This article presents a qualitative research interview method informed by psychoanalysis, which can collect data beyond the subjective report of the participants. The method has been used to study acquisition of psychodynamic understanding and therapy technique among student therapists in psychology. Within the psychodynamic tradition, the subjective report of every person is viewed as potentially distorted by defense processes. Moreover, relational patterns in an interaction are viewed as significant data about the intrapsychic object relations of a person provided that the person is placed in a projective situation. Since common qualitative interview methods focus primarily on verbal data, such psychodynamic assumptions represent a methodological challenge. To collect a wider scope of data than merely the subjective report, a research interview has been developed based on a certain degree of projection, a psychoanalytic listening perspective, and the use of emotional expression in the interview relation as data. Subsequently, relational scenarios and incidences of defense processes in the research participants are inferred.

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The article argues that the concepts of relational scenario, structuralized affect and actualized affect are proposed candidates for observation of changes in relational ways of being as it is expressed in transference. A psychoanalytic follow-up interview of a former analytic patient is presented in order to illustrate how change in relational ways of being may be registered and studied. By triangulating the patient's verbal report of change with nonverbal information and transference-countertransference dynamics, one may grasp qualitative changes in relational ways of being. The case presented illustrates a former patient's on-going process of working towards representing aggression in a more direct manner and how this process is made observable with the aid of the proposed concepts in the interview situation. The proposed concepts of relational scenario, structuralized and actualized affect discussed are compared to the concept of transference used in studies of core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT).