The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science

Comparative Issues and Examples

Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, Tom Wengraf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415228374
• eBook ISBN: 9781134585373
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Biographical research methods have become a useful and popular tool for contemporary social scientists. This book combines an exploration of the historical and philosophical origins of this important field of qualitative research with comparative examples of the different ways that biographical methods have been successfully applied internationally. Through these many illustrative examples of socio-biography in process the authors show how formal textual analysis, whilst uncovering hidden emotional defences, can also shed light on wider historical processes of societal transformation.
Topics discussed include:
*individual and linked lives
*generational change
*political influences on memory and identity
*biographical work in reflexive societies
*narrativity and empowerment in professional practice
*ways of theorising and generalising from case-studies.
Biographical Methods in the Social Sciences promotes debate and provides opportunities for students and researchers to widen their uses of narrative research.

Part 1
Issues of methodology and theory

1 Reflections on the biographical turn in social science

Michael Rustin

Contemporary theories of individualisation (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991, 1992) argue that modern society is giving a new importance to individuals. Where earlier agrarian and industrial societies provided social scripts, which most individuals were expected to follow, contemporary societies throw more responsibility on to individuals to choose their own identities. Social structures—classes, extended families, occupational communities, long-term employment within a firm—which formerly provided strong frames of identity, grow weaker. Simultaneously, society exposes individuals to bombardments of information, alternative versions of how life might be lived, and requires of individuals that they construct an ‘authentic’ version of themselves, making use of the numerous identityprops which consumer-society makes available. The transition from The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) in Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s classic book of that title, to Sennett’s recent study of the children of that generation The Corrosion of Character (1998) provides one description of this transition, which Sennett represents as involving as much loss as gain in terms of psychic and moral wellbeing.

Some theorists of this new ‘individualised’ order view it as embodying the possibility of emancipation. ‘Reflexivity’—the possibility to understand and choose the circumstances and rules of one’s life—is for some the realisation of a prospect of human emancipation. Although the uncertainties and ‘risks’ of this situation are recognised, and anxieties are expressed about the social bonds and solidarities that might be necessary to sustain the meaning of individual lives, some writers celebrate this new world of freedom and choice.

Others view individualisation more critically. Foucault noted that individuals were ‘produced’ through social procedures which were in their own way as coercive as the more collectivised routines of the previous social era. Critics of consumer capitalism have long seen the choices between commodities and the identities packaged with them as superficial, masking dependence on a system which exploits, without satisfying, a human need for authenticity. The concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘individualisation’ are viewed by some as a way of celebrating what for the majority is a condition of increased anxiety and insecurity, the consequence of a transfer of economic risk from the owners of capital to those without its advantages. While those better positioned in the labour or capital markets, and able to exploit the opportunities they provide for the management of uncertainty, may gain from this situation, many members of society lose, and might prefer, if offered a choice, a situation where risks were better contained.

Whatever view one takes of the phenomenon of ‘individualisation’, it is not surprising that a new focus on individuals is having influence on the methods of the social sciences. In such a climate, the time seems right for a fresh methodological turn towards the study of individuals, a turn to biography.

A historical paradox

Individual subjects were ‘discovered’ (some would say invented or constructed), and became the principal focus of cultural attention, at an earlier stage in modern history. This first happened in the culture and society of early modern Europe. From the late sixteenth century, with increasing momentum, European society became interested in individuals, in their differences from one another, in their imputed psychological depth, their moral value, their capacity for change and development. To thine own self be true’ Polonius tells his son Laertes in Hamlet, echoing in his banal homily the fashionable ideas of the time. The portraits and self-portraits of Rembrandt convey a new dimension of self-reflectiveness and of the passage of time. The printed word, the first and most important kind of disembedding of information from its local context, allowed individuals to make their own sense of other people’s experiences, initially in the vernacular translation of the Bible and then in many other kinds of writing. Protestantism required of individuals an intense capacity for self-scrutiny and self-purification. The philosophy of the seventeenth century took as the foundation of knowledge the sensory experiences (Berkeley, Locke, Hume) or the introspected ideas (Descartes, Spinoza) of individuals. The emergence of the novel, in the eighteenth century, enabled readers to reflect on the meaning of lives of persons like themselves and those around them. One of the most influential of these early novels, Robinson Crusoe, imagined the life of a person living in a state of virtual isolation and self-sufficiency, giving an emblematic foundation to the idea of the individual Lyric poetry established the idea of individual sensibility, a subjectivity based on discriminated states of feeling. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude the idea of a spiritual autobiography achieved its canonical modern form. In Germany, in the same period, the ‘bildungsroman’, or narrative of personal development (notably in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), established a parallel view of the world through the life-experience of a representative individual. Later on, the drama which had been originally in the forefront of the cultural ‘discovery’ of the individual (in the plays of the ancient Greek tragedians and in England and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) reemerged as a significant form of exploration of the complexities of individual life, in the work of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, and in a succession of later dramatists from Miller to Beckett. From its inception, the cinema became an exceptionally powerful and popular means of establishing images of individual identity, worth and beauty, popularising the idealisation of the individual through its invention of ‘the star’. These various kinds of images and reflections of individual lives are in the broadest sense ‘biographical’, even though the biographies they construct and represent are for the most part ‘imaginary’ or ‘fictional’ in quality.

