SELF-DECEPTION IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH:
VALIDITY ISSUES
MARCIA SALNER,
PH.D.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT SPRINGFLIELD
PO BOX 19243
SPRINGFIELD, IL 62794-9243 USA
Email: salner@uis.edu
Abstract
This paper addresses the important distinction that must be made by qualitative researchers between self-reflexivity and self-deception. The following points are covered: a) that self-deception is the rule rather than the exception in the everyday world; b) that the researcher is not exempt from the dynamics of the everyday world by virtue of the researcher role; c) that mitigating the human tendency to self-deception requires deliberately cultivated strategies for self-critique on the part of the researcher; d) that psychoanalytic theory and the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur are useful sources for the theoretical elaboration and practice of such self-critique; and, e) that a critical posture, in the tradition of a hermeneutics of suspicion as presented by Ricoeur, is an essential ingredient of qualitative research methodology.
In this paper, I want to explore the difference between self-reflexivity, which can be viewed as is a benign characteristic of human experience, and self-deception, which is generally regarded as a threat to the validity of research-based conclusions. Self-reflexivity is the capacity to analyze the self's intentions, thoughts, actions and reactions as if they were objects, that is, as though they emanated from an other. C.T. Fischer (1994) identifies self-reflexivity as one of two major areas in which the relative rigor of the qualitative researcher's methods are to be judged. She says
By "reflexive" I refer to our turning back on ourselves as our only way to understand human events at a human level. More specifically, "reflexive" refers to the use of self and of self-conscious reflection to perpetually revise our understandings of qualitative data. Doing so rigorously is demanding, in Webster's earlier cited words, "difficult, challenging, and uncomfortable." The researcher must indeed search, research, and re-search through transcriptions or other texts, staying open to their evolving meanings and yet "making" sense of what's there....(p. 25)
This self-reflexive capacity for controlled distance comes about as a result of deliberate cultivation of a zone of objectivity within our subjective experience wherein our own involvement in the portion of the life world that we are studying is acknowledged and deliberately "played with" in a creative way. Self-deception, on the other hand, results from the lack of development, or temporary failure, of this capacity. It comes about as a the result of failure to objectively evaluate the extent to which our own desires and preconceptions have colored the selection and interpretation of our research data.
Over the years, I have encountered many instances in which a student or colleague demonstrates a systematic bias that seems to be self-protective. Fueled by my own inability to adequately handle this dynamic in a mentoring situation, I began to mull over the problem of the psychological limits that people (including myself) may unintentionaly place on their interpretative capacities, and in the process, I fastened on the concept of self-deception.
Self-deception, as I have framed it in relation to qualitative research, refers to a persistent inability on the part of the researcher, that is out-of-character given the person's other capabilities as a researcher, to fully explore the data as given. The inability shows itself as a kind of blindness to certain kinds of information that is similar to what psychotherapists, in their work with troubled clients refer to as resistance. Resistance is a defensive tactic for managing anxiety, and a signal calling forth additional patience and skill on the part of the therapist. Similarly, I believe the blind spots exhibited by nearly all researchers at one time or another, can be interpreted as a response to psychological anxiety—a kind of resistance to the implications of the facts. It is the anxiety that triggers self-deceptive explanations of events in the effort to ameliorate discomfort and make "everything all right" in the researcher-self's relations with the surrounding world.
In this paper, I will argue in Part I that self-deception is the rule rather than the exception in the everyday world. I also argue that qualitative researchers, to the extent that a distinguishing characteristic of their research is its emersion in the everyday world of social interaction, are vulnerable to all of the vicissitudes of that world, including a pervasive tendency of human beings to cling to comforting illusions about themselves and their actions.
In Part II, I will argue that overcoming the human tendency to self-deception requires strategies for self-critique. I will argue first for the utility of psychoanalytic theory and, second, for more attention to the work of Paul Ricocur, whose articulation of a "hermeneutics of suspicion," could be more fully incorporated into theories of qualitalive methodology.
In Part III, I will look at the implications that a psychoanalytic sensibility and Ricocur's hermeneutic philosophy have for qualitative research methodology.
Overall, I am arguing for a critical posture on the part of the researcher, in the tradition of a hermeneutics of suspicion, aimed at uncovering what the researcher has unconsciously, but purposefully, left out of thc story.
I. Self-Deception is the Rule Rather than the Exception
Psychologists have been, for decades, documenting the inevitabiity of self-deception in human life. No matter where we turn in the research literature, we are forced to the conclusion that a tendency to self-deception is the rule rather than the exception (for reviews see Goleman, 1985; Hales, 1985; McClure, 1991; Taylor, 1989). Furthermore, the direction of such errors in judgment is generally consistent: a robust positive bias that enhances the self-image, exaggerates the degree of personal control, and views thc future with optimism (Taylor, 1989).
