Multiple case studies: research strategy in psychoanalysis and education

Abstract

The case study will be discussed as a research methodology for connecting psychoanalysis and education. This discussion is part of the study carried out by the partnership between the Interdisciplinary Center for Study and Research for Contemporary Childhood and Adolescence of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NIPIAC-UFRJ), the Institute of Psychiatry (UFRJ), the School of Education of UFRJ, and the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), which analyzed cases of children and adolescents with difficulties in their schooling. By the topic of discontent in schooling, the association between case study and intervention research was useful to analyze contemporary phenomena inserted in real life contexts (Yin, 2005). We discuss the importance of case definition, of the question of study and production of material, its organization and analysis, as well as results and products. Finally, we carry out a reflection on the methodological challenges found in the research.

Keywords:
case studies; research methodology; psychoanalysis; education

Resumo

O estudo de casos será discutido como metodologia de pesquisa na articulação entre psicanálise e educação. Tal discussão se insere no trabalho efetuado pela parceria entre o Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Pesquisa e Intercâmbio para a Infância e Adolescência Contemporâneas da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Nipiac-UFRJ), o Instituto de Psiquiatria (UFRJ), a Faculdade de Educação da UFRJ e da Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), onde casos de crianças e adolescentes com entraves na escolarização foram objeto de análise. Pela temática do mal-estar na escolarização, o estudo de casos aliado à pesquisa-intervenção se ofereceu propício para a análise de fenômenos contemporâneos inseridos em contextos de vida real. Discute-se aqui sobre a importância da definição dos casos, da questão de estudo e produção do material, sua organização e análise, bem como possíveis resultados e produtos. Por fim, é tecida uma reflexão sobre os desafios metodológicos encontrados na realização da pesquisa.

Palavras-chave:
estudos de caso; metodologia de pesquisa; psicanálise; educação

Resume

On debat ici les études de cas comme méthodologie de recherche sur la relation entre la psychanalyse et l’éducation. Cette discussion est incluse dans le travail en partenariat entre le Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherche sur l’enfance et l’adolescence contemporaine et Université Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro (NIPIAC-UFRJ), l’Institut de Psychiatrie (UFRJ), l’École de l’éducation UFRJ et l’Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), où des cas des enfants et des adolescents avec des obstacles à l’éducation ont été analysées. Le thème du malaise dans l’enseignement, les études de cas associées à la recherche d’intervention, sont bien adaptées à l’analyse des phénomènes contemporains insérés dans des contextes de la vie réelle (Yin, 2005). On parle ici sur l’importance de la définition de cas, la problematique de l’étude et de la production du matériel, son organization, l’analyse ainsi que les résultats et les produits. Enfin, une réflexion c’est construite sur les défis méthodologiques rencontrés dans la mise en œuvre de la recherche.

Mots-clés:
étude de cas; méthodologie de recherche; psychanalyse; l’éducation

Resumen

Los estudios de casos serán discutidos como metodología de investigación sobre la relación entre el psicoanálisis y la educación. Esta discusión está dentro del trabajo realizado por la asociación entre el Centro Interdisciplinar de Estudios e Investigación de la Niñez y Adolescencia Contemporáneas de la Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro (NIPIAC-UFRJ), del Instituto de Psiquiatría (UFRJ), la Escuela de Educación de la UFRJ y Universidad Federal Fluminense (UFF), donde se analizaron los casos de niños y adolescentes con barreras en la educación. A través del tema del malestar en la educación, los estudios de casos combinados con la metodologia de investigación se presentan propicios para el análisis de los fenómenos contemporáneos insertados en los contextos de la vida real (Yin, 2005). Aquí se argumenta sobre la importancia de la definición de caso, la cuestión del estudio y la producción de material, organización y análisis, así como los resultados y productos. Por último, se teje una reflexión sobre los retos metodológicos encontrados en la investigación.

Palabras clave:
estudio de casos; metodología de investigación; psicoanálisis; educación

Case study as research strategy

According to Ventura (2007), there is no consensus about the origin of the use of the case study as a research strategy. Primarily, three directions are offered by different authors: 1) one that points psychology and medicine as its precursors; 2) another from the anthropological studies by Malinowski and the School of Chicago (Chizzotti, n. d. cited by Ventura, 2007, p. 384); and 3) one that points out the legal studies by Laugdell (Gil, n. d. cited by Ventura, 2007, p. 384). According to Yin (2005, p. 32), the case study “is an empirical research that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly defined.”

