Abstract
In this chapter, we explore the employment of psychoanalytic ideas in one important area of social research, narrative research, beginning with a discussion of the continuities between psychoanalytic thinking and the narrative turn, briefly reviewing selected work that has drawn on both these paradigms. We emphasise the way in which psychoanalysis provides conceptual and methodological tools for reinserting the focus on subjectivity, and in particular the affective dimensions of subjectivity, in the narrative domain. In the second part of the chapter, we provide a worked example of how psychoanalysis might be employed alongside a critical narrative focus to analyse an interview extract. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate, in an empirically grounded way, that bringing psychoanalysis into the frame alongside narrative work allows for the emergence of nuanced understanding and interpretation, while at the same time ‘interrupting’ – that is, offering a reflexive space for – the research project itself.