Failure, guilt, confession, redemption? Revisiting unpublished research through a psychosocial lens (Pre-published version)

Abstract

This article offers some critical reflections on a case of failure to bring a qualitative research project to completion and publication earlier in the author’s career. Possible explanations are considered in light of insights derived from the ‘psychosocial’ turn in qualitative research associated particularly with Hollway and Jefferson’s Doing Qualitative Research Differently (2001/2013). The project was an interview-based study of the life experiences of middle aged and older Irish emigrants in England, conducted in the late 1990s in Birmingham and Manchester. The article considers the failure as a possible psychic defence against the anxiety that completion and publication would be a betrayal of the interviewees, many of whom described experiences distressing to themselves and the interviewer. The psychoanalytic concepts of ‘transference’ and ‘countertransference’ are used to speculate as to the role of the unconscious at work in the interview encounters and how, despite class and generational differences, psychodynamic fantasies relating to both interviewees’ and interviewer’s migration histories and experiences may have impacted upon each other.