Feeling and Finding on the Register of Suggestion: Reflections on the ‘Event’ of Researching Community Mental Health Care

Abstract

The paper posits an intervention in current debates around ‘method making’ in the social sciences, drawing on the experience of undertaking an ethnographic study of a community mental health team in East London. Theoretical recourse is made to the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead and to the enduring provenance of the problem of ‘suggestion’ in the history of medicine and psychology. These offer rich and provocative theoretical resources with which to rethink the interpenetration of subject and object and ‘feeling’ and ‘finding’. Whitehead's work provides a general philosophical framework whereby the ongoing subjective experience of the researcher can no longer be sharply demarcated from the ‘data’ encountered. Meanwhile the adoption of a ‘register of suggestion’ opens up insights into the inevitably selective and singular character of any given methodological procedure. It maintains the importance of affective factors at the forefront of analysis, and brings into focus the parts played by indeterminacy and risk in the research event.