One of the earliest attempts to understand and explain indigenous healing in South Africa was made by Laubscher (1937) in his book entitled: "Sex, Custom and Psychopathology". Using Western medical and psychological standards, Laubscher described an indigenous healer as a quack whose work could only be meaningful to the superstitious, culturally retarded and primitive populations. What Laubscher was trying to suggest was that indigenous African people who embraced Western culture and civilization would stop consulting indigenous healers whose practices could be interpreted by those "converts" as meaningless and retrogressive.

The strong ethnocentric flavour in Laubscher's argument is further reflected in his explanation of "go thwasa" (a process through which an individual becomes an indigenous healer) as a schizophrenic process. Since he held the view that schizophrenia is an inherited biochemical disorder, he treated the finding that indigenous healers have ancestors who were also indigenous healers as a confirmation of a psychopathology with a hereditary basis. The possibility that the practice of indigenous healing may have validity in a scientific or epistemological framework other than that with a preconceived methodological approach was not raised by Laubscher.

The line of thinking as reflected in Laubscher's work is also evident in many other studies that have tended to approach indigenous healing from within the context of similar preconceived modes of inquiry. For example, Lee (1969) described "go thwasa" as a psychoneurotic condition, thus giving a suggestion that this experience is not as disintegrative as Laubscher had earlier suggested. Hammond-Tooke (1975) in his authoritative paper entitled: "African world view and its relevance to psychiatry", echoed the same sentiment and went on to suggest the possibility of gender differences in terms of the severity of the supposed psychoneurosis. In his view male indigenous healers as compared to their female counterparts:

"... appeared nervous, moody and probably homosexual, much given to hysterical giggling. Male initiates adopt female dress and sometimes speak in high pitched voice" (p.31).

What is interestingly common and very striking the three authors I have referred to above is their tendency to invalidate some non-Western experiences using methodological tools that tend to disregard the perspective of the experiencing individuals. In other words, these researchers generally failed to see the world through the eyes of those being studied. According to Heddegard and Hakkarainen (1986), a social scientific inquiry calls for a considerable level of involvement by the researcher with the people whose experiences he / she is trying to investigate. The suggestion here is that the researcher should be involved by becoming part of the subject's life situation and by also seeing the world through the eyes of such a person. Elkonin (1986) who had earlier expressed the same sentiment, gave an example of an investigator who need to bracket his / he preconceived ideas and take part in children's play if his / her goal is to understand the inner relations of such an activity. By looking at the play activity through the eyes of the child, Elkonin maintained, the researcher will be in a position to produce detailed descriptions of the experience.

A scientific method of inquiry that has consistently advocated for bracketing of preconceived ideas and the understanding of phenomena as they appear to consciousness is phenomenology. In his often quoted work entitled: "An application of phenomenological method in psychology", Giorgi (1975) identified eight characteristics that make phenomenology a viable approach to the study of human phenomena. As I will try to illustrate by describing a few research studies later, these characteristics that Giorgi identifies appear to be the essential ingredients of that orientation that needs to be adopted by those seeking to understand indigenous healing.

I will now summarize these eight characteristics:

1. Fidelity to the phenomenon as it is lived: This means that all descriptions reflecting the subject's lived experiences are considered an important source of data for analysis. Equally important here is the need to make explicit the perspective of the researcher as this is seen to have a bearing on the research situation.

2. Primacy of the life-world: In order to capture the subject's lived experiences, the researcher will need to go back to the life-world in which the subject is embedded. This should provide the necessary point of departure in terms of a research undertaking. To quote Giorgi here:

"By the life-world phenomenologists mean the everyday world as lived by all of us prior to explanations and theoretical interpretations of any kind. Since the life-world is the ground for all science and systematic knowledge, psychology conceived as a human science must always stay in touch with this inexhaustible source of data" (1975, p.99).

3. Descriptive approach: Because of its reliance on what is communicated by the subject in the form of language, phenomenological psychology nrrds to rigorously analyze the descriptions given in order to understand human phenomena. This point has been extensively covered by Giorgi in his subsequent writings (see Giorgi, 1986; 1994).

4. Expression of the situation from the subject's viewpoint: In setting up a structure for research, phenomenological psychology is very much concerned with the subject's viewpoint. The point here is that rich data can best be obtained if the subjects are given the freedom to choose their own examples of lived experiences.

5. Situation as unit of research implies a structural approach: Since phenomenological psychology accepts lived situation as the basic unit of research, there is a need to take into account the interpersonal context that is created by the very act of investigation. Understood from this angle, it therefore becomes imperative to consider the exchanges between the researcher and subject when research data is interpreted.

6. From the personal to the general: Giorgi tried to draw a line between traditional experimental psychology and phenomenological psychology in terms of how theoretical concepts are formulated. Unlike the former which tends to formulate its concepts before undertaking the investigation, phenomenological psychology seeks to develop these concepts after contact with the data. In this sense, phenomenological psychology would start with the personal accounts of the subjects and on the basis of these gradually generate and construct theoretical positions.

7. Search for meaning: While the measurement method in scientific research is generally regarded as an important route, phenomenological psychology seeks to directly get to the meaning of the phenomenon without necessarily having to go through the measurement process in the strict sense of the word. As Giorgi (1975) wrote:

"The value of the phenomenological approach is the direct access it provides to meaning by interrogating the qualitative aspects of the phenomenon" (p.101 - 102).

8. Engaged researcher: Wether or not the researcher should play an active role in the constitution of the data has been a debatable issue in psychological research. A common question that is often asked is: Should the researcher play an active role in the creation of the data or should he / she treat the data as self-made and complete in itself independent of the investigator? Though he is not in favour of taking an extreme position on this matter, Giorgi is of the view that phenomenological psychology should treat the results of a scientific inquiry as products of an engaged researcher.

By way of demonstrating the viability of a phenomenological method in the investigation of indigenous healing, I propose to present three illustrative research studies that sought to investigate some aspects of this healing practice. In his dissertation submitted for a Masters degree, Schweitzer (1977) sought to understand some categories of experience amongst the Xhosa speaking people of South Africa. One such experience that he studied is the "thwasa" experience which I have already briefly referred to in this paper. Schweitzer's major objective in the dissertation was to uncover the real nature and meaning of the "thwasa" phenomenon. Approaching the subject from a phenomenological perspective, he challenged the predominant universalist medical model that had tended to project this experience as a reflection of psychopathology.

Schweitzer described the "thwasa" phenomenon as a creative illness in which the affected individual:

1. is helped by an established indigenous healer, clan members and the whole community to interprete his / her symptoms within an African (Xhosa) cosmology;

2. establishes positive contacts with the spiritual world; and,

3. acquires respect and wisdom in his / her community by virtue of the new role as an indigenous healer.

Following from his dissertation, Schweitzer collaborated with Buhrmann (a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst) to write a journal article on the "thwasa" experience. Extending on the phenomenological interpretation, Schweitzer and Buhrmann (1978) viewed the experience as:

"... a process of disintegration, resulting in chaos, which then enables reintegration to occur" (p.15).

Concluding the article these two authors went on to suggest that the "thwasa" phenomenon be seen as a meaningful experience that is purposefully directed towards altering and determining the individual's new role in society.

The second study that I would like to refer to is also a Master's dissertation by Miller (1984). In this particular study, the researcher made a phenomenological investigation of some aspects of a Zionist healing service. Specifically Miller sought to explicate the nature and meaning of music and dance as they are perceived and experienced within the context of a spiritual healing service. To obtain his data, the researcher in this particular study identified a Zionist spiritual healer who served as a chief informant. The researcher considered two reasons for the choice of this one spiritual healer. Firstly, it was established that the informant was a spiritual healer of good standing in the community, having 32 years of experience. Secondly, the informant had already served as a subject in two previous phenomenological investigations. Furthermore he expressed a willingness to participate in this third investigation.

According to Miller, the choice of phenomenology as an appropriate methodological approach for his study was based on his criticism of previous studies that had tended to give a passing judgement on the syncretic practices of the African spiritual churches. In his view, such research imposes a Western perspective on this unique belief structure by distorting its essential meaning whilst at the same time superimposing extrinsic schemata of analysis. By adopting a phenomenological stance, Miller thus located his study within the qualitative research tradition the primary task of which is not to prejudge but to interprete phenomena as lived and experienced.

To obtain data, Miller became a participant observer for a period of 12 night healing services which he tape recorded. In addition, he conducted a series of unstructured interviews with the chief informant who was encouraged to give his own understanding of the meannig of the songs and dance within the context of the healing service. A very important finding by Miller was that music and dance turn potential chaos of existential isolation by uniting the affected individual and others in the group in a collective experience of being together. Miller further established that by constituting themselves as a community in this way, these individuals affirm and legitimate the possibility of existing in relation to a cosmic mode of being.

The third and final study that I would like to briefly present is my own Ph.D thesis entitled: "The psychological validity of the process of indigenous healing". The specific aim of this study was to describe and interprete the process of indigenous healing as perceived by the indigenous healers themselves. The data obtained was analyzed in terms of the four phases of phenomenological explication as set out by Giorgi (1985) and Kruger (1988). Briefly, the four phases are as follows:

1. Sense of the whole - During this phase the text is read several times with two specific aims in mind: (i). to understand the language of the describer, and (ii). to get an intuitive and holistic grasp of the data. What is basically required of the researcher at this stage is to remain faithful to the data by avoiding any temptation to interrogate the research protocols in order to derive psychological insight.

