Psychoanalytic Approaches in Qualitative Social Research

Psychoanalytic approaches in qualitative social research bring the dynamics of the unconscious, desire and subjectivity into the study of social phenomena. Rooted in Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, these methods attend to the latent meanings behind speech acts, narratives and interpersonal encounters. Rather than treating accounts as transparent records of external reality, psychoanalytically informed researchers explore the interplay of conscious intention and unconscious motivation. Core concerns include transference and counter-transference between researcher and participant, the role of defence mechanisms in narrative construction, and the symbolic work of language and affect. Methods range from Lacanian discourse analysis of power and desire in institutional settings to object‐relations attuned readings of life-history interviews. Group-based interpretative sessions and collaborative reflexivity workshops further enable the analogue mapping of collective psychic processes. Across cultural and organisational contexts, psychoanalytic qualitative inquiry has illuminated student agency in marketised education, the ethics of attending to singularity in social interviewing, and the temporal reverberations of emotion in biographical re-analysis. By weaving together individual affective dimensions and broader social structures, these approaches enrich understanding of how unconscious frameworks both shape and are shaped by social worlds.

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Technical terms

Unconscious: A dynamic mental domain comprising thoughts, memories and desires outside conscious awareness but influencing behaviour and narrative formation.

Subjectivity: The individual’s lived perspective, shaped by internal drives, language and social structures, as expressed in qualitative accounts.

Narrative interview: A research technique in which participants are encouraged to tell their life or experience stories, allowing exploration of underlying psychic themes.

Lacanian discourse analysis: A method that studies how language structures power relations and desire, based on Lacan’s model of four discourses (master, university, hysteric, analyst).

References

1. La Ética de lo Singular en un proceso de Investigación Social. Revista Veritas de Difusão Científica (2025).
2. Narrative interviews: an important resource in qualitative research. Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP (2014).
3. A Sad Story? Time, Interpretation and Feeling in Biographical Methods. Child Care in Practice (2023).
4. Student Subjectivity in the Marketised University. Frontiers in Psychology (2022).