How Does Zelda Know and How Is Zelda Known? Psychoanalytically Informed Data Analysis

The theorisation of knowledge in Wilfred Bion’s Kleinian-inflected psychoanalysis has been my central resource, influential in the emergence of the book’s key themes of mothers’ and researchers’ knowing and how they are linked together. In this chapter, I illustrate the value of Bion’s key concepts — anxiety and splitting, the processing of raw, always emotional/affective, experience, containment, reverie, communicative projective identification and learning from experience — through applying them to a single case, Zelda’s. At the same time I examine their use in my psycho-social approach to data analysis, especially in the contentious area of psychoanalytically informed interpretation.