Introduction
How can researchers better access and analyse meaning that participants produce beyond what is fully conscious or intended by them? Scholars of International Relations (IR) are increasingly concerned with the constitutive role of affect and emotions in international politics, calling into question mainstream IR’s conception of humans as fully intentional, ‘rational’ subjects.Footnote 1 The field of ontological security studies (OSS) has centred anxiety and desire as collectively felt affective processes within states that lead to ontological security-seeking measures to construct a more stable sense of collective identity. Much of this literature owes its lineage to psychoanalysis, particularly KleinianFootnote 2 and LacanianFootnote 3 traditions. These literatures analyse that which is often implicit, unintended, or unspoken by subjects but is nevertheless evoked and observable in social and political life: the unconscious.
The scholarship on OSS and on affect and emotion in IR has produced excellent insights into the unconscious aspects of political discourse through interpreting existing texts: speeches, party political literature, public documents, online social media, and cultural artefacts such as images, novels, and films. Lacanian Discourse Analysis (LDA) provides a compelling method for unpacking the multi-layered and overdetermined nature of meaning in language.Footnote 4 However, with some notable exceptions, few have used interviews as the main primary source material.Footnote 5 This is curious given that, in psychoanalysis, the most crucial site for building theory was in the clinical situation with individual patients. Indeed, psychoanalysis itself emerged as a field through analysis of the individual subject through long, open-ended conversations, or ‘psychoanalytic interviews’.Footnote 6
For psychoanalysts, the goal is to understand the unconscious life of a patient in order to treat their mental symptoms. Scholars of IR do not share the same objectives; however, psychoanalytic methods are still generative methodological tools for conducting interviews because they were developed explicitly to make the unconscious accessible and analysable in spoken language. In this article, I demonstrate that psychoanalysis offers IR scholars not only a theory of the unconscious in political life, but a set of methodological tools tailored to that theory. To do so, I draw on the rich practical guides offered by psychoanalysis and demonstrate how they might be applied to questions relevant to international politics. Researchers in the disciplines of public health, nursing, and social work have already been using one tool of clinical psychoanalysis – free association – as a qualitative interview technique for a number of years.Footnote 7 I argue we can draw on their free association interview method, along with other psychoanalytic tools, to study the unconscious in international politics. In the process, I aim to better integrate theory and method, allowing researchers to employ the psychoanalytic methods developed to study the unconscious dynamics of intersubjective meaning-making.
This article will proceed in four parts. First, I will discuss the existing literature on affect and psychoanalytic theories of IR and how we might come to encounter and study the unconscious in international politics through discourse. Second, I make the case for studying the unconscious in IR through the interview, which has strong parallels with the clinical method through which psychoanalytic theory developed. Third, I outline what a psychoanalytic style of interviewing might look like in practice and how to use transference, free association, and evenly hovering attention as tools to uncover unconscious or partly conscious meaning in language. Finally, in the conclusion, I reflect on the implications of using the psychoanalytic interview in future research, including ethical and political questions.
Encountering the unconscious in international politics
The unconscious is that which sits outside of the conscious attention of the subject, having been repressed or excluded from consciousness either intentionally or unintentionally, but exerts significant influence on human affect and emotion.Footnote 8 We might think of the unconscious as ‘unknown knowns’ – that which we do not know that we know – and it can relate as much to our social and political life as to personal life.Footnote 9 Studying the unconscious in international politics centres subjectivity, and the affective processes that constitute subjectivity, to shed light on a number of important questions, often ‘how’ or ‘how possible’ questions that system-level IR theories overlook.Footnote 10 These include, but are not limited to: how certain types of political subjects come to be formed; how they come to identify in certain ways with identities or ideologies; how subjects can believe one thing and practice another, or maintain contradictory beliefs; how subjects get ‘stuck’ repeating practices they might know to be detrimental; how and why discourses have or do not have affective resonance with subjects; and how political subjects navigate anxiety, managing to ‘carry on’ despite facing intense contradictions or cross-pressures.Footnote 11 The OSS literature has drawn on psychoanalytic theory – primarily the ideas of Jacques Lacan but also of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Donald Winnicott – to understand how subjects draw on fantasies and unconscious defence mechanisms to achieve a stable sense of identity. The Kleinian IR scholarship in particular demonstrates how unconscious or partly conscious defence mechanisms such as splitting, introjection, and projective identification enable elite and public subjects to navigate anxiety.Footnote 12
Psychoanalytic approaches cast doubt on Cartesian notions of a fully intentional, coherent subject explicitly by drawing attention to how unconscious processes shape subjective navigation of the world, to understand how subjects come to be invested in or attached to discourses, ideologies, or practices that may be contradictory to material reality, or counterproductive to their flourishing in some way.Footnote 13 As such, psychoanalytic IR contributes to the broader insights of the emotions in IR literature, which established affect and emotion as constitutive features of international politics, rather than distractions from or distortions of agents’ rational decision-making.Footnote 14 The emotions literature uncovers how emotion and affect become socially and politically operative on a collective level, how they can be mobilised strategically by political agents, or how they come to constitute identity through discourse, art, and storytelling, such as Hutchison’s work on how shared understandings of trauma forge group identities.Footnote 15 The ‘circulations of affect’ these scholars analyse can be unconsciousFootnote 16 and affect is defined as a ‘range of diffuse and often unconscious embodied experience and processes, including moods, sentiments, and attachments’.Footnote 17 Yet despite acknowledging the importance of unconscious processes, these accounts are not concerned with theorising what the unconscious is or its effect on subjectivity. This is where psychoanalytic IR contributes a rich corpus of theory of the ways the unconscious surfaces and exerts observable effects on the subjects, which can be used to explain ‘symptoms’ such as the persistence of contradictory or repetitive discourses in international politics.
Studying the unconscious in political life enables researchers to make sense of the ongoing resonance of discourses and actions which appear inconsistent or counterproductive by looking at the level of the subject.Footnote 18 For instance, the Lacanian IR literature looks at how political actors – often elites – chase fantasies of ontological security. Through seemingly disproportionate diplomatic or immigration policies, the incomplete subject is invested in trying to achieve an impossible sense of coherence and wholeness, chasing fantasies such as the ‘racially pure’ nationFootnote 19 or unified historical nation.Footnote 20 Fantasies promise that with the elimination of an outside other, who steals enjoyment from the subject, completeness can be attained.Footnote 21
While there is debate on what Sigmund Freud meant by the unconscious, particularly its relation to biological instinct, Lacan’s notion of the unconscious as ‘structured like a language’ has had the most influence on the study of politics.Footnote 22 For Lacan, it is through language that human beings become subjects in the first place. As children, we learn to relate to the world through what he terms the Symbolic order, which comprises the laws that structure our social world, including language. We are obliged to use these laws to express ourselves, yet words never cover the totality of what we experience. Something is always lacking or left over, which Lacan calls the Real, that which cannot be expressed. Nevertheless, it is through language that we are called into various identities – as belonging to the family, the nation, the workplace, the market, and so on – and are obliged to move through the world using the Symbolic. To deal with this lack, subjects collectively invest in fantasies, which are various images and desired objects that subjects pursue to gain a sense of completion and overcome feelings of lack. While subjects never attain the completion that these fantasies promise – because completion is impossible within the Symbolic order – pursuing these fantasies is enjoyable and provides a sense of meaning and stability to subjects.
Just as the conscious subject is constituted through language, so is their unconscious, and the unconscious comes out in our everyday speech. When we use language to express something consciously, Lacan believed we are also always obscuring or repressing something else. These repressed meanings become unconscious, but they resurface in our language in unexpected ways, often through ‘slips’ of the tongue or repetitions.Footnote 23 We can observe the unconscious in political language as much as in everyday life: Rogers and Zevnik argue that the unconscious ‘speaks’ in political discourse:
it displays itself in the symptoms of the political world, in the speech of policy, of decisions, of laws, of images, icons, and gestures and in protest, resistance, and ordinary violences, and, insofar as it speaks, psychoanalysis can say something about it.Footnote 24
Lacanian scholars of IR argue that researchers can find expressions of the political unconscious in ‘the speech, the acts, the gestures of speaking beings, particularly as they solidify into policy and practice in different political contexts’.Footnote 25 The logic of the unconscious can help to explain why certain political discourses resonate, how certain ideologies can persist through their contradictions, and how political and social identity comes to be constituted intersubjectively through interaction with various ‘others’. For example, we might think about how the expression of contradictory statements speaks to unconscious fantasies that subjects might hold about, for instance, ‘Schrödinger’s immigrant’ who is both stealing jobs from citizens and stealing unemployment benefits.Footnote 26 While this characterisation ‘makes no logical sense’, it is a powerful fantasy because it ‘attracts our desires to both “protect our jobs” and “make them work”’.Footnote 27 Similar work has been done on explaining the affective resonance of the Brexit campaign with British political subjects, which promised voters mutually exclusive outcomes such as unlimited economic growth and closed borders – the ability to transcend previous political constraints or ‘have one’s cake and eat it’.Footnote 28 Despite accusations of incoherence, these contradictory promises persist in political discourse because they successfully appeal to the unconscious desires and anxieties of voters, presenting them with both a fantasy of the belonging they will feel after ‘taking back control’ and an image of an immigrant other who is denying it to them.Footnote 29 This unconscious appeal sits alongside – and may interact with – more conscious or ‘rational’ reasoning by subjects for voting.
Other scholarship has used the unconscious to explain why policymakers make affective investments (as well as material investments) in neoliberal economic policy despite its visible failures, particularly since 2008.Footnote 30 Maher demonstrated that the ‘free market’ operates as a fantasy for policymakers, promising wholeness and prosperity and containing an inbuilt ‘transgressive state’ as the object of blame for its own failure. This fantasy gives neoliberal ideology its enduring affective appeal. Centring the unconscious also provides a subject-level explanation for questions such as why communities who are themselves affected by conflict reject reconciliation despite its promised gains.Footnote 31 These examinations of unconscious investments in conflict need not replace material explanations for continuing warfare, but can illuminate the ways that conflict provides meaning and a measure of ontological security on an unconscious level even for the very subjects harmed by these conflicts, as was the case in Cash’s research on Northern Ireland. These processes may go unspoken or unknown to the actors concerned, but they are nonetheless visible and can be explained through psychoanalytic theory.Footnote 32
The unconscious, then, is eminently observable in discourse. With psychoanalytic tools we can interrogate the working of the unconscious as constitutive of the political subject and the affective resonance of the discourses we study. In this regard, psychoanalytic approaches to meaning-making share the core assumptions of interpretive discourse-based approaches: discourse is constitutive of political subjectivity, and subjects in turn (re)constitute their world through producing meaning and discourse. Like discursive approaches, the study of the unconscious in IR through psychoanalysis is not a causal-predictive approach to be falsified through controlling variables, but theories of meaning-making and subjectivity with internal validity.Footnote 33 Most of the research on psychoanalysis in international politics looks at written discourse or images publicly available online, in print and in social media, or more historical material in archives. Using the language in these texts, researchers can interpret unconscious meaning and affective implications. The literature on LDA has unpacked the implications that Lacan’s core assumptions have for how researchers should approach empirical material.Footnote 34 Crucially, Lacan saw language as overdetermined with meaning: whenever we speak, our language holds a range of meanings beyond what we consciously intend.Footnote 35 By paying attention to the layers of signification in a discourse, we can explore meanings that are implied by texts but perhaps not made explicit or conscious.
However, LDA moves beyond notions of discourses as ‘storylines’ that are deliberately instrumentalised by actors to focus on the ‘unintended effects of language on the speaking subject’ and the ways that language reveals contradictions and slippages within political ideologies.Footnote 36 One would therefore look at language to understand how the Real is exposed through expressions of the Symbolic order and then how it is dealt with by subjects.Footnote 37 So where conventional content analysis or critical discourse analysis (CDA) might see contradictory strands of a discourse as ‘competing’ narrative frames that are instrumentalised or misunderstandings exploited by political actors to exert power, LDA focuses on the contradictions inherent in all language and discourse. Storytelling is always incomplete, and in trying to cope with or address inconsistencies or contradictions, subjects will create new ones because language never covers the totality of what is experienced.
