Emotional investments in narrative interviews: a practice theoretical contribution

Abstract

This chapter describes a psychosocial narrative method that focuses on modes of being in and relating to the world through practice. Whereas the “cognitive interpretations” prevalent in narrative research tend to conflate our attachments to the world with verbalized interpretations, psychosocial narrative research emphasizes that narratives are informed by emotional processes beyond language and consciousness. Much psychosocial narrative research proceeds by combining a discourse-theoretical framework with a psychoanalytic notion of individual, emotional processes. This chapter develops a psychosocial narrative method along a sociological practice, rather than a discourse, theoretical conception of the social.

In this practice-theoretical conception, subjects are seen as coming into being by their productive engagement with the world, and the analytic focus is on the motivational energies involved in these psyche-world-interactions. While psychoanalytic theory typically sees investments in the world as a concealment of more “authentic” drives, the practice-theoretical psychosocial theory could be combined and developed with a Winnicottian notion of emotional investments that includes the drive to invest energies in the outer world. Developed this way, the psychosocial narrative method offers a tool to grasp emotional investments in the world as “modes of being driven,” and of managing anxieties through bridging inner and outer worlds within different societal contexts and fields of practice.

To illustrate how this method could be employed, the final part of the chapter presents an example from research on family practices in the financial elite in Norway. I suggest that a notable reromantization of domestic femininity within this class fraction could be interpreted as a “response to relevance,” informed by motivational energies that arise in these interviewees’ specific experience of being “radically exposed to,” and “invested in,” the world. Rather than a renunciation of the critical potential of psychosocial theory, this practice-theoretical optic directs attention to the social institutions with which the interviewees engage, and how these institutions ignite reifying and defensive, or life-promoting, motivational energies.