Diane--
You say: "the only interaction, it seems to me, that you can - or ought
to - account for, is that of the absent analyst, interacting with your
own desires to re-present personal trauma in the contexts of social
science discourse."
Do you really mean the "only"? Shouldn't we try to analyze interactions
that do not involve ourselves for various reasons -- including an
attempt to develop better scientific understandings of how they work?
Personalization of everything would become narcissism when directed to
self and rudeness when directed to others.
It seems to me that the position of the analyst in such work is one of
various legitimate issues for discussion, not the only one. So you ask
whether my analysis is "a further extension of institutionalizing this
woman's experience." Not in the sense that it will affect her at all,
under the almost certain assumption that she will never see this work.
In the sense that it too adopts a distanced stance on her experiences,
perhaps. But it's a long way from institutionalizing someone to writing
analytically about them.
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307 http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
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