For example, Tolis examines how the signifier ‘energy efficiency’ surfaces in EU climate policy discourse in a number of different ways: as the ratio between energy input and product output; as a metaphor for technology itself; as a metaphor for the Energy Efficiency Directive; and as saving money. CDA would look to find coherence or a stable ideological function across these usages, or would treat these different uses as competing framings deployed strategically by actors to advance interests (those of the legislator, the industrial lobbyist, the technocrat, for example). However, Tolis finds these terms are not used consistently in a strategic way by any one group of actors – they do not compete but coexist despite their inconsistencies, and the meaning is deferred across the signifying chain. LDA allows the researcher to explore how these fractures in the discourse are handled by subjects (through Lacan’s Four Discourses or four ways that subjects can relate to the Symbolic order) to assess whether they lead to instabilities that collapse the discourse, leading to something new, or whether the contradictions are integrated back into a dominant discourse.Footnote 38
Interestingly, Hook argues that LDA attends to the same thing that ‘clinical analysis seeks to facilitate’, which is ‘those disruptive or surprising “opening[s] of the unconscious” where other possible significations can be read out of an expressive attempt at communication’.Footnote 39 Both are attempts to search for the surfacing of contradictions, slips, or fractures that come to constitute the source material for analysing the operation of the unconscious. While LDA provides a compelling method for analysing the unconscious in language that already exists in written documents, researchers can access unconscious aspects of politics in a more direct and participatory way by interviewing using tools from clinical psychoanalysis.
Beyond the ‘individual’: psychoanalytic methods and the political unconscious
The psychoanalytic clinical situation shares some obvious parallels with the structure of the research interview that has become a core method in interpretive IR research: a one-on-one, open-ended conversation probing how participants think about the world and make meaning around certain issues.Footnote 40 As I will discuss in this section, the ‘individual’ session in psychoanalysis, like the individual interview in social sciences, never solely concerns the individual in the room: the interview enables the researcher and analyst to understand broader structures and social phenomena.
Freud’s aim for psychoanalytic therapy – and that of most of his successors – was to gain a full understanding of the mental structure of one patient at a time. The analyst would collect information on the family history and dreams of any given patient, which would be highly specific to their past. The analyst would seek to understand how their consciousness developed, their anxieties, repressed desires, and neuroses to understand the roots of mental symptoms they may be experiencing. However, it was from these studies of the individual mind that Freud came to build a theory of the general structure of the human psyche. So as much as Freud saw the psychoanalytic session as a vehicle for treatment or therapy through talking, he also saw it as a research method for building a general theory of consciousness. Indeed, Freud argued these twin aims of therapy and theory building are what made psychoanalysis distinctive as a discipline.Footnote 41
For example, while psychoanalysts might be interested in a patient’s specific family history, Freud was as interested in the social institution of the family as he was in its effects on an individual level. Often, the goals of research and symptom alleviation conflicted: Freud was frequently accused of sacrificing the successful treatment of individual patients to better build a theory of the human mind.Footnote 42 Thus, the ‘individual’ clinical session has always been a way to understand the structure of mind more broadly, and for the founding thinker of psychoanalysis, an ‘individual’ consciousness was never conceived of as existing outside of historical structuring forces. Freud’s later texts such as The Future of an Illusion,Footnote 43 Civilisation and Its Discontents,Footnote 44 and Moses and Monotheism Footnote 45 grappled with the structural constraints that civilisation puts on the human psyche, as well as the psychic appeal of fascism and religion as the collective expression of neurotic symptoms. The ‘individual’ consciousness in psychoanalytic practice is thus as much a product of societal and political structures as it is of any one person’s specific experiences.
The idea of a purely ‘individual’ unconscious was further problematised by later psychoanalysts, including Lacan, who thought about the unconscious in structural and intersubjective terms. The subject forms their identity and their consciousness through language that they did not create, and which never encompasses the totality of what they experience. As such, subjects are always relating to something other than themselves – the Other – through language and social structure, even in their innermost thoughts. This makes consciousness inherently relational, and for Lacanians, discourse is never an individual practice but is always already social, because meaning in language is always established through contact with the Other. In concrete terms, even where one might be alone with a patient in the clinic – or the participant in the interview room – the concepts one discusses, the discourses the participant expresses and the language they use have been constituted intersubjectively and through complex interaction with social orders. They express more than just isolated thoughts of one individual but are specific manifestations of sedimented, shared meaning-making processes. Thus, interviews can be a valuable means by which the researcher can understand collectively held meaning through long conversations with one participant at a time.
The main difference between using interviews in social science and in psychoanalysis is that the aim of interviews in social science is not the alleviation of symptoms in an individual. Psychoanalysing interview participants – asking them about their dreams, traumas, or early memories, making judgements about their personality, character, or object relations – is both unnecessary and unethical without therapeutic training. Since the IR researcher is not trying to access the unconscious of a specific patient to understand their personal mental symptoms, we are instead trying to understand the unconscious of interviewees as it pertains to their political subjectivity. IR researchers are looking for how the unconscious might ‘speak’ through the language participants use when they talk about the political, rather than when they talk about childhood or their dreams. Rather than interpreting the full complexity of the unconscious life of any one individual over hundreds of sessions as in therapeutic psychoanalysis, the purpose of using psychoanalytic methods in international politics is to interpret the expression of socially produced meaning. In Wedeen’s terms, interpretivist researchers seek to understand ‘the ways in which people attempt to make apparent, observable sense of their worlds – to themselves and to each other in emotional and cognitive terms’.Footnote 46 As such, repeated sessions with the same participant are not necessary: we can repeat interviews with different members of the same social group to understand unconscious dimensions of socially produced meaning.
