Mary E. Thomas

The Implications of Psychoanalysis for Qualitative Methodology: The Case of Interviews and Narrative Data Analysis∗

Abstract In this article I ask to what extent geographers can draw on psychoanalytic theory when examining interview data. I consider Freuds theory of the mind and its unconscious processes to ask how bringing the unconscious to bear on identity studies potentially impacts qualitative research on subjectivity and identification. Existing geographic debate on psychoanalytic theory and methods provides an organizing framework for my argument. Although the article advocates an ontology of the psychoanalytic subject, I suggest that researchers must avoid psychoanalyzing research subjects. This distinction limits the ways in which scholars can “read” personal narratives for unconscious processes. *I would like to thank Paul Kingsbury, Geoff Mann, and the reviewers for their help with this article.

Introduction: Psychoanalytic Methodologies in Geography

T his special section began, as many do, with an Association of American Geographers conference. In 2007 Paul Kingsbury and I organized two sessions with a total of nine papers (and ten scholars) that provided an impressive array of the many divergent possibilities that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory offer to geography. Indeed, as this section itself represents, the radically different approaches to psychoanalysis and the inspirations scholars take from its methodologies and ontologies present no unified front, no coherent account of the spatiality of psychic life and practice. Others similarly attest the inability to cull an inclusive or comprehensive lesson for geography or even whether psychoanalysis is an appropriate endeavor for geographers (Philo and Parr 2003b). Instead, authors posit that the common thread of psychoanalysis is the idea that the unspeakable, and thus not entirely representable, gird the social–spatial and the subjective. The unconscious exists in its effects, so this question arises: If only in effect, and unpredictably so, then how to observe, represent, theorize, if not measure? These are conundrums energizing the conversations on psychoanalysis and methodology (more recently see Callard 2003; Philo and Parr 2003a; Kingsbury 2004; Thomas 2007; Parr and Davidson forthcoming). The four articles in this special section, which I describe in turn next, articulate the ways that psychoanalytic thought already pervades much of human geography and its methodologies, albeit not always in the obvious or avowed framework of psychoanalysis (see both Pile and Kingsbury, this issue). Certainly the emotional, the affectual, and the subjective have all been framed through an understanding of the self as somewhat opaque, as nonlinear, as irrational—as a subject, in other words, enlivened by forces not entirely of its own consciousness, unacknowledged yet effective, powerful in its intangibility. Despite the hesitance of many geographers to engage with psychoanalytic theory, its influence percolates without an explicit consideration of its impact on our understandings of what the social–spatial entails (Kingsbury 2009). In this special section, we hope to edge forward a greater commitment to avow this influence and to think about how psychoanalysis shapes geographic thought and research. Our focus on methodologies points particularly to research encounters; that is, between researcher and researched. The four articles consider how methodology can be designed, unhinged, or rejiggered to consider psychoanalytic, subjective process. The articles contend that doing research is as much an unconscious as a conscious reckoning—from researchers’ sketching of projects to the carrying out of plans within ontologies that are as composed of fantasy as they are of materiality. After all, the researcher also has fantastic renditions of the social–spatial, even though this word should not be taken as “unreal.” Fantasies are evident in the material “real” world, too (e.g., Nast 2000; Pile 2005). Thus, the articles importantly give readers new insights into how the framing and doing of research are wrapped intimately in the subjectivity of not only those people and topics researched but also of the subjectivity of the researcher, of their interand intrarelations and spaces, and of the fantasies of just what we think the world is—indeed, how we as scholars also fantasize in terms of how we psychically need or are oriented to think what the world is. This is related to our own social, academic, and political positionings, as well as the positioning

Review – Mary Thomas

a wealth of geographical work on heterosexualities. With this book, he explicitly extends the agenda into engagement with urban concerns. Second, the text is framed as ‘an attempt not simply to show that sexuality matters in urban studies, but to think critically about the possibilities for creating more sexually liberal and egalitarian cities’ (32) and maintains a strong critical edge. As the chapters closely examine the urban production of multiple sexual others, the political stakes are always in the foreground; and challengingly so, as Hubbard extends analysis to stigmatized sexual subjects and practices that many may not find ‘likable’ (e.g. sex offenders, cruising practices and porn production). Furthermore, the political analysis is far from simplistic. Hubbard acknowledges both the exploitative/ disciplining and libertarian possibilities of his subject matter, thus nicely demonstrating that geographical knowledges about sexuality and the city (as about all else) are inherently contextual. Third, Hubbard effectively brings feminist and queer approaches together. He accomplishes a feat that is too exceptional in the literature by going beyond what many see as the proper objects of feminist and queer approaches. Finally, I offer one point of critique. Although Hubbard covers tremendous ground in Cities and Sexualities, it lacks explicit treatment of the co-constitution of race and sexuality. Much of the most innovative and provocative queer studies work of the last decade has bridged queer and postcolonial/critical race theories to demonstrate that processes of sexualization are always simultaneously processes of racialization. Indeed, many of the book’s examples foreground the ways in which sexual stigmas are also racial stigmas. Nonetheless, while sexuality is positioned as gendered and classed in the analysis of heteronormative logics, race is left out and leaves a hole in the analysis. All in all, this is an excellent text that ought to be read widely by students and scholars of both sexuality and urban studies.

Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction

Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston, and Cindi Katz, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 233 pp.

‘I Think it's Just Natural’: The Spatiality of Racial Segregation at a US High School:

36.95 paper (ISBN: 1-4051-1134-8).