ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses how a psycho-social approach, based on object relational principles informed the research in four key respects: ontology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics. She explores two interrelated ways in which her research project engages in relational thinking, largely through the work of Donald Winnicott and Bion. Bion's concept of the container–contained relationship not only affords a powerful tool for understanding the tension and mobilization of intersubjectivity and individuality in new mothers, it also provides a radical foundation for a psycho-social research epistemology. First, the author briefly outlines her theoretical approach to maternal identity, drawing on relational thinking. Second, she describes the research practices that follow and what she learns from them. A psycho-social approach has the potential to transcend various troublesome binaries that abound in identity theory: natural–social, universal– particular, freely chosen–heavily regulated. In terms of a clinical psychoanalytic methodology, we are therefore borrowing a data analytic method based initially on transference dynamics.