As others have noted, psychoanalysis shares the core assumptions of interpretive research in social science.Footnote 47 These include commitments to: the value of the individual ‘case’ as opposed to collecting ‘representative’ samples; open-ended and flexible interactions with participants rather than uniform questionnaires or overly systemised research design; embracing the role and impact of the researcher’s subjectivity rather than attempting neutral observation; and the centrality of hermeneutical analysis to uncover layers of situated meaning rather than searching for ‘immutable fact’.Footnote 48 While in clinical psychoanalysis the individual ‘case’ is the mind of the individual patient, in international studies the ‘single case’ means the country context, social group, or research site.Footnote 49
The interpretive literature on interview methods has provided valuable ways to ‘thicken’ interview data and have richer and more detailed conversations with participants using an ethnographic sensibility.Footnote 50 It shares the broader focus of psychoanalytic scholars and discursive researchers on meaning-making as constitutive of subjectivity, paying attention to how subjects narrate their world and establishing enough trust and rapport to probe meaning and logics expressed by interviewees. However, while trust and rapport are still important factors in any interview, the aims of psychoanalytic interviewing are distinct. Where interpretivist literature on interviewing focuses on using elaboration prompts to ‘thicken’ the description that interview participants consciously produce and to get the participant to be more forthcoming, psychoanalytic interviewing is about loosening or bypassing the participant’s own conscious narrative control so that what emerges is less tightly filtered through their intentional self-presentation, thereby enabling the researcher to access the unconscious processes, such as fantasies, desires, and anxieties that influence how subjects navigate the social world beyond what they are explicitly conscious of. Psychoanalytic writing provides the researcher with a method to access the unconscious through structuring interpersonal conversations in a specific way. Psychoanalysts always focus on the observable, paying attention to what people say and how they act, rather than second-guessing a patient’s ‘real’ intentions. Sessions are designed to uncover unconscious fantasies and anxieties of the patient using a specially tailored method.Footnote 51 The next section will elucidate precisely how to structure encounters and use clinical psychoanalytic methods to help the interpretive researcher access unconscious aspects of international social and political life.
Interviewing psychoanalytically
Below I outline three central concepts integral to clinical psychoanalysis and how they might be used fruitfully as part of an interpretivist research agenda to explore affect and the unconscious in international politics. I demonstrate this with reference to my own research on the unconscious and partly conscious desires and anxieties of professionals involved in European security interventions in Africa. I have no clinical psychoanalytic qualifications, nor did I try to access the unconscious of any one interviewee as it pertains to their personal life. Rather, my goal was to understand unconscious investments that staff as a social group made in their work.
My empirical research is concerned with why European staff working on conflict interventions in the Sahel remain invested in repeating policies which they know to have failed, both in the Sahel (where the conflict worsened considerably as the decade-long intervention progressed) and across the world. It is this contradictory behaviour – knowing one thing and nevertheless doing another – which led me to consider the unconscious dimensions of international intervention and the ways that staff make investments in their work. Existing explanations for why failed interventions are repeated have focused on material or geostrategic incentives, as well as path dependency or bureaucratic lock-in. However, these accounts do not attempt to explain how staff working on the Sahel maintained their investment in the promise of their interventions despite being continually confronted with failure, both in the Sahel and in other contexts where many staff had worked, including Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As I will demonstrate when I discuss the ‘kettle defence’, psychoanalysis also provided me with a specifically tailored toolkit to interpret the contradictory responses I encountered in interviews, which I did not find elsewhere. A focus on the unconscious enabled me to explain a deeper ideological investment in repeating interventions which goes beyond official justifications and the deeply held assumptions, fantasies, and desires that enable intervention continuity through failure. My research explored the everyday disavowals and investments in fantasy that sustain interveners in their work and enable them to argue for the necessity of more interventions in the future, using Lacan and ideology critique as a theoretical framework. I used a mixture of interpretive methods, including participant observation and document analysis; however, the bulk of my analysis relied on 65 long-form interviews that I conducted with staff members.
Participants sometimes told me that our interviews ‘felt like therapy’ to them; other qualitative researchers have noted similar responses.Footnote 52 I never discussed the personal lives of any interviewees; all our conversations were exclusively related to their work. Nor did I attempt to ‘get into their heads’ and guess what they might be secretly thinking: my observations were all rooted in observable language and physical movement. However, interviews provided participants with the space to free associate about their professional experiences without the interruption or judgement they might experience in work contexts. Similar to the therapeutic encounter, my interviews were structured to involve minimal input on my part, allowing participants’ unconscious processes to come to the fore. The following three clinical psychoanalytic tools enabled the surfacing of unconscious logics in the interview room.
Transference
Transference is the phenomenon in psychoanalysis in which past feelings, beliefs, affects, desires, or expectations are unconsciously or partly consciously grafted onto a relationship in the present, particularly onto the clinician.Footnote 53 In clinical practice, the psychoanalyst is interested in how dynamics in the patient’s early relationships with parental figures are repeated in the relationship with the therapist. Patients unconsciously transfer feelings of aggression, fear, love or hate onto the therapist or attach to the therapist in certain ways, which become important clues as to the working of the patient’s unconscious. Transference thereby becomes one of the therapist’s most essential tools for making interpretations: paying attention to what kind of transference the patient makes allows the therapist to gradually understand the patient’s psychic development and object relations. For example, the psychoanalyst might notice that the patient demands excessive closeness with the analyst or expresses separation anxiety when there are pauses in treatment, which is a useful insight into the psychic life of the patient. However, transference is also a type of intersubjective connection that takes place in everyday relationships, whereby the dynamics of early relationships with caregivers are repeated with friends, colleagues, or romantic partners.
Transference relationships take months, if not years, to emerge in multiple weekly sessions as the patient and analyst become more acquainted with each other. The regularity of contact one might have with a therapist or a friend is neither possible nor necessary for most research questions in social science, nor is a familiarity with the personal lives of research subjects. However, transference is still a vital research tool because there are unconscious beliefs and expectations about the researcher – by virtue of their occupation or other characteristics they may possess – that are grafted on to the interview and the interviewer. They can become apparent in assumptions subjects make about the researcher, the nature of the knowledge that will be produced, what will be done with the research, the purpose of research, for example. This can be the result of previous interactions with researchers, journalists, or in other interview scenarios, or can originate in more fundamental beliefs about the role of knowledge. Participants may also have beliefs about knowledge or attributes that researchers should possess based on previous experiences.