Studying contemporary phenomena in contrast to historical ones often requires observation and participation from the researcher in the context in which the phenomenon has been going on. Real-life facts, lived in their context, cannot be inserted into controlled environments or assure us a predominant vector of predictability. In this sense, the case study aims to understand complex social and psychological phenomena, in which multiple variables are involved. Thus, we have chosen this strategy as a possibility to increase the debate between psychoanalysis and education on issues involving childhood and adolescence, especially by the study of discontent in schooling. For the purpose of the research, the term discontent was initially used in the most comprehensive way possible, precisely so that, from the cases, it could be described and analyzed in depth in each specific situation. Therefore, we wove a path from the more general to the particular, with the complaint as a starting point. In this context, in principle, we understood discontent in schooling as a wide range of difficulties involving the child and adolescent with the school environment. They include: learning problems, difficulties in peer relationships at school, difficulties in teacher-student relationships, issues involving reading and writing, aggressiveness and attention; in short, everything that may cause discontent in the relationship of the child or adolescent with the school or with their surroundings (family, for example) from their school issues.

Paín (1985, p. 13) emphasizes a difference between learning problems and school problems, stating that the latter are more comprehensive, involving indiscipline and integration, and can be a reaction formation before a difficult transition from the family group to the social group. However, we did not use the term problem, since it requires the formulation of a conflicting situation and obstacles already with some level of expression. That is, if problem refers to a context with some definition, discontent refers to something more diffuse, alluding precisely to the encounter of drive with culture (Freud, 1930/1996d). The extension of the term thus set matters precisely because it allows a larger opening of possible meanings for what initially appeared as a complaint. The discontent can be announced by the child, as well as by the school regarding the child or adolescent, by the family, or by some expert that cares for that child or adolescent. Thus, the discontent in schooling is the prerogative for the case study, even if it is mentioned by different sources. A child can, for example, present no problems of school performance, not having learning problems, but, by presenting continuously restless behavior, cause discontent in the group, which will turn into actions that directly involve the life of the child/adolescent at school. Another prerogative is that the child/adolescent should be met at the Institute of Psychiatry of UFRJ (Ipub-UFRJ), therefore, that psychiatry was called to treat them. This is part of the initiative to study cases, since, in 2011, the direction of the Psychiatry Service of Childhood and Adolescence (SPIA) of Ipub contacted us, the Interdisciplinary Center for Study and Research for Contemporary Childhood and Adolescence (NIPIAC-UFRJ), and the Schools of Education of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Fluminense Federal University (FE-UFRJ/UFF)¹. The purpose of the contact came from the concern regarding the amount of complaints concerning schools in the universe of children and adolescents referred to the service and the little to no development on the topic. In other words, the only concrete bridge between the user and school occurred by medicines and, in some cases, school reports.

The interest in expanding the medical look was combined to the exercise of interdisciplinarity that NIPIAC has developed, resulting in an articulation between different institutes within UFRJ (Ipub, FE, and IP) and UFF (FE). Instead of a child/adolescent fragmented between specialisms, we sought an integration of the actions and reflections of the different professionals involved and, necessarily, the participation of the child/adolescent and family in the process. In this sense, the case study is linked to the intervention research inserted in the qualitative model proposed by Bauer and Gaskell (2002), focusing on the relation subject/object that starts from the observer, within a context, and questions how the events relate to the people who experience them. This research is also part of the paradigm of construction of subjectivities. The research of construction of subjectivities focuses on the process and modes of subjectification, not on subjects themselves, as if they were already constituted. In this context, the research of production of subjectivities refers to a construction thought of as conceived in the social fabric: “that does not mean we should ignore the existence of an individuation of subjectivities - after all, it is not about denying the existence of subjects, but affirming them as a provisional and prismatic form averse to the idea of totalization” (Catharino, 2001, p. 46).

The meetings with children and adolescents, family, and school were within an intervention research model, which intended at the same time to investigate and enable the construction of a space for speech and exchange between them and the researchers. This model, in its origins, is theoretically inspired by the participatory methodologies and action research from the social sciences that deconstruct the myth of objectivity, since the studied object is modified by the research field. Similarly, it also seeks as theoretical inspiration a clinical approach supported by the assumptions of psychoanalysis, used outside their traditional intervention device (Castro & Besset, 2008).

