In this paper I will share my experience of the way in which sustained and in-depth reflexivity during my PhD research illuminated parallel processes, ultimately leading to a greater self-understanding. Shifts in self-identity, tensions between different roles and working through psychosocial defences will be discussed. In particular I will suggest that my own breakthrough and a breakthrough in the data were inter-dependent outcomes.

In this presentation, we will unfold potentials for learning from experience to strengthen researcher reflexivity in a PhD project which aims to develop knowledge about patients’ care needs in a standardized cancer pathway, in the light of significant health policy changes in the Norwegian welfare state. To investigate this empirically, we opted for a psychosocial methodological approach that could both broaden and deepen understanding of cancer patients’ experience, as situated in the intersection between policy and care practice. Specifically, we rely on a biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) to generate data material, interviewing ten participants who are cancer patients with different diagnoses and in different stages of the cancer patient pathway.

Since 2020, BNIM has seen a significant development from the original one-person methodology to an “improved and more powerful two-person methodology (Wengraf, 2023). In line with this, reflexivity is now built in as an integral part of the method. We will share our experiences as PhD candidate (Baardsen) and supervisor (Gripsrud) with our implementation of the new “Researcher Reflexivity Track (track III) in BNIM. We illustrate how in Track III the lead researcher not only records the traces of the saying, thinking, and feeling of the interviewees, but similarly documents her own experiences as a researcher in the form of writing free-association notes. We hope to discuss this work with reference to Tom Wengraf’s (2023) claim that the quality of the researcher’s “them- search” depends on the quality of the researcher’s “me-search”.

In this presentation we will unfold potentials from learning from experience related to researcher reflexivity.

*The title is used with permission from Tom Wengraf

All references to Tom Wengraf in the text are related to his yet-to-be published

Handbook BNIM 3.

This paper is an overview of the author's debut book based on her doctoral research on holding conversations with people who felt themselves to be possessed by ghosts and spirits.Initially, in these conversations she approached her participants with curiosities about their past experiences which was the language of speaking and listening from the discipline of psychoanalysis.Adherence to one kind of psychoanalysis led her to failure in learning from her experiences.Painstakingly, she learned to relinquish her discipline and be increasingly open to being taught a new language and the unknown experiences evoked in her from her engaged conversations with ghosts and persons who possessed them.

This paper, is in retrospect, an invitation to psychoanalysis to relax its gaze and set aside the blinders that rise when it views spiritual experiences, a tendency to pathologize extreme states and appeals for a response capacity crucial for deep engagement. Inspired by Bion's warning against our tendency to be blinded by theoretical constructions, this paper will highlight moments from the author's work where her analytic "presencing" (Eshel, 2017) opened the intersubjective field to experiences making the two persons engaged in the conversations emerge as 'sublime subjects' (Civitarese, 2017) and ghosts that possessed each of them emerge as gurus or teachers awaiting a receptive student.