The long paper focuses on diversity issues encountered in the context of research in education made during the 3rd lockdown – April 3 to May 19, 2021–, when COVID-19 infection was increasing.

The pandemic crisis led many researchers used to conduct clinical interviews for purpose of research in a face-to-face situation to continue their research in a new way by using online interviews through communications platforms. That unusual situation brought some interrogations on the methodical level as well as it sometimes brought uncertainty or anxiety about the process of the clinical interviews and the effects that an experience never made before could have on the research results, on the analysis produced.

First, we will define what a clinical interview is in our research, how we usually organise the ‘apparatus’ of our interviews and what is our positioning as researcher.

In a second time, we will come back to an experience of online clinical interviews with music teachers and, more specifically, the experience made with one of them. From this, we will evoke some new questions emerging in that unusual context.

The research concerned by this presentation has been built on clinical interviews made with music teachers in training in a higher education institution in the field of artistic practices in the performing arts.

At the request of the director of the institution, who wish to enrich the courses delivered with contributions of research in Education Sciences, a team of five researchers has been organised, each of the researcher having to conduct some clinical interviews with the music teachers in training. Trying ‘to do the best of a bad job’ (Bion, 1979), the first movement of the researchers has been to try to stay as close as possible from a so-called classic situation by making the choice of analysing only the audio recordings without taking into account what had been seen on the screen during the interviews.

Therefore, the working document on which the analysis was supposed to be produced was the transcription of what the interviewee had said during the clinical interview. That point in itself questions the positioning of the researchers more than the nature of the collected data. In the aftermath of the research, it has conducted researchers to realise there was a necessity to think more carefully about what they tried to keep from their previous experiences of clinical interviews or what kind of mechanism of defence could have been at stake with such a choice.

In the paper we come back more specifically to one of the interviews, made with a music teacher in training called here Myriam who surprised the interviewer by the way she introduced her very young baby in the situation of the interview. The interview framework allowed her to do so since nothing had been said before about the possibility or not to continue the interview while breastfeeding a child… The baby’s presence was then perceived through non-verbal elements.

While in a more usual context, researcher and interviewee are living in what J. Puget called ‘fragments of the world’ (Puget and Wender, 2021), quite isolated from each other. It seems that during this pandemic, the irruption of ‘data and problems that belonged to the external reality of the moment’ brought the two in presence closer from each other in ‘overlapping worlds’ (Ibid.). In this paper, we’ll examine the parts of fantasies possibly at stake around the question of ‘feeding’ for someone who is both a mother and a successful music teacher in training.

Our approach takes place within the framework of the ‘psychoanalytically orientated clinical approach in education and training’ (Blanchard-Laville, Chaussecourte, Pechberty and Hatchuel, 2005). According to this perspective, our listening aims above all to initiate a process of understanding some psychological mechanisms at work in ordinary teaching or training situations. But the research process itself can sometimes be an object of research. In our case, it’s the setting of the clinical interviews for the purpose of research which is examined. Due to the specific circumstances of the pandemic crisis, like many other researchers we experienced a kind of diversity we didn’t have imagined before. To be interviewing someone in a face-to-face situation is quite different to trying to do an interview through an application, seeing the other on a screen. This research on the online clinical interview has been helped by the collaboration we have since a few years with colleagues in Europe who are also engaged in works which make links between education and psychoanalysis (Strategic Partnership EducEurope with colleagues from Milano Bicocca University, University College London, Luxembourg University, 2017-2020 – Works in Network 21 with colleagues of Humboldt University Berlin and Vienna University). By confronting our ways to organise clinical interviews, the references we use in that specific methodology, we’ve learned about how European history in the 20th century has led to various ways of practice even when the first sources were the same or very close to each other. But also our attention has been driven to how the specific setting put in place, the frame of the interview influences what we collect as data and how we proceed at the moment of the analysis of the data. Our paper will focus on some questions or issues referring to the frame of a research clinical interview. Trying to think what had happened during those online clinical interviews, we had to conduct without much time of preparation, we base our own reflection on the work of some psychoanalysts who have practised and theorised in different geographical areas (J. Bleger and J. Puget, Argentina; T. Ogden and T. Bibby, U.K.; J. Godfrind, Belgium, R. Roussillon and P. Chaussecourte, France). Despite the differences between these authors, we use their works on mainly two points: what kind of attention for who conducts a research clinical interview and what is the relationship between its frame and the transference phenomena?

The first finding in our research on the online clinical interviews we organised during the COVID-19 crisis is how the specific frame we had to put in place at this specific occasion seems to have been some kind of an ‘attractor’ for psychic investments, for transferential movements. The psychoanalyst José Bleger saw the frame as the repository of primitive symbiotic bonds, as ‘the most primitive part of the personality’ (Bleger, 1967, 248). In our analysis of the clinical research interview presented in this paper, we propose the hypothesis that Myriam could have transferred onto the medium constituted by the connected devices, the video conferencing application and the researcher himself, the most primitive part of her personality represented by the baby she introduced in the situation, keeping him in her arms after a short break when she breastfeed him. In an approach related to Bleger’s, the Belgian psychoanalyst Jacqueline Godfrind has suggested an interesting distinction between two types of frames, the one she calls the ‘inanimate frame’ and the one she calls the ‘embodied frame’. The inanimate frame is ‘the set of material arrangements included in the initial contract: schedule, fees, place [...] of the analytic meetings. The embodied frame concerns the analyst and his/her psyche’ (2021, 156). In the case of research-based clinical interviews transformed by the lockdown, this distinction appears useful to us when analysing what may have been at stake, for the interviewer as well as for the interviewee, on the side of the inanimate frame and the side of the embodied frame. The experience of the online interviews has reinforced our interest for the notion of ‘transference on the framework’ suggested by René Roussillon (2007) and we consider it as a heuristic tool for thinking the transference and countertransference issues in a clinical research interview.

Bibby, T. (2011). Education – an ‘impossible profession’? Psychoanalytic explorations of learning and classrooms. Routledge. Blanchard-Laville, C. & Nadot, S. (2000). Malaise dans la formation des enseignants. L’Harmattan. Blanchard-Laville, C., Chaussecourte, P., Hatchuel, F. et Pechberty, B. (2005). Recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique dans le champ de l’éducation et de la formation. Note de synthèse. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 151, 111-162. Blanchet, A. et coll. (1985). L’entretien dans les sciences sociales. Dunod-Bordas. Bleger, J. (1967) Psicoanálisis del encuadre psicoanalítico. Revista de Psicoanálisis, 24, 241-258. Bourguignon, O. (1995). Le processus de recherche. Dans O. Bourguignon et M. Bydlowski (dir.) La recherche clinique en psychopathologie. Perspectives critiques (p. 35-51). PUF. Cahn, R. (1999). Psychothérapies des névroses et des psychoses. Dans A. de Mijolla et S. de Mijolla-Meilor (dir), Psychanalyse (p. 579-602). PUF. Castarède, M.-F. (2007). L’entretien clinique à visée de recherche. In C. Chiland (dir.), L’entretien clinique (p. 118-145). PUF. Chaussecourte, P. (2022). Entretien clinique de recherche et prise en compte des phénomènes insus. In B. Albero & J. Thievenaz (Eds). Enquêter dans les métiers de l’humain. Traité de méthodologie de la recherche en sciences de l’éducation et de la formation (p. 213-222). Éditions Raison et Passions. Devereux, G. (1967). From Anxiety to Method in Behavioral Sciences. De Gruyter Mouton. Godfrind, J. (2021). Quand le cadre chavire. Revue belge de psychanalyse, 78, 153-167. Markakis, K. (2022). Écrire-rêver le rapport à la pratique professionnelle d’un coordonnateur d’ULIS collège : la répétition d’une réalité inrêvée. Estilos da Clínica, 27/3, 451-465. Ogden, T. (2005). This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries. Routledge. Puget, J. & Wender, L. (2021). Analyste et patient dans des mondes superposés. In Monica Horovitz et Piotr Krzakowski (Eds), Écrits intimes de psychanalystes pendant la pandémie. Journal de voyage en confinia (p. 31-47). L’Harmattan. Roussillon, R. (2007). Le cadre psychanalytique. PUF. Yelnik, C. (2005). L’entretien clinique de recherche en sciences de l’éducation. Recherche et formation, 50, 133-146.