Empirical Psycho-Social Research: Design and Psychoanalytically Informed Principles

The quality of knowledge that research can produce is fatally shaped by its methods, methodology and epistemology. Easy to state now, but what a long, reiterative journey that discovery has been for me: always the need to examine critically another implicit assumption, to unsettle the convenience of established social scientific principles, to expand sterile terrain (for example, the conventions of writing up findings). The value of using psychoanalysis to inform an epistemology as well as methodology was boldly stated by Georges Devereux back in 1967: ‘one may postulate that psychoanalysis is, first and foremost, an epistemology and methodology. This is the chiefest of its permanent contributions to science.’ (Devereux, 1967, p.294). I read that book in the early 1970s, but it took me the intervening decades to ‘know’ it as a researcher.