fits in with the other part of the phrase, which can be read as a kind of belittlement: Look here, I am not criticizing you, I am criticizing myself much more than I am criticizing anyone else. One could understand this as a rhetorical figure, which he uses to make his text more accessible, probably being aware that any critique that implies criticizing yourself as well is usually more easily accepted.

Interestingly, La Barre, himself a psychoanalytically informed anthropologist, offers a possible explanation for this rhetorical device toward the end of his introduction. He explains, “Anyone with analytic clinical experience knows how we feel impelled to punish those who, in giving us insight into ourselves, have aroused our anxiety and burdened the ego with still heavier demands of conscience” (La Barre, 1967, p. 10, emphasis added).

If I now apply what has been said above about using irritations to gain deeper insight, I realize that I have indeed gained deeper insight resulting both from a closer look at the process and at the emotional content. I noticed how much easier it was to “let others speak” (La Barre and Spiro) and analyze or comment what they are saying rather than directly speak about myself. The process then resulted in a compromise between speaking and not-speaking about myself and thus forces me to admit that “beginning at home” is radical (and demanding) enough. At a content level, I find myself reflecting about pain and insight—and this brings me to the very core of psychoanalytic thinking. In my understanding, psychoanalysis can help us acknowledge the fact that, despite all theorizing about the weak subject, we are still living in a world of discourses that feed the idea that we can be strong and are able to control most of our life, if we just work hard enough. Against a world of training, skills, and competence, psychoanalysis thus puts forth the idea not only of being exposed and vulnerable, constantly failing in a way—but also of being able to grow, if we are more able to realize and accept this human condition instead of denying it. And even more so, psychoanalysis believes that life is not about avoiding pain, but about growing from the experience that you can survive it. To move back to social science now, I think that for the research process it is especially the notion of “being in control” as opposed to the possibility of tolerating mistakes or even “embracing failure” that has strong implications here.

Although the qualitative paradigm has already challenged the idea of control in many respects, the world of social research is still structured by the same old metaphors evoking the idea of a competent, trained, skilled professional researcher-as-a-strong-subject, using her (clean) research tools that enable her to generate reliable results. There may be an increasing awareness that research is a process that often evolves so much differently to how it was planned. There may also be an increasing awareness of the role of subjectivity throughout this process. But in this case, as in many others, our feelings just fall so much behind our theoretical insights and it simply feels like a failure when we are planning a research project and are then forced to realize that our plans will just not work out the way we want them to.

In this sense, I argue that the psychoanalytical attitude as a form of strong reflexivity can be applied from the very first step of any research endeavor. As soon as you set out to investigate, be aware of any irritation—anything that resists your control might be a source of insight into the very problem you are interested in. I outline just one example: After some own (painfully gained) insights in a project about “Holocaust Education” (Kuehner & Langer, 2010), my perspective about finding research participants has just been turned on its head: Why do social researchers always expect people to want to talk to them—or with each other—about what the researchers think are important questions? I think it is surprising—and also worth interpreting—if you find them easily. This does not imply throwing away all the debates and interesting arguments about good access to the field. It just adds the idea of embracing failure as a source of insight.

Contemporary Readings: Devereux in the FQS

Following this radically subjective re-reading, I will now choose a somewhat more classic form and look at Devereux’s reception among contemporary authors. In doing so, I will concentrate on the online journal FQS, whose 16th year in publication has just ended with the completion of this text, and in which Devereux is mentioned in a total of 37 articles. By way of comparison, Harold Garfinkel is mentioned in 95 articles, Sigmund Freud in 82, and Norman Denzin in 291.