Gallagher has demonstrated how Kleinian psychoanalysis and the related concept of projective identification can help the researcher use their feelings as a research tool.Footnote 54 As a white British researcher speaking to Zimbabwean participants, Gallagher used her feelings of discomfort in interviews to reflect on how participants unconsciously ‘pulled’ her in or ‘distanced’ her as an external object, and to learn about how the Zimbabweans she interviewed saw their own marginalisation by British colonialism. Transference gets at a different process to projective identification – which is about the evacuation of an unbearable affect onto an outside other – but Gallagher’s findings are an insightful guide to putting unconscious aspects of interviewee–researcher relations to the service of answering a research question.
Understanding how the elites I interviewed related to me as an ostensibly knowledgeable researcher and the expectations they transferred onto me and the interview revealed elements of their unconscious fantasies and desires relating to their work. Reading into this transference gave clues as to what kept intervention staff invested in their work despite failures. Through reading the transference, I learned that, to participants, I was part of a fantasmatic quest to find the formula for how to make intervention successful, and repeat this formula across the world. I was often positioned by interviewees as part of a broader reflective process with the objective of improving peacebuilding through scientific knowledge:
Your work is important, I know because I am actually in the system and I am a product of the system. But it doesn’t mean we are not every day asking with my colleagues about these questions [sic]. That’s a normal thing. And I have a unit for research because I want to have a critical pillar all the time asking the questions and to not just ‘doing’ things. And it’s important that you have self-reflection all the time.Footnote 55
Another interviewee identified themselves more with me as an academic than with other colleagues due to our capacity to reflect on interventions: ‘there is a difference between being a police officer and doing a mission for a year, it’s a different level of reflection and capacity for reflection that somebody like you and me with an academic background’.Footnote 56
During interviews, participants would ask for my interpretation of what had gone wrong in the Sahel and what the EU could have done better: often they tacitly or sometimes explicitly mentioned that they did not know themselves. It was not uncommon for interviewees to bring notebooks open to a blank page with a pen nearby to jot down my thoughts. Many asked me to send them my findings and emphasised how important learning from researchers was. Some asked if I wanted to work for the EU after completing my research.Footnote 57 Interviews sometimes closed with statements such as ‘thank you, continue your work: we need you’ when I had expressed no indication that my work was for policymakers.Footnote 58
Interviewees were searching for an authoritative resolution to uncertainties about their work: they had not yet found the answer to how to prevent interventions from failing, but hoped that as a knowledgeable researcher I might be able to help them, positioning me as a ‘subject supposed to know’. Building on Freud, Lacan theorised that patients transfer their desire for complete knowledge onto authoritative figures who are ‘subjects supposed to know’ such as the psychoanalyst, but also the teacher, the expert, or the scientist. These figures are supposed to possess the certainty of knowledge that subjects feel themselves to lack, and, as such, a great deal of transference takes place as one looks for these guarantees In Lacan’s words, ‘as soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere … there is transference’.Footnote 59
In one interview at an EU member state’s foreign ministry, I joined the call to find several other civil servants, some of whom had field experience. They said they would be happy to answer my questions but that they would like to learn from me first. This interview took place when discussions on whether to renew the mandate of the EU’s military training mission in Mali were ongoing as conditions in Mali were increasingly hostile to Western interveners. They proceeded to ask a number of questions about whether there was reliable evidence to demonstrate that it was harder to start a new intervention after withdrawing, and whether there were other examples where the EU had maintained an intervention and it had ‘paid off’. Despite only being able to ask my own questions at the end of the call, the interview was revealing of the transference participants made onto me as a researcher: to provide certainty in the form of hard evidence for things they wished to do anyway – to keep intervening. This was not conscious to them, much less explicitly articulated, but nevertheless visible through the transference onto me as an academic researcher, as an authoritative figure equipped with evidence to validate their desired action.
Paying attention to the transference allowed me to make a central finding in my research: Eurpoean staff were unsure of how to make their interventions more effective and were searching for authoritative answers. I learned through further participant observation, document analysis, and subsequent interviews that a quest for this authoritative knowledge in the form of a demonstrably effective intervention was a fantasy they were pursuing to prove that, as Europeans, they had the knowledge to build peace in a war-torn society. Pursuing this fantasy kept them invested in repeating interventions despite being aware of their ineffectiveness.
Reading the transference can also offer a more focused and immediate way of thinking about reflexivity and positionality in interviews. This dynamic can be a generative entry point to learn about what subjects hope to gain from the researcher that they might otherwise lack. Do previous experiences in similar situations emerge in a positive or negative sense? What do they expect from you and what do you expect from them? What does this say about the research topic? Do they interpellate the researcher into a specific kind of subject position? Thinking about transference has advantages compared to some other approaches to reflexivity: it keeps the focus on the research subject and the language or behaviour they exhibit demonstrably. It provides a more useful focus on concrete interactions between interviewer and interviewee, as opposed to the researcher’s reflections on their own feelings or hypothetical attempts to gauge their possible effect on participants by virtue of their identity characteristics, which is sometimes in danger of sliding into ‘navel-gazing’.Footnote 60
In psychoanalysis, transference also applies to the analyst – a process called countertransference – where the analyst’s own history can be unconsciously grafted on to the relationship with the client, which impacts how they make interpretations.Footnote 61 Psychoanalysts are supposed to undergo analysis themselves on a regular basis, and to discuss their patients with other analysts (maintaining anonymity) to mitigate this effect. This has some obvious parallels with reflexivity in social science research: reflecting on how one’s own pre-existing ideas or affects might bear on the ways that we research. There are several ways researchers can deal with these effects. First, writing down expectations, hopes, and fears they have before the interview so as to be conscious of them at the start. Second, closely paying attention and following the interviewee’s associations (as I will outline below) rather than imposing a pre-defined structure on the conversation. Third, in the interpretation phase, researchers can contextualise interview material with other interview and documentary material, and existing research is crucial to making triangulated interpretations, taking into account countertransference. Ultimately, a degree of countertransference is inevitable in any interview – no researcher is free from their own expectations – but transparency and rigour in how the interview is conducted can help to ensure certain affects from the interviewer do not come to dominate the interpretation.