Case definition

Although an individual can be a “case” in the classical case study (Yin, 2005, p. 43), this unit of analysis per se is not enough. A case is always a selection of reality and, even if it is a person, it will be a particular aspect or set of features that will make them a case to research. In this sense, defining what will be a case is no easy task. Although we had in our research three fundamental prerequisites for the choice of cases (being a child or adolescent, being met by psychiatric services, and presenting a complaint of discontent in schooling), the deepening of the selection criteria was important to make the relationship between the intended research and the universe researched more relevant. In this context, we carried out a pilot exploratory research during the first half of 2012 to better understand the field. This study focused on a documental analysis, from the reading of 285 screening records (total of children and adolescents who sought the service in the first semester of 2012). The main questions can be thus described: how many children and adolescents sought the service? Of these, how many presented complaints to the school? What were the main complaints? The purpose of the mapping was to better understand the group of children and adolescents who sought SPIA in general, to then select cases that, in their particularity, could somehow contribute to an extended reflection about this universe (Carneiro & Coutinho, 2015). Two complaints were prevalent in this survey (learning difficulty/agitation), a selection within what we call discontent in schooling, and were used as selection criteria of the cases. We chose five cases to represent, in a way, the large group referred with these two prevalent complaints, hoping they could bring more elements on most referrals to the service.

According to Verztman (2013, p. 71), “a case study is, therefore, a naturalistic method and a form of study that aims to describe and understand what is singular” believing that it can contribute to the understanding of a greater reality. In this context, we seek the representative case, that is, the one that will supposedly better represent the universe of interest, as Yin says (2005, p. 63): “One starts from the principle that the lessons learned from these cases provide many information about the experiences of the usual person or institution.” However, even though this is a methodological guiding principle, by psychoanalysis as a theory of reference, we know that singularity will always have a special place in understanding the case. In a different direction from the medical model, to which “the case refers to the anonymous subject who represents a disease (...), for us, on the contrary, the case expresses the very singularity of the being who suffers and of the speech that they direct to us” (Nasio, 2001, p. 11). Another important point was the choice of multiple and not single cases in our research. Precisely by using the psychoanalytic theory in an extended context, or rather, because this is not a classical clinical context, we believed more cases would provide more comparative analysis situations, thus contributing to increase the reliability in the triangulation of the material produced. In our initial research, specifically, we included seven children and adolescents met at SPIA who presented schooling problems linked to complaints of learning difficulty and agitation as reasons to enter the service. In short, our research defined the following eligibility criteria: being a child/adolescent, being met at SPIA, and presenting complaint of discontent in schooling - specifically learning difficulty and/or agitation. These common characteristics defined the choice of cases. As Verztman says (2013, p. 69), “in the humanities, a case is an aspect of reality that will be investigated and that must have certain regular features.”

At the beginning of the research, following these criteria, we chose five children and two adolescents. Along and at the end of the research we were left with three children and two adolescents, because one child was referred to care outside the institution and another was referred to another service within the institution. The latter was referred while still taking part in the project, but their decreased permanence in the research generated far less material than the other cases, and the team decided not to use it for analysis. The choice of 8 initial cases also considered the possibility of implementing the proposal (researchers available to systematically go to school, interviewers, meeting with family members).

Multiple cases?

The choice of more than one case, as already pointed out, was not aimed at replication, but at the comparative possibility. Thus, studying the five cases and working with the speeches allowed us to create lines of convergence and divergence on the material. We did not intend to evaluate the incidence of the phenomena, but rather shed light on the context in which they occurred. Thus, according to Yin (2005), our case study was explanatory, aiming to answer how and why the discontent occurred in those situations. But, as Verztman tells us (2013), comparing cases is a cause of major issues and controversies in psychoanalytic literature. The singularity and differences of context are so important that they often point to the incomparable. However, the author warns us that “comparing models, abstractions that serve to give some parameters to our practice, is not the same as comparing subjects” (Verztman, 2013, p. 75, bold added by the author) and, also, that we must not retreat from difficulty.

The comparative element of analysis was the discontent and how, along two years, it was moving from initial complaint to a clearer and more involved speech by the subjects who formulated it. This interventive aspect of the research was discussed in the article Infância, adolescência e mal-estar na escolarização: interlocuções entre a psicanálise e a educação (Carneiro & Coutinho, 2016). Regarding the description and naming of the discontent, it was compared between the different cases from the four main axes of analysis: family, school, subjects, and experts. In this sense, the way the speech of the different schools named the discontent concerning the cases was a comparative subaxis. The speech of family members about the discontent also created a large repertoire of material in which we sought prevalent topics, departures, recurrences, and specific relations with the cases and between them.