How is Devereux quoted in the 37 articles? The first thing that becomes apparent is that the main proposition (of researchers having to work with their subjective reactions to the data) is the one that receives the most attention in Devereux’s reception within the FQS. As in the original text, both a stronger and a weaker variant are referred to in the articles published in the journal and it becomes clear in the quotes selected to what extent Devereux himself struggled with radicalness. This can be seen, for example, in the following quote that was chosen by Katja Mruck to explain why researchers should speak about themselves. Mruck and Breuer (2003) claim that Devereux provided an answer to the question “early on and radically” (p. 5):

The behavioral scientist cannot ignore the interaction between subject and observer in the hope that, if he but pretends long enough that it does not exist, it will just quietly go away. The refusal to exploit these difficulties creatively can only lead to the gathering of less and less relevant, more and more segmental, peripheral and even trivial data . . . The scientist should therefore cease to emphasize exclusively his manipulation and should seek to understand concurrently—and sometimes primarily—himself qua observer. (Devereux, 1967, p. 18)

Here, a Devereux quote is introduced as radical, which does not include the pointed assertion that counter-transference is the decisive datum. In general, this somewhat softer variant using metaphors such as “influence,” “entanglement,” and “involvement” (e.g., Andersen, 2003, p. 10; Roth, 2004, p. 1) tends to dominate in the FQS articles.

However, several other accentuated points from Devereux’s classic are also cited, which refer in a somewhat different way to the relationship between the researcher and the researched. As such, the idea that the researcher and the researched have an “attraction” for one another (e.g., Breuer, 2003, p. 7) comes up on several occasions, there is talk about the “entanglement” between researcher and the researched (Fitzek, 2000, p. 2), and the question is raised at what point “in the transactional relationship of subject and object data are read” (Breuer, 2003, p. 7). This picks up on the reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which also plays an important role for Devereux. In general,⁷ we can speak of different ways of reading the basic thesis, whereby one of the ways of reading it tends to focus on the psychoanalytical argumentation that refers to counter-transference and thus on anxiety, while the other focuses on the epistemological idea of an overlap between the researcher and the researched.

Who Refers to Devereux?

Who are the qualitative social researchers who refer to Devereux? In 2000, in the very first edition of the Forum, Katja Mruck (the initiator of the Forum) and Guenter Mey (both of them key figures in the German debate) explicitly refer to Devereux. They use a footnote to explain that his work is essential to the “principle of communication” that constitutes qualitative research:

The work of the French ethnopsychoanalyst Georges Devereux is important for formulating the principle of communication and for disseminating the acceptance that any observation/research leads to “disturbances”/”contamination” and needs scientific reflection. Devereux’ work is broadly recognized by all those researchers who stress the importance of the “principle of communication”. Already in 1967 Devereux, elaborating on the observer-observed-dependency, regards such “disturbances” as “cornerstones for the scientific inquiry of human behavior”(Mruck & Mey, 2000, p. 4).

If one now takes a look at his concrete reception in the FQS, it becomes apparent that there are many programmatic articles that are actually bound to the “principle of communication,” and yet tend to discuss this in theoretical and abstract terms drawing very little on the authors’ own empirical examples. These articles discuss, for example, questions of ethics (Roth, 2004), or the principles of reflexivity and subjectivity (Langenohl, 2009; Mruck & Breuer, 2003; Schmitt, 2003). In other texts the authors take their own empirical work as a starting point, whereby one has the impression that the authors really needed Devereux in order to render obvious irritations “epistemologically productive.” Heizmann (2003), for example, writes about a disturbing interview in one study about the “working poor” which, from her point of view, positively demanded to be interpreted analytically. Similarly, Eberhard Tietel (2000) described his experience of a “failed” interview with a works council representative, which he also attempts to make epistemologically productive by taking a psychoanalytical perspective. For this article, he chose the programmatic title “Das Interview als Beziehungsraum” (The interview as a relational space). Two other articles also contain relationship work as an empirical object: Silveira, Gualda, Sobral, and Garcia (2003) deal with subjectivity in the qualitative research on nursing, while Barbara Bräutigam (2000) uses Devereux to reflect on what it was exactly that motivated her to seek out trauma therapists in Chile. In another group of texts, the authors present their methodological and theoretical ideas within the context of conceptual considerations about a “qualitative psychology” (Fitzek, 2000; Mey, 2000; Seel, 2000).

