Afterword

Abstract

This article reflects on the experience of using the psychoanalytic observation method that produced the preceding papers in this special issue as part of an empirical research project on becoming a mother for the first time; the first use of this method in British funded research. After briefly outlining the research methodology, the author considers what she learned from this method, in terms not only of research practice but also epistemology (the practice of using researcher subjectivity as an instrument of knowing) and ontology (how it illuminated the more embodied, unconscious, relational and conflictual aspects of identity processes involved in becoming a mother for the first time). The article then gives examples of how the two methods (infant observation and free association narrative interview) complemented each other in the knowledges they produced (what the psychoanalytic observation method achieved that enhanced the study of identity processes, namely the mundane practices of early motherhood and the ups and downs of going on being that would be smoothed out in a method that involved several months gaps in between interviews). The observation method is situated within the wider psychosocial approach of the research. The article concludes by briefly considering the uses of single cases such as those that make up this issue in generating knowledge that goes beyond the small numbers involved.

Keywords:

• Qualitative methods
• psychoanalytic observation
• free association narrative interview
• mothering
• identities in process
• objectivity and subjectivity

Notes

¹ESRC award number RES148-25-0058 ‘Identities in process: Becoming Bangladeshi, African Caribbean and White mothers’.

²The field note style adopted in our sister project at the Open University (‘the Making of Modern Motherhoods’) has pulled in a similar direction and has provided a further source of inspiration.