Free association
Free association is the central activity carried out in the clinical situation: it is the ‘demand made on the patient that he [sic] should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection’.Footnote 62 In psychoanalysis, the clinician’s aim is to overcome the resistance of the patient to better understand their unconscious desires and object relations. To do so, the analyst needs to enable the patient to feel comfortable enough to say what comes into their head without censoring themselves: the aim is to loosen the grip of the conscious mind over their language. Through free association, the participant structures their thoughts through unconscious rather than fully intentional or rationalised pathways.Footnote 63 In allowing for the fuller expression of the unconscious, the analyst can then unpack the significance of the story beyond what the storyteller intended.Footnote 64
Getting interviewees to free associate means overcoming their resistance or defensiveness, a well-documented problem in social science research.Footnote 65 The ‘Free Association Analysis Method’, developed by Hollway and Jefferson, has been used by researchers in public health, nursing, and social work.Footnote 66 Inspired by classical psychoanalytic techniques, it creates the space for participants to freely express unconscious thoughts about a topic. Following Freud’s practice of letting ‘the patient himself choose the subject of the day’s work’ to ‘start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment’, free association is facilitated through inviting a narration of the experience of the participant in some way, and then following the participant’s less conscious or unconscious associations.Footnote 67
Rather than attempting to find coherence in the narrative by intervening to ask for clarification, letting the subject freely associate allows incoherence, contradiction, and avoidance to surface, so that the researcher can then accord them significance and interpret their meaning.Footnote 68 Where Schaffer’s ordinary language interviewing method involves asking ‘clarification prompts’ to get the interviewee to present a consistent logic or definition to the interviewer on how a word is used, in free association the interviewer does not intervene until the conversation is handed back to them, when they can invite the interviewee to make further associations on what they said.Footnote 69 Hollway and Jefferson, for example, used interviews to explore contradictory public attitudes towards crime.
At the start of an interview, I set out to participants that the discussion would not be structured. I often explicitly made the point that I did not have a list of questions and specified that tangents and anecdotes were welcome. I assured interviewees that all findings would be thoroughly and strictly anonymised. In many cases I did not even ask an initial question – I just introduced myself and said I was interested in the question of the poor results of the Sahel intervention in spite of the vast resources that the EU invested. This was typically enough for interviewees to start making associations. For others, I would ask their opinion on the effectiveness of their mission or programme, leaving them to define effectiveness. I would follow their associations on the progress of their mission, its obstacles, from which their investments would become apparent. With more reticent interviewees, I would start by asking them to narrate the career trajectory that brought them to the Sahel, and then I would ask them how they found working in the Sahel on the intervention, from which their associations would begin.
Early on in my research process, one interviewee’s free associations brought to light an important source of ambiguity, which went on to become a central feature of my findings. The interviewee made this association at the beginning of our interview. I had just described my interest in ‘the poor results of the EU’s intervention in the Sahel in spite of all of the resources they had put into resolving the conflict’. At this point the interviewee seemed ready to speak. They discussed the way different international organisations define the Sahel before making a new association about the meaning of failure:
The UN defines Sahel as more or less West Africa. We work only on the G5 countries which is a bit narrow minded. We have the Gulf of Guinea, but they want to keep it separate, as if it was different. You have borders but it is the conflict that is spreading all over the coastal states. [Pause] For political reasons we want to keep it separate because the Sahel, this is a failure, so if you address the problems in the coastal states with the same approach you convey the message that this will fail as well because it failed already once. So I think this is why you want to keep distinct.Footnote 70
The interviewee was arguing here that the EU wanted to keep the ‘Gulf of Guinea’ geographically separate from the ‘Sahel’ countries, even though they bordered each other and the violence in the Gulf of Guinea was a direct spillover from armed Islamist groups in the Sahel. I found it interesting that the interviewee used the word ‘failure’, which I had not used myself. I asked my informant, ‘in what ways do you think it has been a “failure” in the Sahel?’ The interviewee proceeded to make three further associations:
We haven’t solved the conflict, there were two coups. We were not able to prevent them. The colonels who took the power are still there. We’ve been fired more or less from some of the countries. So it’s not a very bright picture. It’s not what we had in mind. [Association 1] But we cannot say ‘it’s a failure because of us’, maybe it would have gotten worse without us, we don’t know. So if you can assess this – the EU presence on the ground, what it changed over the years, how it is different now thanks to the EU presence – then you can change the narrative that they failed. [Association 2] But nobody is able to assess this. So if you can in some way say thanks to the EU … this has stabilised … it would have been far worse without the EU, this would have been a great narrative to use. But so far we don’t have any evidence to feed into this narrative. [Association 3]
These associations came one after the other, testifying to the ambiguity about how to define failure and success in intervention. This incoherence came up repeatedly in interviews, but I would not have been as alert to it had the interviewee not had the space to free associate. Between each association, the interviewee took a pause, during which it would have been possible to intervene with my next question. Choosing not to immediately ask for clarification – as other methods such as ordinary language interviewing might have – meant that this unconscious ambiguity came to the surface. When it was clear that the interviewee was passing the conversation back to me, I again followed their last association on evidence and asked: ‘What kind of evidence do you think you would need to confirm this narrative?’ My interlocutor replied:
We are addressing the root causes so it is very difficult then to assess. Because when you rebuild the state as we are trying to do in Mali, in Niger, then you start really from scratch … I’m sure there is an impact, it is clear, but as long as you are not able to quantify it we don’t speak about failure. Because we don’t want to enter into the discussion, because we are not able to say how much we improved the situation.