The paradox is that, while a variety of forms of Western cultural representation have been preoccupied with individuals, and have been working in various imaginative biographical registers for centuries, social science has generally not been sympathetic to these approaches, and has mostly filtered biography out of its fields of interest.¹ Why is this?

The explanation of this paradox, and also of the new possibility of escaping from its grip, lies in the prescriptive conceptions of scientific method which have dominated social scientific inquiry until recently. The power of the natural sciences lay in their methods of generalisation and abstraction, in their capacity to view phenomena through particular perspectives capable of generating knowledge, while blanking out all others. Plainly, in studying the solar system, or natural species, or human bodies, or the chemical elements, filtering out the prior texture of mythical, religious, cultural and emotional associations which such phenomena had for members of a culture was fundamental in enabling them to be seen in new and transformative ways.² The capacity to reinterpret, and thereby to gain a new control of, the natural world, required the rejection of previous ‘common-sense’ understandings, in which religious, aesthetic and moral meanings were as important as factual description and causal explanation.

A particularly sharp conjunction of ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ ways of experiencing and analysing the natural world is described by Robert Sack’s (1986) work on the North American settlers’ understanding of land and place. What for the indigenous Indian population were places deeply invested with cultural meaning were for the settlers mere tracts of territory, measured by their potential economic yields. It was difficult for the communities holding these two world-views even to understand one another.

The extreme high (or low) point of this insistence on impersonal objectivity and generality was the philosophical doctrine of logical positivism, developed under the intellectual sway of physics in the early part of this century. This argued that statements which referred neither to observable facts, nor logical relations between their elements, were without meaning (Ayer 1936).

Thus, modelling themselves on the natural scientists, human biologists and psychologists set out to construct models of body and mind which described uniformities and regularities, and which enabled human behaviour to be understood ‘objectively’, that is in terms of its abstracted common attributes. Interests in individual idiosyncrasy and variation were seen as impediments to this ambition to create a generalising science of man. To explain the aspect of behaviour and social organisation that interested them, the economists constructed an ideal-typical model of rational actors which similarly abstracted from the full range of human motives and meanings, with powerful explanatory effect. The intellectual ancestors of both scientific psychology and economics were the empiricist philosophers—Hobbes, Locke, Hume and the utilitarians—who had earlier stripped human motivation down to what they deemed to be its fundamental atomistic elements.

Exceptions to scientism: phenomenology and psychoanalysis

There were two major exceptions to this dominant approach in the human sciences. The first of these was a minority idealist or subjectivist tradition within sociology originating with Dilthey. This influenced the mainstream of sociology through Max Weber, leading to the compromise between idealist and empiricist methodologies embodied in his prescription that explanation should be ‘adequate at the level of cause and adequate at the level of meaning’. The idealist tradition, especially in German philosophy, had a continuing influence on the social sciences via phenomenology and hermeneutics. This tradition influenced American interactionist sociology, via Husserl and Alfred Schütz, and Husserl’s influence was also significant in France, via Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Although rationality ruled in England via a dominant philosophy of empiricism, in German-speaking culture these issues were more contested, even though the rival idealist and empiricist perspectives had both to be sustained in exile, and then renewed in the Federal Republic after the war (Adorno et al. 1976). In France, the idea of subjectivity was marginalised in a different way, through the structuralist and poststructuralist movements, whose intellectual programme was to insist on the construction of individual subjects through systems of language and culture. Even where sociologies of action and practice remained important, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, questions of individual subjectivity were subordinated to the mapping of social structures, which were seen to shape the competition of collective actors by allocating resources of material, social and cultural capital. This idealist or phenomenological tradition has been the primary source of biographical approaches in social science, both directly through its absorption by sociologists in Germany and France, and indirectly via its hybridisation with symbolic interactionist perspectives in the United States. These connections are explored elsewhere in this volume.