The majority of the studies cited in the above reviews cannot be classified as "qualitative", meaning that they do not emanate from an overtly hermeneutical nor phenomenological epistemology. A qualitative study by W. Fischer (1985), however, does look directly at self-deception, although the participating subjects are not researchers. He studied moments in people's lives that they could later identify as self-deceptive. Following a phenomenological research process, Fischer found that these moments had the following structure:
The possibility of deceiving oneself arises when three interrelated conditions are co-present: (1) when one is already committed to a particular understanding of some phenomenon of one's world, (2) when certain emerging significations of that phenomenon render that understanding ambiguously uncertain, and (3) when one anxiously lives this ambiguous uncertainty as threatening not only one's commitment to that particular understanding, but also.... one’s commitments to related understandings of other phenomena.
To deceive oneself about the now ambiguously uncertain character of one's particular understanding is to deny, refuse or otherwise negate the signifying nature of one's anxiousness.... (I)t is to turn away from the possibility of taking up and allowing that anxiousness to inform, if not transform, that understanding. At the same time, it is to rigidly reaffirm the latter, or some variation thereof, as still unambiguously certain. (pp. 139-140)
The tendency to self-deception is so ingrained in human experience that Taylor (1989) has suggested abandoning the conventional view that self-deception is a form of pathology. He argues instead that illusions are "positive" for mental health (a position that is reiterated in a more recent discussion by Nyberg (1993). Although studies of self-deception among researchers are notably rare, an exception is Rosenthal's (1978) review of errors in research methodology. Covering 345 studies, Rosenthal found that when errors were present they tended to a statistically significant degree to enhance the confirmation of the researcher's expectations. The consistent direction of the error suggests a systematic bias. It is hardly surprising in view of psychologists' findings that researchers consistently construct their interpretations of their world in such a way that their self-images are enhanced, their degree of personal control is exaggerated, and their views of a personal future are optimistic. What is surprising, however, is the extensive amount of error found by Rosenthal. It goes beyond what one can label random mistakes, and serves to document self-deception among researchers themselves. To argue that theoretical and methodological expertise eliminates self-deception in qualitative research requires us to believe that the quantitative experts, whose studies Rosenthal (1978) examined, are in some way more prone to systematic biasing mistakes than are qualitative experts.
In the absence of research to demonstrate that the research situation can be demarcated in some way and set apart from the social and psychological dynamics that affect everyday situations, I am forced to conclude that researchers are no less prone to systematic self-deception than are other people. Furthermore, since a hallmark of qualitative research is its attempt at fidelity to the human life world, and the researcher is methodologically immersed in this world, it seems clear that systematic self-deception, which surfaces so blatantly and naively in the everyday world and in the work of novice researchers, is something that requires focused attention as an important aspect of methodology.
II. Self-deception Necessitates Self-critique
Building everyday forms of human engagement into methodology, as does the qualitative researcher, requires that the researcher enter into a process of self-reflection and introspection during which researcher involvement with other participants in the study is given critical scrutiny. There is a duality in the researcher's deliberate use of the self as a research tool. The researcher must both participate as a human being, and evaluate the strategic successes of that participation in furthering the goals of the research project. It is at this point that the distinction between simply having everyday experiences (i.e., participating) and systematic investigation of, or research into, (i.e., evaluating) those experiences becomes important. The researcher is placed in the position of simultaneously maintaining two self identities: In the first, one becomes, with a certain amount of self-forgetfulness, caught up in the on-going social interaction of the research setting; in the second "identity", one becomes, with heightened self-consciousness, the problematic central focus of concern.
The strategic use-of-self-by-self to achieve certain ends is a common enough phenomenon in everyday life. We often "play a role" and are conscious of doing so. We are accustomed to maintaining a bifurcated consciousness in which we experience our selves as simultaneously watched and watching. Such self-consciousness is simply an aspect of the way we humans are.
