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Researching

Psychoanalytic Analysis: Researching

Where to Begin:
Once you’ve read through the text several times, taken notes, and asked yourself all the right questions, it’s time to begin the research process. This is where you take the text and begin to weave it through historical facts that will give you a better understanding of it. Your main goal during this step will be to gather all the information needed to really dissect the text and get to the center of it. The best starting point for research is to simply take a look at the time period in which it was written.

My Research Method:
Personally, I don’t like to spend a lot of time writing everything down. Though writing things down does help some people understand the content better, that isn’t the case for me. So, my researching technique involved searching mostly psychoanalytic-driven textbooks and literary articles that Dr. Hale provided or that I found through online databases, such as JSTOR and EBSCOhost.

Regardless, make sure to keep a record of your resources. I scanned pages from the textbooks and copied and pasted relevant information from the literary articles. Then, I went through all of my research material and marked it up–highlighting, underlining, making notes in the margin. 

Resources Used for “The Story of an Hour” Draft:

  1. Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today, A User-Friendly Guide
  2. Norman N. Holland’s Holland’s Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology
  3. Josh Cohen’s How to Read Freud
  4. Leigh Coombe’s “Narrative Form and the Morality of Psychology’s Gendering Stories”