The statement above sits in stark contradiction with what the same interviewee had already said. They had argued first that the intervention had obviously been a failure, then they said they couldn’t speak about failure because it would have been worse without the EU, then they said they do not have evidence to make such a claim, and actually collecting such counterfactual evidence may be impossible. It was through psychoanalytic theory that I was able to interpret this contradiction as a ‘kettle defence’ or hallmark of fantasies of wish fulfilment where the subject can ‘have it both ways’.Footnote 71 This kettle defence became a key finding in my research: it was backed up by the total absence in EU documents of clear criteria for judging a mission to have been a success or failure. To keep pursuing the fantasy of the successful intervention – in the Sahel and elsewhere – staff rely on this ambiguity. Were unambiguous, pre-defined benchmarks for failure to exist, staff would no longer have the flexibility to dispute what failure is, and there might be expectations that the EU should close its missions or intervene less. The contradiction spoke to the logic of the unconscious or the ‘primary process’ operating here: the method of free association allowed the unconscious processes I was interested in studying to come to the fore, which psychoanalytic theory could interpret. I could have asked for clarification, but this would have invited the interviewee to re-exert conscious control over their narrative and try to present a façade of coherence to paper over the contradiction, which would have masked the unconscious process I was most interested in.
Getting interviewees to free associate was a gradual process, and every interviewee was different: some were more willing to follow their own associations than others, and sometimes the free associations came later in the interview. Briefly jotting down statements from interviewees that were either unclear or surprising allowed me to turn the conversation back to salient points when there was a natural pause, so as not to interrupt their process of associations.
Evenly hovering attention
‘Evenly hovering’ or ‘free floating’ attention is another central element of psychoanalytic clinical practice. It consists of ‘not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same “evenly-suspended attention” … in the face of all that one hears’ as the ‘necessary counterpart’ to the patient’s free associations.Footnote 72 The analyst responds to the patient’s unconscious or partly conscious associations through an unconscious or partly conscious way of taking in their information: in this way, the clinical situation is an intersubjective process involving the unconscious of both parties. In his early clinical practice, when he concentrated too much on one detail or another, Freud found he selectively heard, keeping some points in his mind and disregarding others. He most often focused on things the patient said that confirmed what he already expected and thus struggled to gain new insights. Furthermore, much of the material that comes up can only fully be made sense of after further sessions: ‘the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognised later on’.Footnote 73
Psychoanalytic practice aims to remedy some of these difficulties by giving equal attention to everything the patient says. Instead of consciously ‘hunting’ for meaning in the session and trying to already draw conclusions in the interview, the analyst is encouraged to stay mindful of each association the patient makes, allowing their own unconscious and intuition to match that of the patient during the process. The aim is to be fully immersed in the patient’s language and behaviour so as to be attuned to the working of their unconscious and to respond where it emerges. Discussing LDA, Hook notes something similar: when reading, the Lacanian researcher should not maintain too sharp a focus on the literal meaning of a text but rather remain open to the many possible layers of signification, like a musician listening to an entire score of a piece rather than only the melody.Footnote 74
Of course, some selection is inevitable, and it is difficult not to fix one’s attention on anything at all for the entire interview. But making an effort to suspend one’s conscious analysis of the conversation until after the interview can yield rewarding results. Keeping an evenly hovering attention helped me to pick up on unexpected associations that may be revealing as to the unconscious aspects of how subjects related to their work. It enabled me to be as responsive as I could to each association the interviewee brought without privileging what I thought was the most interesting answer to my research question in that moment. Being mindful and alive to what the interviewee was saying and doing often meant noting down the embodied, partly conscious movements of interviewees, including their body language and affect.
In one interview, a participant was making associations on the extent to which the EU had made progress on resolving the conflict over the course of the past decade. The interviewee was hesitating over how progress should be measured and how bad the situation was when they arrived in Mali. As they spoke, the interviewee kept glancing at a point just behind me, and I turned around to see it was a map of Mali. The interviewee then gestured over to the map and pointed at the size of the country, arguing that much of the country is sparsely populated land north of the capital city, Bamako. ‘If you look at the map, you can see the scale is so large. Mali is more than twice the size of France’, they continued in an exasperated tone. ‘When the area to cover is so vast and the resources are so small, there are limits on what we can do.’Footnote 75 Bringing the map into the conversation had allowed the interviewee to verbalise an anxiety that had been latent in their language until that point, and the interviewee stood by the map for much of the rest of the interview. Looking at northern Mali on the map led them to make further associations on progress made in certain regions compared to others, working through the complex question of the extent to which the EU had been successful. Trying to remain present and less focused on consciously controlling the direction of the interview enabled the interviewee to make clarifying new associations.
On another occasion, I observed a staff member from a training mission in Bamako playing with the lanyard they wore around their neck, which was imprinted with the EU mission’s logo. I asked, ‘do you have to wear your lanyards everywhere on the mission premises?’ The response they gave was revealing:
… we bring it outside also. In fact, I’m always bringing this [points to the lanyard] to the airport when I sit on my flight and then I just put that in the bag and this it saves me from many problems at the airport.
The lanyards became a point of reference for the remainder of the interview, where they referred to wearing their lanyards while driving around the city:
… you will not find that anywhere in writing but when we are going around and the police stop us, for example, we always have this [points to lanyard] driving. Many of them have been trained by us at the airport, or in crisis management.
This moment became a pivotal finding. The EU’s mission was in Bamako with the primary objective of ensuring transparency and good governance in the Malian security sector, including the police and security services at the airport. On a daily basis, the mission’s staff trained Malian security forces on the rule of law and transparency to improve trust between the public and the state. The wearing of the lanyards to exempt themselves from corruption, which this staff member effectively admitted to me was widespread, was a ‘slip’, or an unconscious acknowledgement that the very same people they were training were engaging in acts of bribery and extortion that the EU’s mission was supposed to prevent. It was an unthinking admission that they had failed in their intervention. At the same time, the wearing of the lanyard was a sign for them of the popularity of the mission, which they saw as a success. The admission gave me a clue as to what was more important for staff – the cordial relationships they formed with trainees – which kept them invested in their daily work despite confronting evidence that the conflict was worsening and accusations of failure. It reflected patterns I later found in social media and official communications, where the EU focused on telling stories about good relationships with African recipients rather than impact on issues such as corruption, rule of law, or conflict mediation. The unthinking question about the lanyard, made in a state of evenly hovering attention, facilitated an important insight into how meaning was made among staff on the ground about what constituted ‘success’, which I was able to further uncover in written documents.
