Sailing between Scylla and Charybdis1

In Greek mythology, Charybdis is a sea monster, daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, who swallows huge amounts of water three times a day and then spouts it back out again, forming an enormous whirlpool. She lay on one side of the narrow Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy. On the other side was Scylla, another sea-monster. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis will pass too close to Scylla and vice versa. The Argonauts were able to avoid both dangers because they were guided by Thetis. Odysseus was not so fortunate; he chose to risk Scylla at the cost of some of his crew rather than lose the whole ship to Charybdis.

: Incorporating qualitative approaches into child psychotherapy research

Abstract

Starting from the acknowledged gap between research and practice in child psychotherapy, this paper offers an historical perspective on the relation between these two activities, and suggests that qualitative approaches to research may offer new ways of bringing them together. After introducing the fundamental concepts of qualitative analysis, three areas where qualitative forms of research may be useful to child psychotherapists are explored: relevant but non-psychotherapy research; accounts of therapy research; and therapy process research. Examples of all of these types of research are presented, and some of the challenges to incorporating qualitative approaches into child psychotherapy research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Psychoanalytic research
• qualitative methodology
• research-practice gap
• evidence based practice
• therapy process and outcome

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following people who read drafts of this paper and made valuable comments: Liane Aukin, Deirdre Durkin, Ricky Emanuel, Viviane Green, Annette Mendelsohn, Robin Midgley, Jonathan Smith, Mary Target and Katie Lee Weille.

Notes

In Greek mythology, Charybdis is a sea monster, daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, who swallows huge amounts of water three times a day and then spouts it back out again, forming an enormous whirlpool. She lay on one side of the narrow Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy. On the other side was Scylla, another sea-monster. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis will pass too close to Scylla and vice versa. The Argonauts were able to avoid both dangers because they were guided by Thetis. Odysseus was not so fortunate; he chose to risk Scylla at the cost of some of his crew rather than lose the whole ship to Charybdis.

Since writing this paper, two examples of qualitative, clinical research have been published in this Journal, both deriving from the Tavistock Clinic's clinical doctorate programme (Anderson 2003; Reid 2003). It may well be that the development of clinical doctorates in child and adolescent psychotherapy will create the context for a blossoming of clinically-relevant, qualitative research projects, as practitioners look for methodologies appropriate to small-scale research rooted in the ‘swampy lowlands of practice’. Reid's paper was part of a special issue of this Journal on ‘The clinical relevance of research in child psychotherapy’, in which Peter Fonagy and Michael Rustin set out the respective arguments for child psychotherapy to preserve its own epistemology and tradition of ‘clinical research methods’ (Rustin, 2003) or to engage more fully in the ‘knowledge chain’ of contemporary scientific research (Fonagy, 2003). I hope it will be clear that my argument finds something of value in both of these opinions, whilst suggesting that the development of qualitative methods offers some possibility of trying to steer a ‘middle way’ between the two.

See footnote 2, above.