2. Discrimination of "natural meaning units" (NMU's) - This second phase requires the researcher to breakdown the text into naturally occurring meaning units that will be manageable and easy to analyze. The basic requirement is that each NMU which spontaneously emerges from the text should convey a particular meaning. The researcher should then articulate the essence of these NMU's using the subject's phraseology as much as possible in order to "let the data speak for itself".

3. Transformation of NMU's into psychologically expressed themes - During this phase the researcher starts by rigorously reflecting on the NMU's which are still in the ordinary language of the subject. According to Kruger (1988), this act of reflection is intended to transform the NMU's into central themes that are expressed in psychological language. A related activity is that of imaginative variation whereby the researcher reflects on the imagined possibilities inherent in each central theme and discards those that fail to withstand criticism.

4. Synthesis of emerging themes into a consistent psychological structure - This last phase is usually divided into two steps as recommended by Kruger (1988). During the first step, all the central themes are synthesized to communicate the psychological insights contained, taking the particular context of the experiencing individual into consideration. During the second step all these psychological insights contained in the specific descriptions are put together to develop a general description of the subject under investigation.

Following the four phases as I have outlined above, three themes, each addressing some aspect of the process of indigenous healing were consequently identified:

1. "Go thwasa" is a preparatory step that leads to integration of personality, acquisition of clinical competencies and attainment of some transcendental experiences.

2. Indigenous healers attach culturally congruent labels to clusters of physical and psychological symptoms presented by their clients.

3. Indigenous healing is a multiphasic process that is aimed at the client and the total home environment while at the same time providing an opportunity for some to access spiritual dimensions of their experiences.

By way of summary the following important points emerge from the three illustrative research studies that I have presented in this paper:

1. Contrary to certain popular medical and anthropological beliefs, some non-Western experiences like "go thwasa" are perceived as meaningful if studied and understood from the perspective of the experiencing individual.

2. Given the calls for the recognition of indigenous healing in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, there is a need to understand this alternative form of health care. In this regard phenomenology appears to be a viable approach as it tends to give primacy to the lived expeiences of those studied.

References

Elkonin, A.J.J. Introduction. In Ashworth, P.D., Giorgi, A., and De Koning, A.J. (eds). Qualitative Research in Psychology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Hammond-Tooke, W.D. (1975). African world-view and its relevance for psychiatry. Psychologia Africana, 16, 25 - 32.

Heddegaard, M., and Hakkarainen, P. (1986). Qualitative research as instructional intervention. In Ashworth, P.D., Giorgi, A., and De Koning, A.J. (eds). Qualitative research in psychology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Giorgi, A. (1994). A phenomenological perspective on certain qualitative research methods. Journal of phenomenological psychology, 25 (2), 190 - 220.

Giorgi, A. (1986). Theoretical justification for the use of descriptions in psychological research. In Ashworth, P.D., Giorgi, A., and De Koning, A.J.J. (eds). Qualitative Research in Psychology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Giorgi, A. (1985). Sketch of a psychological phenomenological method. In Giorgi, A. (ed). Phenomenology and psychological research. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Giorgi, A. (1975). An application of phenomenological method in psychology. In Giorgi, A., Fischer, C., and Murray, E. (eds). Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Kruger, D. (1988). An introduction to phenomenological psychology (second edition). Cape Town: Juta and Company Ltd.

Lee, S.G. (1969). Spirit possession among the Zulu. In Beattie, J., and Middleton, J. (eds). Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Miller, M. (1984). Singing and dancing in holy spirit: an understanding of the Xhosa Zionist healing service. Unpublished master's dissertation. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.

Schweitzer, R.D., and Buhrmann, V. (1978). An existential-phenomenological interpretation of thwasa among the Xhosa. Psychotherapeia, 4, 15- 18.

Schweitzer, R.D. (1977). Categories of experience amongst the Xhosa: A psychological study. Unpublished master's dissertation. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.

Sodi, T. (1996). The psychological validity of the process of indigenous healing. Ph.D thesis in progress. Cape Town: University of Cape Town.

Sodi_Tholene/HSC@caddy.univen.ac.za

University of Venda

Department of Psychology

Private Bag X5050

Thohoyandou

0950

When we ask people what they feel, or what they desire; and ask them to account for their opinions or attitudes, and the motives for their actions; what can we expect in terms of them being able to respond to our enquiry? I will attempt to address this question in relation to a context where I acted as a programme evaluator and where the question has a practical significance.

The context is an evaluation of the Eastern Cape Dramaide project. This was a six month pilot project which explored the use of `participatory theatre' methods in sex and life skill education in high schools in the Eastern Cape. This project was part of a larger Dramaide initiative concerned with development of theatre methods in life skills education. The project team consisted of six members who were directly involved as facilitators, and two administrators.

The project set out to engage high school pupils in a reflection upon their sexuality and sought to instil conscious informed decision making in respect of sexual behaviour, particularly in the context of the HIV epidemic. This work was set in a general value framework which upheld and attempted to instil such values as self-respect, tolerance of others, regard for other and the need for appropriate assertive behaviour in the sexual arena.

The Dramaide intervention consisted of a four stage intervention comprised of: 1) a needs analysis process; 2) a life skills education process; 3) presentation of a play to be used as a stimulus for engaging the pupil's in approaching their own sexuality and relationships in a questioning way, and leading to formulation of constructive ways of dealing with problematic issues in their lives; 4) an Open Day where the school took up the issues addressed in the project as their own, and planned their own community event to address these issues.

The philosophy behind the project was somewhat of a unique assimilation of theatre and social development methodologies. The methodology drew heavily on the work of Augusto Boal (1985) (image theatre, forum theatre, guerilla theatre). The epistemological foundations of the participatory research method used, were quite strongly influenced by the work of Paulo Freire. However, I will not go further into these ideas or the exact nature of the intervention, as interesting as it is, for I wish in this context only to explore a particular dimension of this project arising from my own involvement in it.

My role in the project was programme evaluator. I was contracted as an outside researcher to evaluate the project with respect to its feasibility; it being a pilot project. In addition I was to pass on my findings to the team as the project proceeded so that the team could use this information in the ongoing development of their intervention. This latter function is termed process evaluation. As a process evaluator I was closely associated with the team throughout the project, and witnessed the planning and execution of the four stage intervention in six of the ten schools chosen for the project.

A full evaluation is presently in preparation and the purpose of this presentation is to detail only a few, specific facets of the comprehensive evaluation process, which allow me to address the topic of my presentation, `the hermeneutics of distanciation in programme evaluation'.

There were many methods employed in this evaluation. We (a research assistant and myself) used questionnaires, focus group discussions, interviews, observation, audio-visual recordings of interventions and audience responses, and analysis of plays and other cultural productions performed on the Open Days.

For the purposes of this presentation the methods used can be divided into two broad categories. Those (principally focus groups and interviews) which asked people to express their thoughts, feelings and attitudes, and those which interpreted their experience, so to speak, from the outside. The latter category includes observation, audiovisual recording of events and an image theatre technique presently to be discussed. The former set of methods are based on an implicit trust that people are more or less reliable in accounting for their own experience. The latter approach, usually employing observation as a method, tends to be more wary of people's interpretations of their own experience, and generates alternative, contrary interpretations (of motives especially). We might say that the former relies on a hermeneutics of trust or faith, whereas the latter employs a hermeneutics of suspicion.

There are many ways of articulating the dialectical relationship between these contrasting hermeneutic orientations. The former kind of understanding which tends to trust that the psychological subject is finally best positioned to articulate his/her own reality, is typically associated with humanism and phenomenology, and is well represented in psychology, anthropology and sociology. Politically speaking it contains an inherently populist ethic, and arguments in its favour are often set as a reaction against the imposition of understanding by the culturally more dominant upon the realities of those who, for whatever reason, have not the power to make their own voices heard. The other orientation is, broadly speaking, based on the idea that consciousness may be false, that we may misunderstand ourselves, and that sometimes others are better positioned to know us, and to articulate our realities than we ourselves are. Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, masters of suspicion, might be seen as the proponents of this approach; questioning as they do our ability to speak our own reality.

Much can be said about these two hermeneutic frameworks and their relationship; which I may say in passing can be shown to be dialectically rather than dichotomously related. I have found the work of Paul Ricoeur (1981a, 1981b, 1981c) to be particularly instructive in clarifying the relationship between these hermeneutical functions; which he names `participatory belonging' and `distanciation' respectively. The dialectical, tensional relationship between these hermeneutical functions is foundational to his entire epistemological system. However, I will not go any further in describing the many different manifestations of this root dialectic, and wish to restrict myself to a narrow terrain, and with practical purposes in mind. I wish only to show that when we engage in participatory research relationships that aim at the development of critical reflection, we inevitably invoke the hermeneutics of distanciation. The research participant to whose benefit the research relationship is directed, is necessarily placed in an invidious relationship to his/her own intuitive, taken-for-granted experience. What is revealed through distanciation (and I hope that this will presently be demonstrated) does not have the immediate ring of truth that accompanies statements arising from our pre-reflective appropriation of understanding. The distanciated interpretation, for example, that whereas I experience myself as being polite, I am actually being arrogant and condescending, might conceivably be true. But it might not immediately and intuitively seem to be so to me.

