Research as Reparation. Studying to Soothe

Abstract

The autobiographical accounts of researchers in the social sciences often draw connections between the focus of their research and painful events in their personal past (Bouilloud, 2009). In my experience of supervising doctoral theses in recent years, I, like many of my colleagues, have observed cases in which writing a doctoral thesis appears to serve as a form of ‘reparation’, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term (Klein, 1975): this may involve an attempt to correct social wrongs, or a response to questions encountered in life. In such cases, studying is a way of soothing the pain of old wounds