Auditory verbal hallucinations have traditionally especially been researched from a form-based approach, with content getting much less attention. In this article, we argue for the importance of looking at content to get a fuller understanding of the hallucinatory experience. Guided by Lacanian psychoanalysis, we conducted a thematic and a narrative analysis on interviews with 10 schizophrenic patients about their hallucinations. We discerned five themes in the data, which were based on Lacanian theory and had to do with existential questions: parenthood and authority, sexuality and relationships, gender identity, life in the light of death, and what does the other want? Furthermore, we added a theme for unclassified content. Narratively, we found that participants constructed a story of four steps about their hallucinatory experiences. These steps were disturbing events in the past posing an existential question, triggering event, period of confusion, and hearing voices that allude to existential themes. Participants succeed in different degrees in integrating their hallucinatory experiences in their own life history. These stories can be situated on a continuum by making use of three prototypical narrating styles: the meta-delusional, delusional, and chaotic narrative type. Overall, our analysis shows that hallucinations can both be thematically and narratively organized, by making use of a theoretical framework like Lacanian psychoanalysis. Our research demonstrates that hallucinatory contents are not random but are about existential issues imbedded in a life narrative. Future research would benefit of integrating content and form-based approaches.
As quantitative methods dominate the field of clinical psychology, qualitative inquiry struggles to live up to its full potential. The ubiquitous quantitative criteria and epistemology lead to a flawed idea of objectivity, pursued by many qualitative researchers in an attempt to be taken seriously. Therefore, they try to avoid any possible theoretical influence. This often creates a fear for really interpreting data. However, it seems that instead of leading to higher quality research, this rather leads to superficial analyses. In this chapter, I show, based on my own recent research regarding the experience of negative symptoms in psychosis, how theoryuse led to more in-depth analyses. Our study consisted of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of interviews with twelve patients with psychosis about their negative symptoms. During the earlier phases of research, we stayed close to the data and tried to bracket our theoretical assumptions as much as possible. However, when coming to our final analysis, we approached the data more through a theoretical lens. This way we were able to lift our analysis from what was rather a summary of what our participants told to a deeper understanding of the process of negative symptoms.
Background: Despite considerable scientific interest in the negative symptoms of psychosis, the subjective dimension of these experiences has barely been studied. Methods: This paper aims at addressing this shortcoming by means of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of semi-structured interviews with 12 participants with a psychotic disorder. Results: The analysis yielded three major themes: 1) negative symptoms can be conceptualized as a failure of narratives to account for perplexing experiences participants are confronted with in psychosis; 2) negative symptoms challenge participants to make sense of them with metanarratives; 3) participants highlight a withdrawn attitude towards life after psychosis. Conclusions: The standard characterization of negative symptoms as a loss of normal functioning should be revised, as this does not match participants' subjective experiences. Negative symptoms rather represent hard to verbalize experiences. This difficulty of linguistic expression is not 20 a shortcoming of the person experiencing them, but characteristic of the experiences themselves.
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