We may say that the one form of hermeneutical experience is accountable to subjectivity. The findings represent subjective experience and empathy is the method for accessing this. Empathy is the method in question. The other form of hermeneutical experience is accountable to the ways things are, in spite of how the subject may or may not conceive them. It tends towards objectivity. There are a good many reasons why it is legitimate to talk of being more objective by having access to this function, but I would prefer to avoid having to justify this except to give a few examples. These examples could, I believe, be used in developing support for a realist epistemology in the human sciences, which can speak of interpretations being more objective, or as approaching objectivity, without finally making claims to absolute objectivity.

We are concerned here with what can be said, for example, of a moment in time by virtue of the perspective of hindsight. We would not have to look long to find our own examples of how the benefit of questions posed after an event allow us to make statements about the event, which we would want to say are true of the event, but were not be known in the context of the event. So I can discover myself to have been living an oppressed life without having known it then and I would want to say that I really was oppressed then, in spite of my apparent freedom. In other words, the interpretation is not a re-interpreting of experience but a real apprehension of something that was lived but not yet known. A different kind of example is the knowing of another (say a child by its mother). The mother is better positioned to know, in some respects, who a child is and what the child is becoming, by virtue of seeing the child in his/her complete biographical context. The child knows him/herself only in the context of the present and its immediate surrounds. By virtue of being in a context, of living a moment we are often precluded from seeing the broader contexts in which our experience is mounted, and the attendant meanings which we live in a received and taken-for-granted way. We have access to the world through our own perspectives (horizons), but what we don't see by virtue of having those perspectives cannot be evident to us, except in so far as we look at our experience from the perspective of others. A further example is the holding of beliefs which we cannot know as being what they are whilst we hold them, because to know them as `just beliefs' we would have to suspend our belief in their reality and hence our experience of belief. A different kind of example is the knowing of emotional states, which can only be known for what they are in their passing. As observers we may be structurally better positioned than the person having the experience to perceive patterns of emotional experience. From the perspective of living through an experience we are often not able to see the links between experiences, and the patterns which bind certain a sequence of experiences into their temporal structure. This is possibly most true of emotional experiences. The intensity and immediacy of feeling-experience is such that it tends to exert a type of Procrustean influence on our perception. The world is coloured by the current feeling to the extent that the person cannot see except through the feeling, with its attendant immediacies and foreclosures.

Of course more needs to be said about all of this and some of these examples may need to be better put, or discarded, if the point is to be convincingly made. A more methodical exploration of the dialectical functioning of these epistemological functions in applied psychology, can be found in Kelly (1994). However, I hope that a point has been made; namely, that subjectivity is not transparent to itself and as subjects we are not necessarily well positioned to perceive our own forestructures of experience. We need distance, finally, to apprehend ourselves, and to gain a comprehensive picture of what we think and feel and do.

I now wish to move on to explore the place of distanciation in situations where the `other' is given the role of evoking interpretation which may run counter to subjective experience, in the context of a dialogue with the subject. Such is the psychotherapy context. In attempting to describe the persistent rejection of interpretations by the patient, psychotherapists sometimes use the concept of resistance. Resistance is the rejection by of the subject of what is perceived to be an inaccurate or unfounded interpretation on the part of the therapist/interpreter. Another context where the researcher's interpretations are given back directly to the subject of the interpretation is in the participatory research relationship.

When the researcher's interpretations are delivered directly to the subject of the research in the context of a dialogue, one has an interpersonal re-enactment of the situation of the subject reflecting in a distanciated way on his/her own experience. In a development situation where the meeting is between the subjective experience of the structurally disempowered and the critical reflector in the form of a facilitator of change agent, the contrast between the two hermeneutical perspectives takes a distinctly political turn. This paper ends with some reflections on the management of this interpretive interaction, but before I turn to this I wish to show the value, from an epistemological perspective, of using methods of distanciation in social research.

At the heart of the Dramaide project was a commitment to the Freirian action-reflection cycle. This was conceived as operating between the team and the evaluator and between the team and their own work; and it was planned that the project would engage the pupils in reflecting on their own sexuality.

The Freirian dialogical method, in general terms, involves reflecting on experience in order to `problematise' experience. Having problematised the experience the task moves towards finding solutions to the problems thus identified. This formulation contains the idea that we can live an experience which is problematic to us without us knowing it. We can collude with our own subjugation or oppression and not know our collusion for what it is. We can have best interests which are not known to us. This orientation probably derives from the Marxist side of Freire's unique mix of Marxism and humanism.

His method has been translated into a broad range of techniques for achieving this end. A generic form of his method is to get people to reflect on a representation of their experience (generative code) and to describe what is happening in that code (which may take the form of a picture, a play, a poem or any other cultural production). Having begun to divulge their ways of understanding using the code as a context, and having begun to develop a grasp of the themes through which they think, the facilitator then turns to ask them to use these themes in understanding their own everyday contexts. The method ignites the interpretive sensibilities before turning to understand the difficult subject of that which we live in an everyday, intuitive, pre-reflective way. It gets discussion to focus on ways of understanding an external situation and then examines how these ways of understanding work to structure everyday reality. Once this reflection is underway it is the facilitators task to challenge the understanding which underlies everyday action. Through this the participants in such exercises are brought to realise that their understanding constitutes a problem and they are challenged to deepen and broaden this understanding. New understanding that develops is explored for its practical import and alternative courses of action are derived from it.

The philosophical foundations to this kind of work are laid out in Freire's (1972) `Pedagogy of the oppressed'. In the Dramaide intervention aspects of Freirian epistemology were applied, if in somewhat atypical forms. For example, students were presented with carefully designed frieze frames constructed by actors with props acting out interpersonal dilemmas relating to sexual decisions. They were then asked to say what was happening in the situation. Generative codes are constructed to portray a theme, but with ambiguity carefully constructed into the theme, such that while the code is suggestive it allows one to project one's own interpretations onto the scene. TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) cards might be seen to operate in a similar way. Then, having entered into energised discussion about the scene students were asked to describe whether these things happened in their lives. They thus were brought back to their own experience, in consciousness of particular themes.

Further stages of the Dramaide process attempted to problematise their interpretations, as described above; but this proved to be a difficult task. I will presently come on to discuss this, but will first elaborate further on the epistemological distanciation process.

Not only were students invited to interpret frieze frames performed for them, but were asked to construct their own frieze frames. They were asked to present scenes which represent their own sexual dilemmas. In so doing they largely followed the themes which had emerged in their interpretation of the scenes that were presented to them. On a content level some different issues were raised, but these were issues such as gang rape and fighting over women which they knew well as problematic social issues and which they seemed to simply lift out of popular discourse. In other words what they consciously presented represented what they could easily speak, what they already knew. Now the point of the exercise was to understand themselves more deeply, and if all that were to be achieved were to come to realise what was already known, one may well wonder about the value of the exercise. As it happens what they produced was loaded with clues to features of their sexuality that may be assumed to be intrinsic to their experience, but being foundational to the structure of their experience, they represented it without being able themselves to consciously identify it. It was unconsciously presented in the structure of what they presented rather than by conscious design. For example, their frieze frames when considered together, were strongly characterised by gender themes. These were not represented in their conscious understanding of their own experience. This became particularly clear to observers who noted how these images were constructed, and noted who led the creation of images, and at what point different people entered the creative process and in what way.

The pupils unconsciously presented frieze frames strongly characterised by male insecurity and female passivity. Males would often be represented, for example, as fighting over what seemed like an endangered resource (women), while women would be characterised as watching the brutality with a mixture of fascination/amusement and disgust/horror. Women also seemed caught in the midst of the contradictory pulls of the need for independence and the need for support. Women would seldom intervene in the conflicts that were set up because they were caught in a trap of needing to be wanted, yet wanted in terms that were not offered by males in the constructed image. All of these interpretation could not be readily entertained by the pupils, because while they may represent structures of experience, they are not easily known to be true and may even be contradictory to the way students own preferred self-characterizations. Note that I have not addressed the entire vexed question of confirmation of interpretations derived in this way; i.e. confirmation of interpretations of that which we live without knowing. This requires a different approach to confirmation. That I say it is correct or incorrect to interpret my experience in a particular way is no longer anadequate test of veracity. But this issue cannot be adequately addressed in this context.

In videotaping audience responses to plays, it was possible to construct the psychology of the audience in ways which they were not subjectively (or intersubjectively for that matter) well positioned to confirm or not. It became clear that audiences had their own familiar , well trodden ways of dealing with gender inequalities and with the brutalities of sexual harassment, manipulation and abuse. Voyeuristic enjoyment, shame and guilt are some of the varied emotional responses which showed themselves in the close-up images of audiences watching the plays. Asked to account for what the play meant to them and to describe what had happened in the play, the flow of emotion revealed to observers was generally not acknowledged by the very subjects who showed these same emotions.

