This article discusses the use of free-association as a data production technique in psychosocial research, and how it may interact with the use of personal artefacts as a means to stimulate the emergence of free-associative discourse. While free-association aims to destabilise orderly accounts of the self (Fink, 2007), personal artefacts are used to stimulate the production of meaning-making narratives (Edwards & l’Anson, 2020), in search of coherent interpretations of subjectivity. As both techniques seem to work in opposite directions, the productivity of using them together could be questioned. However, I argue that experimenting with this apparent paradox may open up new ways to explore subjective experience.

To examine this, I look at an artefact-prompted free-associative interview conducted with Amelia, a Chilean early years teacher, in the context of a psychoanalytically-informed empirical study on the intersubjective and unconscious aspects that underlie the production of teachers’ professional identities in a group setting.

Amelia described the act of narrating herself through her personal artefact – which seemed to symbolise past and present relationships with multiple O/others throughout her life – as a confirmation of being a subject. While this subjectifying function of narrating oneself (Butler, 2005) and its enabling of a certain experience of continuity may seem to undermine the decentring aim of free-association, I argue that a free-associative setting is precisely what makes possible for a discourse characterised by contradictions, breaks, gaps and discontinuities to emerge.

The work that gives origin to this paper resonates with the call to reflect on learning from experience, in that the teachers’ relational production of their professional identities in a free-associative group setting seemed to allow them to envision new articulations of their subjectivities. Lastly, it also aims to contribute to a wider discussion on what it means to engage in the co-production of psychosocial research.

On 11th March, 2020, the WHO declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. As our geographies closed down on one another, the gravity of our lived experience in India wasn’t fairly represented. The news said one thing, our lived experience was another. As mental health practitioners, we were left to make sense of this dissonance of our shared reality based on isolated personal experiences. In this reflective piece, we combine the voices of two mental health practitioners in India; (Rhea Gandhi and Smiti Srivastava) as we piece together what it has been like to be in a helping profession whilst living in different parts of India - elucidating the complexity and diversity of our country through our experiences with ourselves and our clients inhabiting different, moving spaces. In documenting this together, we act as mirrors to one another, seeing the missing parts of a shared picture and reflecting on our work in India through the years 2020-2023.

This presentation explores the need to understand adolescent identity development from a psychosocial perspective. Much research has relied on a positivistic lens to study this topic, reducing this nuanced and complex developmental phase to a single surface snapshot understood through pre-determined theoretical categories. With psychosocial methodologies, exploring the subjective specificity and complexity of such experiences has become possible. Drawing on The Free Association Narrative Interview Method (FANI) in the study upon which this presentation is based has facilitated the study of the intertwined aspects of young people's external, social world and their internal, intrapsychic landscapes. In interviewing 6 participants, using the FANI method allows each to share a narrative as they choose and direct themselves. Using a psychosocial theoretical framework, interpretation can provide further understanding based on the premise that each person is not purely a rational agent able to dictate a linear composition of their life history. Instead, they will decide which experiences to focus on and which points to reveal and how. Analysis can then be drawn from how and why these choices have been made consciously or unconsciously allowing a more holistic picture.

This paper will encompass a way of harnessing experiential learning in psychosocial and psychoanalytic research methodologies through use of artwork. I will also discuss use of art making in the higher education teaching and learning context with Undergraduate and Postgraduate students in their curriculum, as well as within a student enrichment club model that I have pioneered in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic studies (PPS) at the University of Essex. I will discuss the use of artwork as a methodological tool in the theory building formulation process in my clinical research. As a psychotherapist, academic, artist and illustrator, I use artwork to exemplify my ideas and concepts, as well as to access my unconscious thinking, feelings, countertransference and unconscious dynamics in the clinical work. I will argue that Freud utilised artwork as a way of formulating the unconscious processes of his conceptual models in spatial terms, as an aide to his thinking, as well as a way of illustrating and exemplifying them. I will show a range of my artwork, as well as Freud and Winnicott’s drawings in order to discuss these themes. I will be discussing not only how I use these technique in my own research, as shown in my book ‘The Physical and Virtual Space of the Consulting Room; Room-object Spaces’, but I will also be discussing R. D. Hinshelwood’s method of ‘Case Study Research’ data analyse (Hinshelwood 2013, 2015, Wright 2022 and Kegerreis & Wright et al 2023) that is being used in a pioneering way in the PPS Professional Doctorate programs of which I am Director. I have shown here, that in this paper I will address the conference themes of experiential learning, psychosocial and psychoanalytic methodologies and psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching.