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This article describes some of the essential features of a methodological approach to studying individuals' deeper motivations and experiences. The overall approach consists of "interviewing for feeling" with "the participant as ally and co-contemplator," "conceptually developed essentialist portraiture," and cross-case discussion, with an epistemology based on C. H. Cooley's principle of "sympathetic introspection." The heart of the article is an example of an analysis of excerpts from an interview with an English as a second language teacher regarding her interest in language. The analysis illustrates how to see and conceptualize the manner in which certain essential aspects in the participant's consciousness and overall orientation evolve in time. This example is then used to illustrate several concerns of portraiture and the epistemological presuppositions of the approach. E very methodological approach in qualitative research is particularly suited for certain tasks and purposes. For example the frankness, caring, and indomitable spirit of Douglas's (1985) "creative interviewing" is perfect for "ask [ing] someone to tell all about love, their life as a beautiful woman, their career as a drug smuggler, their dread of being ugly and how it fits into their entire life" (p. 59). And Clandinin and Connelly's (2000) focus on narrative fits exactly these authors' aim to enable them to have dialogue with all concerned parties in the school regarding their research. The present article describes a methodology that is especially sensitive to deeper aspects in the individual, such as sources of inspiration and higher aspirations, and to subtler levels in experience and consciousness. The methodology does not stop at the phenomenology of subjective experience but endeavors to understand this experience, with empathy and sympathy as part of the larger unity of the person of whom this experience forms a part, and to communicate this understanding in carefully constructed portraits. The whole approach was devel-246

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