In the interviews and focus groups which were designed to glean an understanding of what the entire process had meant to various participants, they were able to account for their experiences to the point of being able to say that they had accounted for most of what they had experienced. They had a sense of having had certain types of experiences and they knew when they had accurately represented these. They could confirm whether or not the interviewers had correctly understood what they were saying. What they weren't able to articulate, but which was portrayed in their cultural productions (posters and plays) were the stereotypes and particular prejudices which were the platform, so to speak, from which they thought, felt and acted. The characterisation of male sexuality, for example, was such that the only alternative to male brutality was through taming and self-limiting. The sensitivity of men to rejection, an alternative interpretation, was strongly represented in the projections of the participants, and was noted by observers. But this was represented in the self-accounts of the subjects, and this again showed the need to observe and interpret rather than to take their self-accounts as accurate and sufficient.

The Dramaide team similarly showed at some points that they needed to be shown what they were doing, how they were being in the social milieu. Well intentioned facilitation was, for example, at some points strongly coloured by moral discourse. This may have been amenable to self-reflection, but this could only take place through critical reflection, by a movement of distanciation.

I hope that I have shown why, for epistemological reasons, it may be desirable to reach beyond self-accounts in seeking to interpret experience. I would like also to briefly mention some interpersonal reasons why interview and focus group methods might be limited, as compared to methods which are able to reach conclusions on the basis of observation and interpretation. The desire to please, to be liked, to be helpful, not to be a spoilsport, to support; can mean that interviewees and focus group respondents are led in part by what they perceive the interviewer to be wanting them to say. I have observed how in interpretation of images in a focus group, for example, the group builds upon emerging imagery so as to make the exercise work, rather than because they have a strong affinity for the imagery that is emerging. Rather they suspend the self-representational endeavour and begin to play the game. Similarly people seem to discover the parameters of an interview quite early on and to stay within these. These kind of interpersonal tendencies are further reason why research based on what people say should be treated with circumspection. Research based on interpretation of projections and action is not subject to these constraints.

I have discussed some of the ways in which, in the interests of better interpretation, we might need to distanciate from that which is subjectively (directly and intuitively) understood to be true. Unfortunately the hermeneutics of distanciation do not make for easy politics. In the project studied there were certainly a few politically sensitive moments in this respect, but the facilitators were in such cases usually deferred to the subjective understanding of the participants, and did not pursue their own critical predilections. They deferred this simply because the co-operative relationship was not solidly developed enough to properly extend into the hermeneutics of distanciation; i.e. without endangering the working relationship with participants

There can be no doubt that when people feel understood (i.e. when the interpreter accurately represents subjective understanding) the subject whose experience is interpreted feels supported. Empathy and the emotional experience of support are closely tied. Distanciation is, on the other hand, treated as a challenge, hostility, domination, insensitivity or a lack of support. So it seems that any participatory research process, be it psychotherapy or participatory action social development work, should ideally start by representing people in the way that they see themselves. The Freirian method does just this and having evoked their understanding then attempts to show how their self-understanding is self-limiting and problem making. In developing self-understanding the method brings the participants to conceive of their situation differently, and to find actions appropriate to their new understanding.

Kelly and Van Vlaenderen (1996) have explored some of the problematic interpretative dynamics that can develop in research situations where insufficient attention is given to understanding interpretative relationships. They also suggest some possible ways of creating a climate of dialogical exchange where the meeting of subjective and `alterior' (originating from `the other') perspectives can be mediated and desensitized.

Perhaps the easiest way out is not to voice all that we see, but then the participatory research relationship is likely to yield no more than platitudinous understanding, which is in any case already known to the participants. If the participatory research relationship is to remind people of what they already know, there may yet be some value in it, but this is surely not why people request the assistance of outside researchers in helping them to alleviate a problem which they have. To do real research `with people', I believe, means that we necessarily enter a tricky and implicitly political terrain. I hope I have shown that there are epistemological reasons why this is and will inevitably be so, and I believe that these need to be better understood than they presently are. The `critical moment' in participatory research is politically fraught and the conditions for its proper management are an area deserving of research and theoretical exploration. It is all too easy, particularly in research environments which are already politically sensitive, to engage in collusions of evasion, designed to bypass or resist the recognition of underlying discourses, and concealed in comfortable, familiar and sometimes flattering disguise.

In the Duquesne method of phenomenological research in psychology, there exists a directive that one ask people to talk about or describe their experience, rather than ask them to interpret their experience or communicate their understanding of their experience. This is because as a researcher one tries to get to the `structure of experience' in the sense of that which gives order and form to experience, rather than to get to the person's understanding of experience. The understanding of the structure of experience is in a sense the distanciated interpreter's prerogative. This is not to say that the subject who has the experience is not capable of understanding and interpreting the structure of his/her own experience, but that he/she as a subject is not a privileged interpreter thereof. Thus the subject's confirmation of experience should not be regarded as the measure of the veracity of the interpretation.

In conclusion I would like to point to the tension within participatory research approaches which shows itself in the dual need to speak with the voice of the research subject, and yet to critically reflect on the shortcomings on the subject's understanding of his/her own reality. Empathy and critique do not blend seamlessly into each other, and the presence of one may exclude the presence of the other. It is possible that given certain, optimal conditions in an interpretative relationship, both of these hermeneutical functions can freely be drawn on without the crises of trust which may so easily arise. Each undoubtedly has its particular epistemological achievements and each also limits our knowing in particular ways. It is all too easy in the interests of good relations to rely too much on empathy as a mode of knowing, and it is risky and possibly imperious to rely too heavily on distanciation. In understanding the unique achievements and limitations of these perspectives we can direct our attention to understanding how, when and in what measure we can employ them in participatory research.

References

Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Commmunications Group.

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kelly, K.J. (1996). Hermeneutics in psychotherapy: A study of interpretation in the context of the therapeutic dialogue. Doctoral thesis, Rhodes University.

Kelly, K.J. & Van Vlaenderen, H. (1996). Dynamics of participation in a community health project. Social Science and Medicine, 42 (9), 1235-1246.

Ricoeur, P. (1981a). Appropriation. In J. B. Thompson (Ed.), Hermeneutics and the human sciences (pp. 182-193). Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1981b). The hermeneutical function of distanciation. In J. B. Thompson (Ed.), Hermeneutics and the human sciences (pp. 131-144). Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1981c). Phenomenology and hermeneutics. In J. B. Thompson (Ed.), Hermeneutics and the human sciences (pp. 101-128). Cambridge University Press.

PSKK@warthog.ru.ac.za

Psychology Department

Rhodes University

Grahamstown

6140

You don't need to leave your room.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Don't even listen, simply wait.

Don't even wait.

Be quite still and solitary.

The world will offer itself freely to you.

To be unmasked, it has no choice.

It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

(Franz Kafka)

"The entities of which one is talking must be taken out of their hiddenness; one must let them be seen as something unhidden (alethes); that is, they must be discovered" (Martin Heidegger).

Kafka's joyous depiction of world revelation in response to a particular style of attentiveness, and Heidegger's reference to discovering entities by extracting them from their hiddenness, raises some foundational questions about our research activities. What exactly is it we do when we do qualitative research, how do we go about doing it, and how do we know that we're doing it correctly? As qualitative researchers of one kind or another, we are presumably united by the methodical search for the meaning of human productions, whether verbal, textual, or pictorial. What does this search involve? Broadly speaking, it involves - as Kafka and Heidegger suggest - the revelation of something hidden, the pursuit of world-disclosure.

It is ironical that psychology, concerned as it is with individual experience and behaviour, has only recently discovered the methodological possibilities of hermeneutic theory. However, long before the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur began to be usefully appropriated by psychology, a group of researchers based at Duquesne University in the USA, were vigorously promoting the empirical study of subjective experience. Based on the assumption that understanding psychological meaning, rather than predicting statistical correlation, was the primary task of human science research, the Duquesne School, under Amedeo Giorgi, developed a rigorous methodology for the empirical study of experiential meaning. This project based, based on the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, was undoubtedly influential, and in this country phenomenological research is a popular qualitative alternative to statistical methods.

The objective of this approach is to consciously suspend one's preconceptions about the chosen research phenomenon, and then to rigorously analyse subjective descriptions of it in order to arrive at the essential meaning structures which constitute the experience. This process, commonly referred to as explication, is construed as a descriptive procedure whereby the implicit essential meaning of a phenomenon is made explicit, while fidelity to the subjects' experience is maintained by bracketing one's own intellectual and ideological prejudices. While this Husserlian pursuit of subjective meaning was established as a vanguard against the empire of positivism, a few pages from Heidegger's philosophical text, Being and Time, became the impetus for what today may be referred to as the hermeneutic revolution in the social sciences. Now that phenomenology and hermeneutics are becoming accepted as viable alternatives to traditional scientific methodology, the relationship between them warrants closer scrutiny. The nature of this relationship suggests some answers to the questions raised in my introduction. The commonalties between these approaches are readily apparent: both are concerned with uncovering the meaning of experience and behaviour, both rely on experiential reports as research data, both acknowledge the dialogical relationship between researcher and subject, both suspend judgement on the factual content of the subjects' perceptions, and both believe that the natural attitude of pre-reflective engagement with the world needs to be modified into a rigorous, systematic, and methodical mode of enquiry.

