ABSTRACT

GD: Well, fi rst of all it’s a pleasure to have Carol back with us again and a pleasure I think we can look forward to in regular interval over the next couple of years. The second thing is that this is actually the continuation of a conversation, really, that began the last time you were here in October, when we discovered, almost by chance, that we had similar interests in relation to interviewing. And we thought it would be interesting to share this in some way. I think one point where we might begin is with some thing that was said by Jonathan Potter at a seminar he gave at the LSE a couple of weeks ago, where he announced to everybody that the interview was dead as a research tool. This is a kind of characteristically provocative statement. He wanted this to mean that we should give up trying to look for data in sources where the researcher has manipulated things in some way and we should look for freely occurring and spontaneous conversation rather than structured interviews of any kind. But I think both you and I have a conviction that he is profoundly wrong about this, and that interviews are actually or interviews should be a key and focal source of how we start to explore social psychological processes. Maybe, one place that we can begin is to go back to where we fi rst started talking about interviewing, which was for me largely focused on Piaget and for you also some of Freud’s works. But perhaps where we can begin is just with something about where that interest in interviewing came from. I don’t know if you wanted to say something about what you saw in Freud’s studies on hysteria?