The use of fictional narratives in psychoanalytic research

Abstract

Starting from the consideration that the psychoanalytic method is an invariant element of the human activity known as psychoanalysis, this paper aims to allocate the use of fictional narratives within the scope of qualitative research with the psychoanalytic method. It is justified insofar as it promotes the discussion of the theoretical foundations of this type of narrative, which has been gaining notoriety in the qualitative field. Therefore, the text is organized into three parts. The first discusses the different types of psychoanalytic research in general. In the second, it presents different uses of the psychoanalytic method in qualitative investigations. In the third, it inserts fictional narratives into the scope of qualitative research with a psychoanalytical method and presents a fictional narrative as an example. It appears that the rigor of fictional narratives is based precisely on the use of the psychoanalytic method, giving them clinical-epistemological coherence.