However, it is the differences between these allied approaches, rather than the commonalties, that are of interest to me, and which have important implications for what we as qualitative researchers do - and understand ourselves to be doing - in pursuit of meaning. The central difference concerns the relationship between description and interpretation as related, but alternative, strategies for accessing meaning.

Qualitative research could be broadly classified according to whether it follows a descriptive or interpretive logic (Giorgi, 1992). In other words, the task of the researcher may either be phenomenological explication or hermeneutic interpretation. Phenomenological description, or explication, is defined as the process of "bracketing" one's presuppositions about the research phenomenon, and then explicitly describing "what presents itself precisely as it presents itself, neither adding nor subtracting from it" (Giorgi, 1992, p.121).

What makes this process descriptive, it is argued, is that the distorting influence of presupposition and theoretical imposition are avoided, firstly, through the preliminary strategy of identifying and isolating one's own existing beliefs and hypotheses concerning the phenomenon and, secondly, through the subsequent phase of rigorously describing how the phenomenon presents itself, without the distorting influence of theoretical language.

The descriptive approach attempts to remain faithful to the phenomenological reality of the subjects' experiential world, and operates within the "constraints of intuitive or presentational evidence" (Giorgi, 1992, p. 121). This means that both the reliability and validity of the descriptions can be established by checking them with other descriptive researchers and, ultimately, by showing the descriptions to the subjects, who can determine whether the descriptions reflect or distort their lived experience. The descriptive approach remains objective even though its data comprises subjective experience.

Giorgi thus contends that because description concerns "the clarification of the objects of experience precisely as experienced" (1992, p. 121), no interpretation occurs. Kafka's poetic assertion that the world unmasks itself before the quiet receptivity of an engaged onlooker, seems to square to with the phenomenological stance.

But does the world always unmask itself in the manner suggested? Given the pervasive influence of hermeneutic theory, together with the cultural impact of deconstruction and postmodernism, Giorgi's claims warrant critical examination.

Hermeneutics begins with the assumption that what makes revelatory understanding possible is the activity of interpretation, rather than description. Heidegger (1927/1962) defines interpretation as a "letting-something-be-seen", and goes on to say: "The entities of which one is talking must be taken out of their hiddenness; one must let them be seen as something unhidden (alethes); that is, they must be discovered" (p.278).

The importance of Heidegger's theory of interpretation was his radical claim that interpretation is not something we do, but that it is what we as human beings are. In other words, interpretation is our primordial mode of being-in-the-world, and only secondarily a reflective pursuit of knowledge.

Furthermore, given that we are fundamentally interpretive beings, and that our being-in-the-world is essentially historical, there can be no transcendental subjectivity or knowledge to underpin the contextual relativity of life-world experience. Understanding is typically grounded in the accessible, taken-for-granted lived meanings that behaviour and experience has for us, i.e., our pre-understandings. This experience and behaviour, in other words, has a pre-reflective intelligibility which is always historically situated in a socio-historical matrix of cultural significance. This intelligibility, the backdrop for all interpretation, has been referred to as practical understanding, one's "everyday participatory understanding of people and events" (Packer & Addison, 1989, p.23).

Interpretation, a fundamental condition of all human understanding, becomes foregrounded as a reflective, sense-making form of engagement only when there is a break-down of ordinary pre-reflective understanding, when some aspect of experience is rendered problematic by its resistance to common-sense assimilation. Research, in other words, begins when we start to find questions to our answers. It is only when some transparent aspect of reality becomes opaque, thereby resisting the established glance of tradition, that it becomes at all questionable. All or most of the words in the title of this paper are known and familiar to you, but perhaps on this occasion their specific juxtaposition resisted the familiar slide of your practised eye, resisted immediate assimilation. Whether teased, tantalised, or merely irritated, you found yourself arrested by the question of what this title could mean. This is always the occasion for interpretation, when some aspect of the mundane world eludes the casual glance.

The implication of all this is that because every descriptive act is located in a web of pre-understandings, Giorgi's distinction between description and interpretation is thus untenable. According to Giorgi interpretation involves the external attribution of meaning, rather than the description of meaning already implicit in the experience. However, if meaning is a discursive event, and both researchers and their subjects are historically located within a nexus of discursive pre-understandings, then no amount of reflective bracketing can neutralise these. To the unavoidable extent that these pre-understandings influence both the subjects' languaging of their experience, and the researchers' reflection upon this experience, pure description, i.e., description free of interpreted meaning, is impossible. Every description is always an interpretation, and consequently, may be interpreted in various ways.

Giorgi has a two-pronged rejoinder to this argument, based on the definition of interpretation as meaning attribution. Every interpretation involves a process of meaning attribution which, however plausible, is always contingent. This contingency inevitably results from invoking meaning which goes beyond people's self-descriptions of their lived experience. Because the only real criterion of a research description's validity is its necessary consistency with subjects' self-experience, any departure from subjects' self-descriptions means sacrificing the validity criterion of any statements about their experience. Consequently, an interpretation may be said to be plausible, but not true, since the criterion of truth no longer obtains. A corollary of this is that any number of other interpretations may be equally plausible. The second prong of Giorgi's rejoinder is the philosophical objection that if every description is already an interpretation, then this assertion must itself be an interpretation and, in the light of the previous argument, not necessarily true.

A pragmatic way out of this philosophical debate is to consider description and interpretation, not as opposing modalities of apprehending meaning, but rather as polarities of a single continuum of 'sense-making' engagement with a phenomenon. From this perspective the distinction between description and interpretation is the extent to which researcher presuppositions and hypotheses are intentionally bracketed, subjects' consciously intended meanings adhered to, and their analysed experience articulated in research language that deliberately avoids theoretical terminology. To the extent that presuppositions are bracketed, that subjects' consciously intended meanings are faithfully adhered to, and that these clarified meanings are conveyed in deliberately atheoretical language, the approach may be termed descriptive. Conversely, to the extent that hypotheses are self-reflectively employed to approach the phenomenon, that meanings beyond those consciously intended by subjects are pursued, and that these meanings are conveyed using theoretical language, we may identify the research approach as interpretive. These two research approaches may thus be understood as part of one continuum of sense-making activity, merging into each other, becoming less polarised and easily identified as the three distinguishing criteria become less rigorously employed.

The descriptive-phenomenological approach has certain advantages concerning the issues of objectivity and validity. Objectivity, from this perspective, is defined as fidelity to the phenomenon as it is subjectively experienced by research subjects. Consequently, by consciously suspending one's presuppositions and hypotheses, clarifying only consciously intended meaning, and eschewing theoretical language, a high degree of objectivity may be observed and critically assessed by referring the clarified essential meanings back to the subjects and/or other phenomenological researchers for adjudication. This objectivity is necessarily compromised with interpretive research because of the essential nature of interpretation.

Interpretations depart from the intuitive or presentational evidence of the subjects' experience. The consequence of this is, firstly, that the descriptive criterion of objectivity (whether the subjects' themselves accept the clarified meanings) is sacrificed and, secondly, without an objective criterion of correctness or accuracy it becomes difficult to determine which of two or more interpretations is the better one. If one accepts this formulation, then the important issue becomes the question of when, and under what circumstances, a qualitative researcher is justified in going beyond a descriptive approach by interpreting meaning that cannot be verified by appeal to the subjects' conscious self-descriptions. Sometimes a descriptive approach is clearly sufficient, rendering any further meaning attribution unnecessary. For example, while conducting a qualitative investigation of the meaning of male paedophiles' sexual interaction with children, I was struck by one subject's statement: "I never came out of the cocoon my mother had spun for me, she was too overprotective. Whenever I like a girl I would always see my mother in her and it would feel like a mother-child relationship".

A phenomenological description of this statement might be as follows:

The subject's initial attraction to sexually mature women is blocked by his perception that they embody his overprotective mother, thereby transforming adult sexual interaction into a discomforting incestuous re-enactment of a mother-child relationship.

Compare this to a classical psychoanalytic interpretation:

The phallically fixated subject, unable to resolve his genital wishes for his mother, unconsciously displaces his oedipal impulses onto attractive adult women, thereby projecting onto them the forbidden maternal imago, consequently resulting in castration anxiety and subsequent defensive libidinal de-cathexis of the adult sexual object.

This interpretation is problematic in at least three respects: Firstly, I doubt whether the psychoanalytic interpretation is any more illuminating than the phenomenological description. Secondly, the theoretical language of the psychoanalytic interpretation, with its implicit assumptions, does seem to alienate one from the experiential texture and quality of the original description. Thirdly, while I could imagine this subject confirming the phenomenological description, I very much doubt whether he would be able to comprehend, let alone accept, the psychoanalytic interpretation.

