Understanding feelings: Engaging with unconscious communication and embodied knowledge

The field of emotional geographies raises challenging methodological questions about how researchers produce knowledge about the feelings of others. Countering scepticism about the methodological possibilities of psychoanalysis, I argue for and illustrate its potential. Drawing on a single research interview, I show how psychoanalytic ideas about unconscious communication can be used to help to make sense of emotional dimensions of research interviews and the narratives they generate. I introduce the idea of the “receptive unconscious”, which I connect with the building of trust and the concept of rapport. Turning to transference communications, I clarify the different ways in which researchers and clinicians work with unconscious communications. I revisit debates about empathy, which I distinguish from identification and link to the counter-transference. I show how my embodied, affective response during and after the interview gave me clues that eventually furthered my understanding of emotional dimensions of the interviewee's narrative. This analysis contributes to methodological debates about researching emotional geographies and to discussions of the methodological uses of psychoanalysis in social research. Rather than construing psychoanalytical methodologies as highly specialist and intrinsically different from generic qualitative research practice, it seeks to illustrate their potential in relation to critical forms of reflexivity well-attuned to understanding felt experience.