Study question and production of the material

We chose the term discontent as theoretical point of interest (Freud, 1930/1996d) to agree that the construction of civilization imposes a series of restrictions on the drive and that, with this, being in and producing culture, far from being harmonious, is a conflicting process, with a permanent attempt of balance. As Millot says (2001, p. 109), rereading the Freudian text: “will it be possible to find a balance between the claims of the individual and cultural requirements?.” From psychoanalysis, this balance will always be temporary and laborious, which characterizes discontent as a condition of culture itself, going in the opposite direction of the binarism well-being/discontent. The school, while important agent of the civilizing process, would not be exempt from the conflicting aspects involving the relationship of individuals with culture, with their peers, and themselves. However, “education reveals itself as ‘disastrous’ when it remains unaware of the desires and conflicts between them” (Millot, 2001, p. 115). This means that, when education takes place in a primarily alienating vector, of submissiveness, in which the subjective dimension is not considered, it contributes to the increase of discontent and its consequences. The attenuation of discontent, going in the opposite direction, could pass through the recognition of this real disagreement issue that our desires constitute (Millot, 2001), in the sense of what Freud postulated as education for reality (Freud, 1927/1996c). This points to an elaborative possibility of discontent, a know-how of it, which would go in a different direction than trying to eradicate it, with a speech that believes in a welfare society. Therefore, including discontent and building from it would be part of an education guided by the reality of castration. In this context, the objective of the presented case studies was to expand the discussion on difficulties in the schooling of children and adolescents to integrate several speeches, more specifically, the family, the school, experts, and the child and adolescent themselves.

The numerous difficulties in the education of children and adolescents today lead us to think and question the way they are treated theoretically. It is quite common the complaint from educators about the “failure” of their students, very commonly identified as an expression of a single symptom (ADHD, dyslexia, cognitive deficits, etc.) of the child/adolescent, which is corroborated in the medical and/or psychological field by the current trend to medicalization, but one very rarely considers the singularity of the subjects and the situation in which the problems occur. The psychoanalytic texts (Bergès, 1999; Jerusalinsky, 1999; Mannoni, 1999; Colli & Kupfer, 2005; Santiago, 2005; Lajonquière, 2010) draw attention to the fact that the medical-pedagogical discourse about the difficulties of learning and schooling often does not consider the particularities of subjects and their context. When dealing with the issue in an isolated, decontextualized, and descriptive way, the singular dimension of that symptomatic manifestation to that subject is lost, along with the possibility that they are involved in the research and treatment of their difficulty. We started from the assumption that broadening the discussion on difficulties in school would include different voices that, participating in the process, rather than silenced, would help to simplify the issue and consequently minimize the subjective participation. The case study while research strategy would favor this more careful selection, in which the multiple factors that intervene as well as their different agents would be discussed. That said, the question of our research can be stated as follows: how can we understand the discontent in the schooling of children and adolescents from the complaints of learning difficulty and agitation? How can we think the participation of the different actors in this discontent (child/adolescent, school, family, experts)?

To try to answer these questions, the research needed to hear, read, and interact with children and adolescents, family, experts, and schools. Two years were devoted to material “collection” and construction. We used a series of strategies, such as meeting with the families, individual interviews with children and adolescents, school visits, and meetings with experts. There was no aprioristic design of the actions-interventions that were constructed from each case and from the demands each one presented. In this sense, we sought multiple sources of evidence, including documents, transcripts of group meetings, transcripts of interviews, and participant observation reports. The documents included the records of screening books, patient records, school reports, reports of psychopedagogical and speech therapy diagnostics, psychodiagnostics, journals of school observations, among others that the case presented. The interviews also followed the four axes, therefore they were performed at school, with experts, family, and child/adolescent. The participant observation mainly included the presence of researchers at school, but was also carried out when the user attended the service. All the meetings with the families and almost all the interviews were recorded, forming a database composed primarily by reports and audio records that were transcribed. All procedures were documented (interviews, visits, phone calls, meetings), contributing to the reliability of the research. Thus, the “use of several sources of evidence to encourage converging lines of research” (Yin, 2005, p. 33) was a tactic used to increase its validity. Since our object of study was the speech of these different actors regarding discontent, all that referred to it was, at first, of interest. The said, the unsaid, anyway

the case study research faces a technically unique situation in which there will be a lot more variables of interest than data points, and, as a result, it is based on multiple sources of evidence, with the data needing to converge in a triangle format and, as another result, it benefits from the previous development of theoretical propositions to conduct data collection and analysis (Yin, 2005, p. 33).