Certain research phenomena lend themselves more than others to either descriptive or hermeneutic methodologies. Those meanings readily accessible to conscious self-reflection are obviously open to descriptive approaches, whereas those cases in which self-reflection is distorted by defensive psychic or ideological strategies require methods that go substantially beyond subjects' conscious self-descriptions. In Paul Ricoeur's words: "to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning, but to decipher its expressions" (In Clarke, 1990, p. 62). These oblique expressions thus require oblique methods capable of excavating hidden meaning. Giorgi anticipates this criticism and contends that the unconscious does not pose a problem to descriptive phenomenology for two reasons: firstly, because the data are "not limited to the consciousness of the experiencer but to whoever's consciousness grasps the phenomenon" (1992, p.127), and secondly, because the search for indirect meaning is a therapeutic, rather than a research task.

The first point is that the researcher may consciously perceive and describe meanings that are not consciously perceived by the research subjects. This raises a number of problems for descriptive phenomenology, but perhaps the most difficult is that its primary criterion of validation - the intuitive affirmation of the subjects - no longer applies when it is acknowledged that the researcher has access to meanings which are not accessible to the consciousness of the subjects. This compromises the very factor which Giorgi contends guarantees descriptive phenomenology its objectivity, and thus places the descriptive researcher in the same predicament as the hermeneutic researcher.

The second point, that divining unconscious meaning is appropriate to the therapeutic, but not the research context, is mistaken. Description is not always adequate to the task of comprehending a phenomenon's meaning. For example, in researching individuals' experience of satanic cult involvement, most subjects gave detailed accounts of seeing and being possessed by demons. A general phenomenological description of this would be as follows:

Having subscribed to the mythological belief in demonic entities, and having committed themselves to cultivating the powers and attributes of these demonic forces, Satanists literally perceive these supernatural entities, and experience them as alien internal presences. Now, while this description remains true to the subjects experience of demons and demonic possession, it remains unsatisfying because the psychological nature, status, and origin of the demonic entities is not addressed. In my study all the subjects assumed the literal reality of supernatural demonic entities, and interpreted their experience as the intrusion of demonic forces. The subjective reality of this experience could, of course, be respected in trying to understand the meaning of demonic possession. However, a faithful description of this experience, though adequate to the subject's phenomenological reality, must remain psychologically unsatisfactory because the question of what demons are at a psychological level has not been addressed. Unless demonic possession can rendered psychologically meaningful, i.e., by understanding it in natural rather than supernatural terms, we cannot make any significant sense of it. However, we can only make psychological sense of it by interpreting the taken-for-granted experiential reality of possessing supernatural entities sent by Satan.

If one substitutes an object relations psychoanalytic interpretation for the phenomenological description, one arrives at the following:

Demons are dissociated manifestations of destructive self representations, derived from childhood identifications with bad internalized parental figures which, when split off from the central self structure, function as autonomous subpersonalities. The defensive externalisation of these alienated subpersonalities leaves the individual vulnerable to their fantasised intrusive return as personified supernatural entities, capable of taking over and controlling the central personality.

This interpretation clearly departs from satanic subjects' self-descriptions, and would never be accepted by these subjects, who emphatically believe in the literal reality of demons as supernatural entities. What is satisfying about the interpretation, however, is that it makes psychological sense out of supernatural experience, identifies the origin of demonic experience, and explains the unconscious process whereby aspects of the personality come to be experienced as alien entities.

The fact that it is one interpretation among many possible others does not, I believe, weaken its power to illuminate the phenomenon. Intuitive validation of a research account by the subject is merely one criterion of the interpretation's appropriateness. From the hermeneutic perspective psychological research is not concerned with the essential truth of a phenomenon but, as Keneth Gergen says, with crafting systems of intelligibility (Gergen, 1989, p.257).

There are multiple discourses and multiple interpretive communities, and hence any interpretation may be contested by someone located within another 'sense-making' discursive vantage point. For example, within a fundamentalist Christian discourse Satan is a real supernatural intelligence who possesses the unwary, from a constructionist perspective Satan is an ideological construct whose imaginary existence serves a cohesive sociological function in times of secular social change; and within a psychoanalytic discourse Satan is a split-off part of the individual's own instinctual life or internal world. One cannot ask which of these interpretations is the correct one because each procedes from a fundamentally different discursive fore-structure of interpretive assumptions. This does not mean, however, that one interpretation is as plausible as another. Giorgi overlooks the fact that a number of hermeneutic theorists have developed criteria for adjudicating contending interpretations. There is not time to examine these; suffice it to say, however, that a hermeneutic stance need not be a relativistic one.

I hope that this paper has gone some way to reconciling two qualitative research traditions, which Giorgi has sought to polarise. I do not find it useful to dichotomise phenomenology and hermeneutics, and then argue for the superiority of one over the other. My definition of qualitative research as a sense-making continuum between predominantly descriptive or interpretive approaches means that the important issue now becomes where one locates oneself on this continuum, and being able to justify this location in terms of the phenomenon one seeks to illuminate.

References

Clark, S. (1990) Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge.

Gergen, K. (1989) The possibility of psychological knowledge: a hermeneutic inquiry. In M. Packer & R. Addison (Eds.) Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology, pp 239-258. New York: State University of New York Press.

Giorgi, A. (1992) Description versus interpretation: competing alternative strategies for qualitative research. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 23, No.2, p.119-135.

Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row.

art27n@neptune.dbn.lia.net

We usually think of the body politic as bodies subjected to politics. But this paper investigates the notion that bodies have a politic of their own. Entities, be that physical bodies, ego's, or bodies of knowledge, are constituted via processes of identification. I use Lacan's mirror stage theory, modified by Derrida's notion of differance, to illustrate how identification is realised through appropriation and exclusion. These processes are situated in a metaphorical seascape where waves are constituted by politcal motions of self-appropriaton, ebbing the ability to respond to the other. When a body emerges in these waters it finds itself in a political domain. But it never succeeds to clear the water surface; the body never appears in full. It fights an endless battle to stay afloat. The final moment of complete(d) appropriation is constantly deferred. The waves that pound the body, those political waves the body is subjected to, are always already the manifestations of the coming into being of the body - truely a politics of the body, and a politics driven by the fear of drowning, the fear of going under in the deconstruction of an identity built on self-appropriation. I conclude with a few concrete examples to demonstrate the dynamics of this exclusive body politic.

The body politic: a body and a politic, a double name, a simulacrum that splits in two, into bodies belonging to politics, and politics belonging to bodies. The first side of this double-sided body politic we know all too well. The politics that bodies belong to, is a politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994, pp. 25-73), and these movements have become the slogans of our times. We hear them on a daily basis: save my female body, recognise my gay body, appreciate my black body, do not taint my white body, acknowledge my minor(ity) body. But the other side of the body politic is less often the object of attention, perhaps because it challenges our innocence. It rejects the notion that we are merely the victims of a raging politic, and it does so by subjecting politics to the body. It suggests a politic of the body where the body is not a simple given, where its coming into being calls for a constitution that is always already political.

Let's chart a seascape to navigate these waters. It is easy enough to image bodies being tossed about in the stormy seas of politics, but it is a little more difficult to imagine these bodies being responsible for the motion of the political ocean. If in the first instance bodies are simply presupposed, the second scenario is about the surfacing of these bodies. Somehow they have surfaced and managed to stay afloat before those political waves start catching up with them. It is this side of the double sided body politic that I want to explore in this paper.

Here is a picture of our seascape:

We see a wavelike motion between two domains, namely the domain of politics and the domain of ethics. The political domain is overt. It is in full sight, on the surface of the sea. Below the surface lies the ethical domain. It is hidden from our view, but it forms a strong undercurrent in the motion of this ocean. The question we must deal with here, concerns the constitution of the wave itself. My point of departure is that politics is a power game and a game of appropriation. And I go on to suggest that the game of appropriation is based on a forgetting. It is based on a forgetting of the ethical. Without going into detail, we will simply accept that It is this forgetting, that it is a politics constituted in and through a forgetting of the ethical, that causes the waves. I will use this notion to suggest that these waves are the manifestation of the surfacing of the body. In other words, that bodies are constituted in and through the wavelike play of politics and ethics. In particular we will see how the being of the body requires the exclusion of the other and a denial of responsibility.

The route we take is quite simple: We start with Lacanian reflection to gain an understanding of the meaning of constitution via appropriation and exclusion. We then go on to Derridean differance to obtain a deconstructed version of the ego/identity/body. And finally we look at some examples demonstrating the dynamics of a constitution based on exclusion.

LACAN'S MIRROR STAGE THEORY

According to Lacan's mirror stage theory (1977, pp 1-7) the child, at age six months, discovers itself in its image in the mirror. At this age the child is outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, but unlike the animal, it does not quickly exhaust the image and lose interest in it. In its play the child experiences the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reality it duplicates, namely the child's body, a body which at that young stage is an ensemble of uncoordinated and turbulent movements, a body in bits and pieces, a corps morcèlé. In recognising the mirror image as itself, the child sees what it will have become. It sees itself as a coordinated whole.