A second important exception to the dominant anti-subjectivist current of social science was psychoanalysis, which was unusual among the social sciences in rejecting the opposition between scientific and imaginative methods, between typification and the investigation of the particular. Freud wanted to develop a new psychological science which would provide causal explanations of mental states, and to connect these to their biological basis in instinctual drives. He saw himself as a scientist, yet his primary method of investigation was the case study, seen as the history elicited from patients and those around them, and more particularly as what could be learned through the method of psychoanalytic treatment, with its distinctive method of interpretation of dreams and free associations. Freud constructed his typified models of psychic structures from individual cases. Other psychoanalysts tested Freud’s findings both through investigation of the application of his theoretical models to their clinical experience, and through identifying similarities and differences between their own cases and those described by Freud and other analysts. The development of psychoanalysis post-Freud has followed this method. The investigations of cases in the consulting room, making increasing use of the transference and counter-transference as sources of understanding, have been the main empirical resource for the development of psychoanalytic theories and techniques. The transmission and reproduction of psychoanalytic ideas has always taken place to a great extent through clinical examples, through the ‘family resemblances’ between one instance of a typical psychic structure in the consulting room and another. Without such clinical illustration and exemplification, psychoanalytic theories appear scarcely intelligible abstractions, and where the field relies too heavily on abstracted theory, it does not make much progress.

In its insistence on the ‘whole person’ as the object of study, and on the necessity to understand non-rational aspects of mental life as constitutive of human nature, psychoanalysis refused to accept the legitimacy of prevailing orthodoxies in the human sciences. The claims made by Freud for the scientific status of psychoanalysis were vigorously disputed, and psychoanalysis gained little influence in academic psychology or psychiatry, in Britain at least. But, on the other side of the ‘two cultures’ divide, it was extremely influential. The resources that psychoanalysis provided for reflecting on disturbing and poorly understood aspects of the self were widely taken up, in particular in cultural metropolises such as Vienna, Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Buenos Aires where the educated congregated in the most contested and open cultural spaces. The fact that psychoanalysis could be sustained wherever individual patients were willing to pay psychoanalysts to analyse them made it possible for psychoanalysis, like modernist literature and art, to flourish even if universities and scientific establishments had little time for it (Rustin 1997, 1999). In fact, psychoanalytic ideas became part of everyday life, and were particularly influential in the arts, where the idea that the mind might not be transparent to itself and that communication often took place in unintended, overdetermined, or metaphorical ways, was a stimulus to imaginative work. Since production in the arts did not usually take the form of following explicit rules and protocols, and often took as its subject-matter experiences which seemed to fall outside the domain of scientific understanding, psychoanalysis’ doubtful and ambiguous status as a scientific discipline was little obstacle to its influence in the arts and humanities.

In fact, argument about the scientific status of psychoanalysis has continued to take place within the psychoanalytic movement, as well as between psychoanalysts and scientific psychologists. While Freud himself was emphatic that he wished to create a science whose theories would be testable, and which would enable causal relations to be discovered, many psychoanalysts felt more comfortable working with ideas of meaning rather than of causal determination. The organisation of personality by reference to instincts, drives and desires, which had been important in Freud’s early work, developed into a theory of personality governed by structures of relationship to internal and external objects. This development began in Freud’s own work—for example, his paper Mourning and Melancholia is based on the idea of relation to an internalised concept of a loved person—and was developed further by his successors. Melanie Klein’s concept of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is based on the idea of a relation to ‘internal objects’ as providing an unconscious template which shapes individuals’ relationships to persons in their external world, and is in turn shaped and constituted by their experiences of such others especially in early life. These unconscious structures of mind are the primary theoretical objects of this school of psychoanalysis. Some argue that such structures embody causal hypotheses; others prefer accounts which describe patterns of thought and action, and think of psychic structures in terms of meaning and coherence, not cause and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: The biographical turn
• Part 1: Issues of methodology and theory
• Part 2: Examples of biographical methods in use