The research project precisely constitutes the logic connecting the data to be collected (and the conclusions to be taken) to the initial questions of a study (Yin, 2005, p. 40). Therefore, when “collecting” and systematizing the different speeches, we were not only discussing the multiple factors that intervene in the so-called learning difficulties, but also expanding their contextualization.

Material organization and analysis

There is sometimes confusion between case study as a research method and the cases as a way of keeping records, which are important for the practice, but do not meet the requirements of the method. In psychoanalysis, for example, we often find the use of clinical vignettes (Nasio, 2001, p. 12) to illustrate aspects of the theory, but they are not case studies themselves. In this research, on the other hand, we had as research object five children and adolescents to be monitored for two years and all the speech regarding discontent in schooling related to them, a problem of research and a great analytical axis that consisted of, methodologically, understanding it in the four different speeches.

The analysis phase of the research was one of its major challenges. On the one hand, the research had an initial design pointing to the four main axes of analysis that remained in and guided the field. However, within each major analytical axis (family, school, subject, expert), the material produced during the two-year period was large. The very extensive database required many organizations, and Dropbox and Google Drive have been used as filing systems. Before this amount of material, the researchers’ analysis took place in the ways described below. The a posteriori way was a guide for the design of the categories and subcategories within each axis. That is, if a priori, in the project, we had the question and the major axes defined, in a third moment of analysis, looking at the material, the categories and subcategories were constructed only after. We read all the material more than once in a group of two coordinators and five students of undergraduate research, and we mapped the recurrences and differences in the speeches, as well as prevalent topics. After reading, we pointed to some possible categories and returned to the material. Some remained and others were discarded, because they did not sufficiently include the speeches. The ones kept were improved and generated subcategories. Here, the theory and clinical experience of the researchers were a very important point.

For example, when conducting the analysis of the family axis, the research group initially focused on the study of the state-of-the-art research in psychoanalysis, education, and family. This theoretical research showed trends that could, later, when confronted with the field material, affect the construction of categories or not. The fact of using the a posteriori in the construction of categories and subcategories brought advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage, which combines with the psychoanalytic activity, is a certain emptying of knowledge, the fact of listening to the speech itself and letting it affect us for what it brings of new, different, unusual. Here, the clinical researcher posture lends what Freud (1912/1996a) calls evenly suspended attention, so that the voice of the subject surpasses that of the researcher. However, because we only designed categories after, we found different categories in each axis, which made the comparative discussion quite difficult between them. For example, in the family axis, we built two large categories from the mapping of the discontent stated in the parents’ speech - examiner school and school that does not meet expectations -, whereas in the school axis, from the speech of educators, we built other two - ideal student and ideal school/teacher.

In a very synthetic and reduced way for the purposes of this article, we can say that the four axes presented a great relationship between discontent and ideal. Attending a school necessarily involves ideals of student, of learning, of citizenship, of children, anyway, often silent and silenced matrices that cross the production of discontent and can easily be unnoticed by both the school and the mental health field, the family, and the subject. For example, in a longitudinal analysis concerning the initial complaint of learning difficulty by one of the adolescents, referred by the school, from listening to the family, visit to the school, and further analysis of the material, we found that the view of learning of the family was directly related to the alleged difficulty of the student, who had low grades as a way of visibility and resistance to an unattainable model. In another case of a seven-year-old boy that used controlled medication, also with initial complaint of learning difficulty, we found by participant observation that, although the speeches of the expert, the family, and the school affirmed that all was well with the drug interference, the child was asleep half the time of the shift. Here, for example, the ideal of quiet child, favored by the use of the medicine, could be appeasing the discontent at school. Finally, the analysis of the discontent was quite long and generated many aspects of discussion, both interventive and conceptual, which exceed the aim of this article.

In the comparative analysis of the five cases, very rich in differences, the point of convergence between ideal and discontent remained, even though stated by quite peculiar and singular forms in each case.