Interpretations and Contemporary References

Following this general overview, I would now like to concentrate in more detail on two authors. If we look at the text by Langenohl (2009), the question arises as to whether the considerations outlined there with Devereux in mind haven’t been swallowed up to a certain extent by the debate about reflexivity. Langenohl creates an interesting link between Devereux and Bourdieu:

Heilbron names Georges Devereux, to whom he himself also refers, and his psychoanalytical studies of the scientific subject as a direct predecessor of Bourdieu. Both Devereux and Bourdieu talked about the difficulty that unacknowledged and/or pre-reflective positionalities of the knowledge-seeking subject are very hard to understand by the same. (Langenohl, 2009, p. 13)

Is Devereux’s concept only expressed in more modern terms such as the “scientific subject” and “pre-reflective positionalities” or do these words also stand for something completely new? It is interesting that Langenohl in the following directly quotes Johan Heilbron with the following statement: “Both insist on the need for a reflexive perspective, on the necessity to uncover basic mechanisms of denial, defence and projection, and both wish to make such analysis fruitful for epistemological purposes” (Heilbron, 1999, p. 303, quoted in Langenohl, 2009, p. 13).

Put in this way, it sounds as if a “reflexive perspective” is to be placed on an equal footing with the realization that denial, defense, and projection play an essential role in the research process and that analyzing them can be rendered fruitful. In this case, Devereux’s thesis would certainly have been swallowed up by the desire for reflectivity in the social sciences—whereby the concepts “denial, defense, and projection” would still continue to be unusual.

The second text I want to have a closer look at is the one already mentioned by Heizmann (2003). She is the author, who refers to Devereux in most detail and in the most differentiated terms. In her text, she pursues a decidedly ethno-psychoanalytical argumentation and also goes into the further development of ethno-psychoanalysis, for example, by Paul Parin, Mario Erdheim, and Maya Nadig. It is fitting here that she also leans toward the radical interpretation and emphasizes that the “change of perspective from the person being questioned to the person asking the questions” is not only the recognition of an influence, but she also states that, with this “a new epistemological starting point for the social sciences” emerges (Heizmann, 2003, p. 4, emphasis in original). And later on she writes,

The main instrument for reflecting on the influence of the researcher is to bear in mind the counter-transference which Devereux considers to be a central phenomenon and a decisive datum for every social science. The unconscious can become knowable and analysable using counter-transference. . . . Counter-transference refers to the unconscious emotional reactions to whomever we are speaking to and in particular to her transferences, refers to one’s personal affective entanglement with the object being researched. . . . Devereux assumed that the object of research and the contact with the other always had inherent to it a potential confrontation with whatever we bear suppressed within ourselves and can therefore trigger off our fears which are then reflected in the scientific methods. A great deal of methodical and theoretical effort is made as a defensive reaction in order to fend off the feeling of anxiety and impotence vis-à-vis the material and to safeguard distance. (Heizmann, 2003, p. 6, emphasis in original)

Unlike the other authors, Heizman speaks in concrete terms about the confrontation with what we ourselves have suppressed and not only about fending off fear, but also about impotence. This is also worth mentioning, because in the practical communication of qualitative methods the fear of not getting what you want or need from those who are questioned is highly relevant. In practical research work, therefore, a recurring issue is the dependence of the researchers on the researched, as researchers generally rely on the willingness of those they encounter in this process to allow themselves to be researched.

Heizmann thus proposes reading Devereux in a way very similar to my own, whereby she argues from her own research experience and gives the notion of impotence a more central role.

Doing Subjectivity—But Still Aiming at Objectivity?

In this essay, I have tried to show how social researchers, especially those who feel committed to “critical qualitative inquiry,” might benefit from a psychoanalytical perspective on the research process. In order to do so, I have presented different re-readings of a classical text that is often used as a reference for the contribution of psychoanalysis to qualitative research. To me, it had always seemed most likely that psychoanalytic thought fits into other discourses of subjectivity, with psychoanalysis representing a most radical version of doing subjectivity. When we think of Devereux’s metaphor of subjectivity being the “royal road” in social research, this link is certainly convincing. But what about the second part of Devereux’s plea to use subjectivity “as the royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious objectivity”⁸ (Devereux, 1967, p. 17, emphasis added)? Obviously, Devereux doesn’t see subjectivity and objectivity as opposites but proposes a specific connection between the two. In “The Vulnerable Observer” Ruth Behar pointedly called this “Devereux’s dream of doing social science more subjectively so it will be more objective” (Behar, 1996, p. 28f., emphasis added). Devereux sees subjectivity as a necessary and useful practice, but objectivity remains central when we talk about aims in social research.

