Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The lyrebird is an endangered Australian creature, almost a strange peacock with a steely grey body and tail feathers flanked on either side with an ostentatious whorl. What makes this bird unique is that in order to attract a mate, the lyrebird sings a song that consists of every notable birdsong, forest noise, or human-generated sound the bird has ever heard, sung in a sequence composed by the bird. The lyrebird faithfully mimics these noises in timbre and resonance, and repeats them exactly as they were originally heard: the impersonation is so good that it fools practically all other creatures who have the privilege of eavesdropping in on the vanishing bird's song. The researcher attracted to interviews is not a lyrebird[1], for she interprets what she hears and it is impossible for her to reproduce the experience of the interview. She has neither the faculties to reproduce the talk of the interview accurately (memory, experience, or the unconscious gets in the way), nor the technology (even the best recording will fail us at least once, often when we need it the most). Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes that "[f]or many of us the best way to be neutral is to copy reality meticulously" (95); or in other words, the model offered by the lyrebird. An unforgivable mistake that research falls prey to is the promise made by positivism and empiricism that interviewing is a way to hear the real voice of the interviewee, which may then be re-presented to others as a truthful depiction of what really happened in the interview, untainted by the researcher. Many common strategies that are used in interview research reporting implicitly aim at telling the "truth" about the interview (examples of these strategies include the use of large block quotations excerpted from interview transcripts, the creation of comparative thematic categories to classify the transcripts, and software such as NVivo and NUD*IST). These strategies can have the effect of obfuscating the researcher's involvement in the interview and promising to the reader that the reporting of the interview is objective. I find this position on the space of the interview to be inadequate, and hope to open up a different kind of space for the interviews in my research that enables the reader to actively engage in the process of interpretation alongside me as the researcher.
Repository Citation
Hurst, Rachel. "Complicated Conversations between Interviewing and Psychoanalytic Theory." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss1/12