Psychoanalysis and qualitative psychology: complementary or contradictory paradigms?

This paper outlines a history of mutual suspicion between qualitative researchers and psychoanalytic practitioners, despite many apparent areas of shared concern. After offering a brief account of Freud's own epistemological and methodological position(s) with regard to research, the paper describes some of the most important attempts to combine qualitative research with psychoanalytic ideas in the last ten years, focusing particularly on the development of the psychoanalytically-informed research interview and the potential uses of counter-transference within qualitative inquiry. Some potential criticisms of these approaches from the perspective of discursive psychology are described, and the place of lacanian psychoanalysis within discourse analysis is briefly explored. The paper concludes by discussing some of the arguments for and against incorporating more psychoanalytic methods into qualitative psychology, and suggests that greater interaction between these two fields could lead to the enrichment of both.