In the manner of results

Once again, for the purposes of this study, we will significantly summarize the discussion of results. In general, the initial hypothesis that the complaints of agitation and learning difficulty, if considered as expressions of discontent, could initially gain a very different outline from the initial one was materialized. That is, before understanding it as a possible characterization of a disorder (four cases have been diagnosed, or have had the suggestion of ADHD), when we consider the complaint only as an indication of a discontent, we are necessarily compelled to try to understand it from the established relationships. Whose discontent is it? Who enunciates it? What does it say? Otherwise the “disorder,” fiduciary of the disease model and already previously defined, is predominantly located in the subjects themselves, individualizing the “evil” and, many times, taking it as biological (Guarido & Voltolini, 2009; Costa, 2004). Thus, in an interventive aspect, from the discourse analysis mainly of the family and school axes, we were able to see some “advantage” for the actors involved, especially in three of the five cases, inferred from statements such as “I got better,” “now I can talk,” “my relationship with him has improved,” “I’m looking at him differently,” among several others phrases. In this sense, the case study as a means and subsidy for the intervention in the research was interesting because it enabled a certain shift of the participants, including in this the researchers themselves. In a micropolitical context, the research strategy brought to light, by deepening the cases, the complexity of the singular regarding a more diffuse and generalized initial complaint, which could contribute to the understanding of agitation or learning difficulties as signs of pathologies.

In a more conceptual perspective, we can say that, of the various analyses, we cannot think about discontent in school without considering the crossing of various ideals in this production. Therefore, the ideal was a key concept for understanding discontent, being in the prevalent category among the four axes and in the comparative analysis of the five cases.

The research generated many products, including more than ten studies of undergraduate research, five articles in indexed journals, two book chapters, and several presentations at congresses. Currently, the coordinators are producing a book with the general results of the research.

Methodological challenges

The study of the cases revealed that having discontent in schooling as object is, essentially, asking who enunciates it and in which relationship it takes shape. In this respect, our research strategy is interesting because it can happen in the very context where the discontent is supposedly produced. In one case, for example, the visits of the researcher to the school showed that, despite the initial complaint, there was no educator who affirmed in their speech that there was discontent, on the contrary, for them everything went on as expected. The production of discontent was centered on the family axis, especially in what the family expected from the child. This finding was not without dilemmas, because we ended up not including this material in the comparative analysis of the cases, which presupposed a certain involvement of the school, even if it has helped to clarify the importance of the researched context in case studies.

Also, by performing a research in psychoanalysis outside its strict context - the clinical aspect - we faced great challenges. The first, in our view, is relative to the object of psychoanalysis, which is the unconscious. Undoubtedly, a researcher guided by psychoanalysis necessarily starts from the paradigm of the unconscious. This clear and indisputable point, since it is a theoretical premise, soon finds difficulties in the extended field. One of the reasons can be thus translated: how to research the unconscious beyond the clinical aspect? Freud left us clear clinical research matrices and bet on the relationship between psychoanalysis and education, but did not advance in this last field. In the clinical context, treatment and research coincide, and this is a Freudian important maxim. In the educational context, we often cannot talk about treatment itself, but in an intervention in the studied reality. Clinically, the research is of the unconscious, and it takes place from its formations, namely: joke, symptom, dream, and Freudian slip (Freud, 1915/1996b). When we listened to the subject in the research and intervened, we are starting from the premise of the unconscious, but are not necessarily having its formations as specific research object. When we later analyze the material, we also will not be predominantly driven to the formations of the unconscious. The issue of transference is also delicate, since we took it into account. However, it often will not be presented in all situations of research, and its clinical participation is very different.

In this sense, doing research in psychoanalysis, in addition to the clinical aspects, calls us to permanently think about this relationship, improve criteria, and articulate knowledge. By choosing discontent as an object, which is not a metapsychological concept itself, we knew we would have a certain theoretical plasticity, which has enriched and expanded our discussion. On the other hand, it was not simple to locate discontent when analyzing the material, since the evidence were often subtle and relied on the clinical experience of the two research coordinators. Anyway, we started this research report arguing about the use of the multiple case studies strategy and how we have used it over more than two years. We described the research design and the main axes of analysis as very important points, briefly discussing the results. Finally, we can say we had several difficulties, but the connection between psychoanalysis and education produced interesting effects on the interventive aspects and enabled us to critically and reflexively broaden the discussion that involves education and mental health. However, as this method is a “critical activity of science, and not a general recipe or technique of research” (Furlan, 2017, p. 83), we still have a lot to do in the methodological discussion involving the articulation of psychoanalysis with the other fields of knowledge, its dilemmas, and its possibilities.

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• 1
  This context includes the research Infância, adolescência e mal-estar na escolarização: Estudo de casos em Psicanálise e Educação, coordinated by the author of this article along with assistant professor Luciana Gageiro Coutinho (PPGE-UFF).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2018

History

• Received
  27 Nov 2017
• Accepted
  15 June 2018