Here is a picture of Lacanian reflection:

The vertical line in the middle, suggests the mirror. On the left we have the corps morcèlé, and on the right the body as a coordinated whole. For Lacan the ego comes into being in and through these projections and retrojections - the reflections from source to image and from image to source

The mirror stage is marked by difference (the child looks at the other to see itself) and deferring (the child sees what it will have become), but these notions carry the promise (for the child) of properly becoming its own - of becoming its own property. Thus a certain appropriation will take place. But we must proceed with caution here, because the appropriation, which results in the Lacanian ego, requires a deconstruction, as we shall see. We must look carefully at the notions of difference and deferring. These notions are the core ideas of Derridean differance. So let's leave the mirror stage theory for a while, and investigate Derrida's notion of differance, before we return to consider the imports of Derridian differance on the mirror stage theory.

DERRIDEAN DIFFERANCE

Differance is a neologism in which Derrida attempts to combine difference and deferring. Differance deals with the simultaneity of distinctions (to differ) and postponements (to defer). It is neither passive nor active. It does not have an agent, neither does it function as an agent in itself. If we struggle to understand differance, we should not be surprised, because we cannot fathom the simultaneity of spatial and temporal operations. We always need a double reading of differance to form some idea of its meaning.

To my mind the following is a core definition of differance.: Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be "present", appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element. This trace relates no less of what is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present (Derrida, 1973, pp 142-143).

Now, let's attempt a double reading - let's read this twice and see what we manage to come up with. I add my visual impression of these ideas, but treat them with care. They function like metaphors, typically obscuring as much as they reveal.

Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be "present", appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element ......

In other words, we begin by presupposing a body/identity/consciousness that returns to itself (that is reflected in the mirror, if you wish). But the point is that the "returning" onto itself, is not a collapsing into itself. There is always difference in self-reflection, and this holds true for the moment of self-consciousness. The moment of self-awareness is a doubling up, a moment of being aware of oneself (of one's self). Thus self-consciousness harbours an interval that divides self-consciousness in itself, an interval that opens self-consciousness to what is other to self-consciousness.

This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present.

Now we begin with the interval that divides self-consciousness in itself. The interval that invests the moment of self-consciousness is related no less to what is called the "source" of self-consciousness than to what is called the "image" of self-consciousness, and it constitutes itself by this very relation to what it absolutely is not, that is neither a preceding nor a resulting consciousness. Thus the other, which invests every moment of self-consciousness, precedes, and is constitutive of, the moment of self-consciousness.

This double reading points to the incomprehensibility of differance: At the very moment the ego is constituted in an appropriation of self, it is always already also constituted in and through what is other to the ego. In more general terms, what Derrida suggests is that fundamental reality takes the form of the trace. In doing so he deconstructs singularities. He denies single moments of presence, which means the present cannot be narrowed down to a singular moment, and singular moments are not simply present. Whatever is present, whatever appears on the stage of presence, is always already double. It always already involves a difference and a deferring. And this is only half the picture, because at the very moment we speak of things being differed and deferred from themselves, these things are brought into existence in and through these processes of difference and deferring. And, as we have seen, moments of self-consciousness are not excluded. In the moment of self-consciousness one returns to oneself to be oneself in one's own presence. But this moment of absolute and united presence to oneself is always already a moment of difference and deferring. One cannot gather oneself to be oneself in one's own presence without the possibility of the intrusion of an other. One is always already differed and deferred from oneself even when one believes oneself to be a singularity.

DIFFERANCE AND THE MIRROR STAGE THEORY

The mirror stage theory captures differance in a single reading, provided we do not forget the lessons taught in the double reading, especially that the mirror stage promise of becoming properly my own can never be more than a promise.

To begin with, here is a (single reading) picture of differance:

This picture depicts the relationship of an inside with its outside. Keep in mind the mirror stage theory where the corps morcèlé sees itself as a unified whole. However such a relationship requires the maintenance of difference and deferring. It requires a doubling up. It forbids the dissolving of source and image into a singular ego, which always involves the appropriation of the image by its source, or vice versa.

Differance forbids appropriation, and thus maintains the promise of appropriation, and thereby the structure of desire. Lacan, on the other hand, awaits an ego that comes into being in and through projective and retrojective appropriation, a power play, a political domain. The ego requires an absolute forgetting of the ethical. It finds itself afloat in a sea of politics.

But the import of differance paints a slightly different picture. The ego which lives by the promise of appropriation and which takes its form from desire (Kamuf, 1991, p. 461; Spivak, 1976, p. lxxviii), is an ego which exists by virtue of its own impossibility. This is the deconstructed ego. It can never be a fulfilled state, nor a state of fulfilment. The condition of the ego is the relationship of selfconsciousness to what is absolutely other to itself. Elsewhere I have indicated that this relationship is what we experience as the I (van Deventer, 1994, pp. cxlv-cliv). Thus the deconstructed ego appears as the I.

To return to our initial seascape: In and through desire the ego attempts to constitute itself by excluding the relatedness to the other - and ethics is the victim. An entire philosophy pivots on this point (see e.g. Critchley, 1992), but let's simply say that ethics requires the ability to respond. The egoistic desire for appropriation attempts to exorcise the opening onto the other. Quite literally it reduces the ability to respond - a diminished responsibility. When the other is excluded I am responsible to no one. The ego's desire for appropriation initiates a play of power whereby it seeks to exclude the other in order to dissolve the doubleness into a singular identity. And it must seek to avoid this doubleness, it must wish for appropriation, because the moment of the absolute double, is a moment of absolute undecidability, and this sets off an uncontrollable anxiety (Gallop, 1985, p. 63). The desire of appropriation, and thus an entire politic, is fuelled by these moments of anxiety. But as we have seen, the process of appropriation can never succeed in full, and hence the wavelike motion in the political-ethical ocean - waves that are the manifestations of the endless movements of deferred egoistic appropriations.

Let's turn now to two examples to demonstrate the dynamics of indentity formation. The first example has to do with the constitution of personal identity via exclusion and the fending off of anxiety. The second example is more abstract, and concerns the constitution of the individual as a scientific object.

THE DYNAMICS OF IDENTITY FORMATION: ABOUT BLACK IDENTITY

It does not take a genius to see Apartheid as the constitution of white identity founded on black exclusion. Its institutionalised racism rubbed off deeply on all factions of the population, and in post-apartheid society race still plays a major role, probably to such an extent that it can be considered a psychological dimension in the constitution of our identities (Carter, 1995, pp. 71-84). The following is an example (actually a series of four events) of black identity formation founded in exclusion, and the anxiety associated with the deconstruction of the ego. It is not an attempt to critique black identity formation. The point is not that white identity is not constituted in similar ways - all identity formations are based on appropriation and exclusion and are thus political in nature. The potency of identifying exclusion in black identity formation lies in the underlying paradox: These black students who constitute their identities through exclusion have been involved in the struggle against Apartheid, a struggle against identity formation based on exclusion.

Here are the four events that occured in a class of mainly black students:

1. When asked to close their eyes and picture a "man from Africa" the class without exception imagined a black man. When challenged that there are also white people in Africa, the class rejected the Africanness of white people.

Stereotyping plays a major role in identifying a black man with Africa, and one may well ask whether this is an example of identity founded in exclusion. Indeed, exclusion does not lie in the postive identification of Africa with black people, but it does manifest itself at the root of the matter. Whites are not identified as a minority incidence of African people. Their Africanness is denied. They are excluded from Africa, and it is this exclusion that enables the blackness of the "man from Africa". Here we have the danger of any stereotype: Its positive constitution of identity is a masquerade, because the moment of exclusion has already been hidden. It turns a blind eye towards its own politics (it creates an imaginary picture in a closed-eye view). The moment of the ethical has already been forgotten, and with it goes responsibility.

2. When the lecturer introduced the topic of racism in his class he was deemed unfit to do so by virtue of the fact that he is a white person.

Although this position is not as blatantly racist as it seems - the point of view of many black people is simply that only the oppressed can make a meaningful contribution to the discourse on racism, and whites are not identitied as oppressed - it is obviously exclusive. The discourse on racism, which serves to constitute white and black, is appropriated via exclusion. The movement is subtle, yet powerful: the wrongs of the past (a denial of the ethical) is used to deny the ethical and to set up a repetitive cycle/wave of the same old politic.

3. When the same class later evaluated the course, a student remarked that the lecturer did not have the guts to show his racism.

In this remark we see the traces of anxiety caused by the deconstruction of the ego. When the lecturer did not appear a racist, the student nevertheless found it necessary to endow him with this quality. She presupposed the racism of her white lecturer, and when it was not displayed she envoked it. In the discourse on racism she needed the white person to be a racist, and she felt frustrated when he did not act accordingly (she felt he did not have the guts). In psychoanalytic terms: one recognises a defensive projection. An ego constituted via racism becomes threatened when faced with the possibility of non-racism.

4. When the postmodern notion of the plurality of voices, especially the legitimacy of the suppressed voice, was discussed, a student remarked: How do I know this is not just another colonisation of my mind?

In this case the anxiety associated with the deconstructed ego is expressed fairly openly. The student is faced with a discourse that advocates the legitimacy of her voice, but it confronts her with an immense responsibility. Henceforth she must speak in a voice that is not merely a voice of protest. She must find her own voice, and she must find it among many other voices, all equally legitmate. She must find herself by including, and not by excluding, the other. In other words, she must find herself as I, in and through the relationship with the other.