Evenly hovering attention comes with its own challenges: the practice involves the interviewer almost totally relinquishing conscious control over the conversation to allow space for the interviewee’s unconscious processes to come forward. To be fully present in this way as an interviewer means resisting the urge to impose a list of questions onto the conversation and instead committing to following the interviewee’s associations on a topic. It involves suspending any anxiety or preoccupation with immediately finding the answer to one’s research question during the interview, keeping faith that the answers will come through the interpretation of the material later on. The insights into unconscious processes above were possible because I chose not to attempt replicability or to use a common set of questions to interviewees that would allow me to make controlled comparisons between each interview. The unconscious relations of subjects to their social world emerge through following their associations, to allow slippages and contradictions to occur in different forms. The ‘unstructured interview’ is an approach that some interpretivist researchers take, but not all: Fujii’s relational interviewing, for example, still maintains a commitment to the semi-structured interview, posing questions across a common set of domains to permit comparisons across interviewees.Footnote 76
Evenly hovering attention is most easily practised when the researcher records the interview, which allows the interviewer to be present in the room, noticing even small affective pointers in speech and body language.Footnote 77 If the interview is recorded, transcripts can then be written up, read, and re-read closely to unpack their meaning in the context of other interviews. This allows the researcher to make unconscious associations in response to the interviewee’s free associations. Continuous note-taking, on the other hand, makes evenly hovering attention more difficult. If the interview cannot be recorded, it is advisable to take only brief jottings – points that the interviewer would like to come back to later – and then try to write down the entire conversation immediately after the interview concludes.Footnote 78
Conclusion
In this article I have demonstrated how IR research on affect, emotion, and the unconscious might benefit from a psychoanalytic approach to interviewing. The aims of the psychoanalytic interview are distinct from those of clinical psychoanalysis: they are non-therapeutic and aim to access unconscious aspects of political topics rather than the psychic life of an individual. Nevertheless, interpreting the transference, encouraging the interviewee to free associate, and evenly hovering attention enable the interpretive researcher to use psychoanalytic methods to generate theories on ideology, identity, belonging, and other aspects of political engagement. While this article has drawn mostly on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, including concepts such as the ‘subject supposed to know’, this research method is also suited to Kleinian, Winnicottian, and other theoretical standpoints that examine the unconscious. LDA, for instance, might then be deployed on interview transcripts to uncover further layers of meaning in a participant’s spoken discourse.
My findings complement existing research on interpretive methods; however, the aim of the psychoanalytic interview is not just to ‘thicken’ interview data, but to access the unconscious. Through paying attention to the transference that takes place in the interview, the researcher puts themselves in a position to better understand the unconscious investments that interviewees make in knowledge, or their relationship to the researcher and the ‘subject supposed to know’. This allows the researcher to reflexively engage with the expectations participants have of them and use them as an opportunity to learn about their topic. Getting interviewees to freely associate without attempting to find coherent narratives gives the interviewer insight into the unconscious processes that influence how subjects make sense of their world, beyond intentional, consciously controlled discourse, provided that the right environment is created for interviewees to speak openly without much conscious censorship of their thoughts. Finally, evenly hovering attention is a tool by which researchers make a methodological commitment to spontaneity, allowing space for slips by which the unconscious dimensions of certain topics might be glimpsed. To study the effect of the unconscious on the subject in international politics, I have argued that researchers should take greater advantage of the psychoanalytic methods that have been specifically designed to study this aspect of subjectivity. While my work has shown the promise of using psychoanalytic concepts in interviews with elites, Gallagher and Houde have demonstrated their promise in studying popular perceptions of international politics.Footnote 79
The purpose of clinical psychoanalysis is to identify and alleviate symptoms in a patient, through a working relationship and structured conversations that help to make unconscious processes observable. Psychoanalytic clinicians do not (and cannot) claim to know the patient better than themselves or to read the mind of an otherwise oblivious participant. They are not there to moralise, judge, or to ‘catch out’ a patient, but to listen to them and pay attention to what they have to say about their world. Psychoanalysts use a tried and tested methodology to bring unconscious processes to the attention of the patient in order to work through them together. In psychoanalytic IR, the aim is to bring repetitions, contradictions, and slippages we observe in the social world to the fore to better understand the fantasies and anxieties that underpin them, to explain why subjects get ‘stuck’ or how they navigate difficulties. The researcher, like the psychoanalyst, makes interpretations that are always open to contestation and may be challenged by the subject: where there is a power imbalance between researcher and subject and where academic representations may be harmful, the ethical and political implications need to be particularly carefully considered. Psychoanalytic work need not make normative claims about research subjects as people: the researcher and the psychoanalyst, just like the interviewee and the analysand, have their own unconscious or partly conscious desires, fantasies, and anxieties. These processes are an inescapable part of navigating the world as humans: there is no human subject free from inconsistency and no ideology free from contradiction. So the purpose of using psychoanalytic methods in research is not to pathologise or eradicate unconscious fantasies, contradictory beliefs, or anxieties but to understand them in order to explain specific research puzzles on political subjectivity which might remain unexplained in other theoretical frameworks. These methods can be used for progressive research agendas; to make unconscious fantasies and investments conscious and thereby opening up the possibility of reworking or reshaping them for more emancipatory ends.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Anne-Marie Houde, Zach Klamann, Albert Cullel Cano, Asha Herten-Crabb, and Chris Deacon for reading earlier drafts, as well as to the Theory/Area/History cluster at the LSE International Relations Department for the excellent feedback I received. I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments: responding to them greatly enriched the paper.
Funding statement
This article draws on research conducted as part of a PhD funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council [2632453].
Competing interests
The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.
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