Biographical Research and Treatment. Some Remarks on Therapeutic Aspects of Sociological Biographical Interviews

Abstract

The article is a result of the discussion between the sociologists and professional psychotherapist. The authors’ aim is to consider therapeutic functions of biographical interviewing with reference to professional psychological treatment assumptions. Therapeutic aspects of the narrator–scientist encounter are especially important in the research on traumatic collective and individual experiences (such as wars, exile, disability, poverty, etc.), when informants recall painful memories or talk about the distressing present. In the article, the issues of scientific and psychological treatment aims are discussed, as well as problems regarding the relationship between narrator–patient and researcher–therapist, and professional skills in the area of biographical interviewing and psychotherapy. Also, the authors consider potential advisability of “therapeutic” interventions undertaken by a researcher in the sociological interview course in the context of ethical principles and their presumable impact on narrators’ biographical and identity work resulting from the participation in the interview. The indepth biographical interviews and narrative interviews collected in the project “Institutionalized identity? The processes of identity development on the basis of biographies rendered by adults raised in residential care,” Lodz, Poland 2011-2013” will provide the empirical background for our considerations.