THE DYNAMICS OF IDENTITY FORMATION: ABOUT THE body OF SCIENCE

The following example comes from an honours student's research proposal. Students were asked to keep a diary and to extract a theme that runs through the daily entries. They were then to formulate research questions based on these themes. What makes this example interesting is that it clearly demonstrates the subjection of the subject in the name of science, and that this takes place in a proposal that itself deals with overpowering and submissive interpersonal relationships.

Here is the student's diary theme:

There are those people that constantly try to overpower other people, and then there are those people who play the submissive role in life. Those that are in the submissive position have the desire to somehow find a way to make themselves be heard in circumstances, to assert themselves, and to find a way to come into being.

She then formulated the following research question:

What sort of behavior do people engage into in order to deal with difficult and/or uncomfortable situations in their lives?

The following are a few snippets taken from the section where she describes her methodology:

• ..... unit of analysis will be the individual .....

• Participants will be presented with questionnaires....

• They will be asked to imagine themselves in situations .....

• An outsider will be aksed to confront the participant with uncomfortable and personal questions.

• No direct questions will be asked regarding a person's personal feelings ....

Exclusion and distanciation are at work throughout this excercise. The (scientific?) value of objectivity organises every move of this investigation. An object of research is constituted at all costs. The interpersonal relationship is omitted to limit the unit of analysis to the individual, and the boudaries that are drawn in constituting this individual are not to be transgressed (no direct questions will be asked regarding the person's inner feelings). The monadic nature of these individuals is heightened by shifting their interactions to an imaginary realm (they will be asked to imagine themselves in situations ... ), prohibiting any real contact. The final isolation of the subject, a final objectivication, comes with the total withdrawal of the researcher. The researcher changes into an outsider, prodding the object with uncomfortable questions.

Is what we see here not in itself a power play? The isolation of the individual, the denial of its feelings, the constant watch of the foreign, distant eye: do these not add up to a brutal torturing of the subject? Does science leave this individual any chance to experience itself via its connectednes to the other? In objective science the moment of exclusion gains a postive value. It becomes ethical to forget the ethical, and to set those political waves in motion. But this is, as the present example shows, the very moment of our coming into being. The eye of the other, becomes the eye of the outsider. Responsibility, the ability to respond to the other, is shed. We draw our boundaries to contain our personal feelings, and to withstand the prodding of the other. And in doing so we aim to be the celebrated body of the surfer, gacefully riding those politcal waves, whilest forgeting that the waves we ride are the waves of an egoistic appropriaton.

References

Carter, R.T. (1995). The influence of race and racial identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a racially inclusive model. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Critchley, S. (1992). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell.

Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl's theory of signs. (Translation D. Allison). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Gallop, J. (1985). Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kamuf, P. (1991). A Derrida Reader: Between the blinds. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A selection. (Translation A. Sheridan). London: Tavistock Publications.

Spivak, G.C. (1976). Translator's preface. In J Derrida. Of Grammatology. (Translation G.C. Spivak). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A Gutmann (Ed.). Multiculturalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Deventer, S.H. (1994). Die menslike wetenskap: 'n Verhaal vir die Sielkunde. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria.

vdevesh@alpha.unisa.ac.za

Department of Psychology

University of South Africa

PO Box 392

Pretoria

0001

Background

"Silence" currently is a very contentious "noise", and the aim of this paper is to articulate different "species" of silence in the symbolic order, and the empowerment of those who hold the discourse of "silence". The focus of the paper is on the body impolitic of "silence" and how the speaking subject is "silenced" in the self-authentification of identity formation. This paper will argue that the struggle for power is the struggle for the discourse of "silence", and how the alienated body is the basis for articulating "silence".

As Derrida (1989; 1995) and also Nietzsche (in Kristeva, 1982) indicate, symbolically, that religion, and more notably Christianity, symbolically engaged her followers and other institutions in a struggle for the discourse of "silence" in the paradoxical demand for confession. It is in "silence" that the subject can nourish the secret or the passion of his non-being. Derrida (1995: 27) states that "the secret is in speech which is foreign to speech.", and that the impolitic of silence is to sustain that which is foreign and de-posed. The practices of confession, is to sustain that which is foreign to speech when the speaking subject articulates a "bourgeois consciousness" which is a displacement of consciousness from itself, and the speaking subject is self-reflexive insofar as he doubles up in misrecognition and re-misrecognition. Nevertheless, the emphasis here is that the "practice of silence", invariably leads to the internalisation of "rot", while the act of speaking, or the confession is to lie in order to retain the passion for that which is the prohibition, and to sustain the secret of that which is "not it" (Freudian "ich"), namely the self. In Nietzschean parlance, it can be said that Christianity has fine tuned "silence" for her own empowerment as a universal body. Nietzsche says about Christianity (in Kristeva, 1982): "To breed out of mankind a self-contradiction, an art of self-defilement, a will to lie at any cost, a revulsion, a scorn for all good and upright instincts! [...] call Christianity [...] the immortal defiling of mankind." In the light this and the religiosity that goes with "silence", I will now focus specifically on the impolitic of "silence", the symbolic symbioses between the speaking subject and the other in the various practices of inclusion and exclusion in communication. This is of particular importance for Psychology and psychotherapy, because what is staged in Psychology is the "privilege of absence", which Lyotard (in Bennington, 1988) might refer to as "Exteriority", "Zero", "Other" and "Signifier", and which is therefore fundamentally religious for the psychological experience of unity and mastery.

In communication the speaking subject is self-orientated in his discourse, and to this effect can claim self-reflexivity. However, more than the Freudian doctrine that the unconscious is the discourse of the other (Lacan: "unconscious is structured like a language"), I want to add (maybe insist) that "normative consciousness is also the discourse of the other". Normative consciousness demands of the speaking subject an intersubjectivity which is nothing more than a "repression" of the subject in an identification with otherness as he adheres to the repressive morphemes of a bourgeois consciousness. This means that the conscious, self-reflexive subject is an authentic entity as he adheres to bourgeois demands for self-cultivation in the posing of the repressed, but at the same time is an alienated entity in the courtliness of his self-confessions and what is expressed. O'Niell (1983) articulates the alienation of the congenial subject who adheres to the courtliness of a bourgeois consciousness in terms of the body politic of the aristocracy; first of all to preserve the manner of the aristocracy from debasement while teaching those who acquire it to appear to have possessed it, and to encourage a literature of "self-fashioning". Moreover, to flee from the intersubjectivity of conversation, that is to be "silent" in not confessing the prohibition, is to confess baseness and an inability to withstand judgement of one's peers who accept such rivalry. On the other hand, to engage in conversation amounts to a healing and empowering of the other in the sense that what is expressed is the repressed in the production of the prohibition, and in this regard the subject is "silenced" pertaining the "proper" thrust of language which puts the other and the aristocracy on trial. This "contractuality" between the repressed and the expressed is important to articulate the self-dressage of the culturally authenticated speaking subject, because, as Lacan (1977) reminds us, it is the "repressed which insists", and if the prohibition is repressed, it will also insist and ultimately be expressed in the practice and poetics of transgression. Nevertheless, the self-alienation of the speaking subject as he adheres to the intersubjective demand for self-reflexivity and the repressive morphemes of a bourgeois consciousness amounts to the displacement of consciousness from itself in a politic of an objectified and alienated body. (Consider here Nietzsche's double inscription for consciousness, recognition and articulation). Considered on the whole, the paradoxical trap of the speaking subject in conversation, not only amounts to acting into the unknown as the subject confess the prohibition, but also amounts to the "silencing" of the speaking subject, something Freud recognised with the imperative "wo es war, soll ich werden". Thus, adhering to normative consciousness, that is to speak a bourgeois hysteria for the clean and proper, is to "silence" the speaking subject for the "cure" of a foreign consciousness, and to lay the "foundations" of the speaking subject bare insofar as he is "making sense".

Having said that, this paper can now focus on a "different" conception of the "body impolitics of 'silence'". As has been suggested, this bodiliness refers to the exclusive body of bourgeois consciousness in a hysteria for the "proper" as the new realm to which the mind is banished in the making of local knowledges. This paper will refer to experiential knowledge and the creative knowledge which is based on an alienated body as "thinking with the pigs", and the various practices of "silence" as de-posing of subjectivity and the confession of an inward "rot" which is masked in the folds of discourse.

First of all, there is the "silence" that goes with the demand of discourse to "conform". This form of "silence" can be recognised in psychology in its modern scientific project, and the vulgar objectification of its subject in the various practices of self-confession.

Secondly, in a more mystical sense, there is the "silence" that goes with the practices of "central neutrality" where the "feeling" subject caresses itself. This form of "silence" can be recognised as the postmodern condition of man, where subjectivity comes to be recognised or misrecognised in what is simultaneously posed and de-posed.

Thirdly, "silence", that is silent in the sense of not speaking, symbolically comes to mean that the subject is either "going with the flow", or the subject is orientated in the "proper" thrust of language rather than the "common sense" of a bourgeois consciousness which brings inertia to the "proper" thrust of language - an inertia which is mistaken to be the sense of his discourse, and comes about in the confession of the prohibition in the name of Hum