One might interpret this claim in the light of the radically positivistic understanding of most of Devereux’s contemporaries as it fits with his sharply criticizing them for their self-deceiving practices of gaining objectivity through distance. The argument could be summed up as if he said, I am aiming at the same ideal, I just use the opposite strategy. If we re-read this claim today, we should have in mind that he developed his argument when he was more or less the only one to talk about subjectivity in the field of social research.

Nevertheless, a critical re-reading has to address the question, Do we still need debates on objectivity? Who needs them? For a long time, I thought that advocating for a psychoanalytic perspective simply implies to reject claims of objectivity and that we have overcome these discussions, which I held to be fruitless. I assumed that most colleagues would easily agree with me that there is no problem in acknowledging that we are “only producing knowledge” as opposed to revealing objective truth(s). It took some time until I came to accept that there might also be good reasons to adhere to the ideal of objectivity: Having spent much of my academic life with thinking and writing about individual and collective trauma, the urge to develop an ethically sensitive language to describe experiences of extreme suffering had always been an important issue for me. In such contexts (when we refer to violence and suffering), claims of objectivity radically change their meaning. This does not and cannot answer the question whether objectivity should be a central aim for social research, but it makes clear that we still need the debate.

Closing Remarks: Psychoanalysis and “Embracing Failure”

Perhaps it is because the term unconscious implies the notion of something beneath or below the surface: Psychoanalytical thinking, not only in social research, tends to be seen as something “beyond,” a practice that is somehow exclusive or even exotic. It often seems as if you had to be an insider, or even worse, a “believer,” if you want to apply it—and thus many doubt that it is scientific at all. As a social researcher and university teacher, I always find myself arguing against this notion of exclusivity and this is exactly because I feel I am benefiting extensively from psychoanalytical thinking in both of my professional roles. What is it of psychoanalytical thinking that can be applied beyond the couch, if we acknowledge that neither research nor teaching should be confounded with psychotherapy?⁹

I hope that, by re-visiting Georges Devereux’s classic work, I have been able to convey that it is not about wanting something completely different nor about doing things in a completely different way. Perhaps it is rather about looking at it differently. Like many qualitative researchers, I see qualitative research as an open process, that is inevitably accompanied by experiences of failure and which demands that we get involved as whole persons. It has the potential to confront you with intense feelings, with irritations and fundamental doubts about what you are doing. I have been re-reading Devereux as a story of encouragement, one that reminds us that difficult feelings, pain, failure, impotence, and doubts are just part of the human condition and thus part of social research processes as well. In everyday life, however, we generally have to act and function somehow and cannot always take the time to be aware of all these difficulties. The spontaneous reaction, therefore, is usually to quickly pass over them and try to put them out of our minds. It is an opportunity and a luxury provided by research situations, that you can create time and space to think—a reflective space that is partly free of the necessity to act.¹⁰ If we use this space to be radically subjective—that is, “begin at home”—this might be a painful process, but also a productive and rewarding one.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Angela Kuehner holds a PhD in social psychology and is the author of Trauma und Kollektives Gedaechtnis (Trauma and Collective Memory, 2008) and Kollektive Traumata (Collective Trauma, 2007). Currently, she is a senior researcher and lecturer in sociology and psychoanalytical social psychology in the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main and a senior researcher at the German Youth Institute in Munich (Germany). From 2011 to 2012, she held an interim professorship for qualitative research also at Goethe-University. In addition to her interest in migration, trauma, and memory studies, her research interests in qualitative methodology focus on issues of power, difference, and subjectivity throughout the research process as discussed in “critical methodologies” and also include teaching qualitative methods and psychoanalysis in social research.

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