What we cannot avoid here is the necessity to maintain some theory of consciousness as background to our work as researchers. The concept of self-deception has been explored by philosophers. It is a paradox that cannot logically occur if one assumes that self is a unitary phenomenon because deception implies that there is one who deceives and one who is deceived. However, "the self" rather than referring to a unitary object may be a metaphor that we employ to cover a range of experiences and states that we cannot easily contain or define. In this view, both deceiver and deceived may be the same person. However, then one needs a theory of consciousness that does not disallow such divisions of awareness. Of the available alternative positions, Haight’s (1980) review finds that psychoanalytic theory provides a more plausible and comprehensive argument than does either the existential theory of "bad faith" (Sartre, 1943/1957) or Fingarette's (1959) theory of disavowal. Following Haight's arguments, I assume a concept of mind that has both a conscious and an unconscious aspect, and take the psychoanalytic concept of psychological defense mechanisms to be explanatory of examples in which a person refuses to acknowledge the existence of evidence to support a proposition, even though this evidence seems obvious to others (A. Freud, 1936/1966; S. Freud, 1915/ 1957, 1938/1949, 1938/1964; Madison, 1961).
THE UTILITY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
For those readers who are suspicious of my use of psychoanalytic terminology, I would point out that the unconscious has entered the public domain. For example, Bara (1984,56) states, ".... evidence from cognitive science and artificial intelligence shows how everything in the cognitive system is unconscious, apart from a small area, still to be understood and explained, which is conscious." (See also Graf, Squire & Mandler, 1984; Schacter, McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1988). The social concepts of transference and counter-transference are widely accepted as processes that need to be generally considered in the analysis of psychological relationships (Patterson, 1986, 85-86; Wolberg, 1977, 28-44). The relevance of psychoanalytic concepts to the problem of self-deception in research is unambiguous if one accepts Hartmann's (1964) suggestion that one of the definitions of psychoanalysis is that it is "a systematic study of self-deception and its motivations" (p.335). What remains to be developed for qualitative research methodology is explicit acknowledgment of the unconscious aspects of cognition, and incorporation of explicit methods for working with unconscious processes in data gathering and data interpretation.
Churchill (1987) provides an example. Using Sartre's (1943/1956) concept of "purifying reflection" as a method, Churchill outlines a process of "seeing through" distortions and deceptions inherent in narrative accounts of lived experience. In examining protocols of research participants' accounts of experiences, he asks the question, "How is the subject approaching the task of description, such that we find explanations in place of naive description?" (p. 8). He identifies "explanations" as a particular shift of attention from the lived to the known. By focusing on these shifts as they occur in both the analyses of participants' accounts and of researchers' interpretation of the accounts, it is possible to distinguish our own and others' unconsciously defensive "excuses" or rationalizations. The intrusion of "explanations" where none are needed stands in contrast to a revealing description of living processes in which "there is a significant connection ('a bond of being' [in Sartre’s words]) between one's reflective self-reports and the nature (the 'being') of the experience described" (p. 23).
In this process, which Churchill aptly labels "seeing through", the researcher who is evaluating her own and participants' actions and explanations via a data/text, passes through the same set of challenges as does the psychoanalyst. Psychic defense mechanisms may affect the manner in which data will "appear" (Hunt, 1989, 24-57) and the manner in which explanations for the data are proffered. The psychoanalytic examination of the psyche/world relationship is intertwined with the hermeneutic examination of the text-world relationship. In both realms, the selfhood of participants and researcher are constructed and deconstructed through "imaginative variations of the ego" which, according to Ricoeur (1973/1981) is an interpretive strategy that provides "the most fundamental possibility for a critique of the illusions of the subject" (p. 37).
The role of research mentor(s), rather than being ancillary to this process, becomes a central aspect of methodology. Inasmuch as none of us can metaphorically see the back of our own heads, we require the mirror of an other in order to be quite certain that we are making fully conscious and plausible assumptions about what is "out there." The image of the solitary researcher who can ferret out "truth" in some splendid intellectual isolation becomes as mythical as an ideal of perfect objectivity. Research becomes overtly cooperative; the role of the other in reflecting what cannot be seen is central. Mentors thus become essential links in corroboration and consensus about the validity of interpretations. However, a mentor's role is seldom viewed as an explicit aspect of method. Nor is the nature of the relationship between researcher and mentor explored from the perspective of its resemblance to a therapeutic alliance (Greenson, 1965; 1967) with its attendant possibilities for critical reflection on interpretative adequacy.
It is through such alliances that the researcher is able to come to a renewed understanding of the importance of the unspoken, the silences and absences in data/texts, and in a reading of them. Such gaps reveal themselves to us only indirectly through a deliberate and imaginative search for alternative and decentered self-identities (the interpretive strategy of creating "imaginative variations of the ego" referred to above). While this search may require an intuitive sensibility, it is ultimately a rational and evaluative process that, like most skills demanded of us in research, can be refined and elaborated into a form of expertise. Thus, "critical self-consciousness" acquires a fundamental status in the development of definitions of valid qualitative and interpretive research. When linked to critical social theory, along the lines suggested in the work of Paul Ricoeur, which I will discuss more fully in the following section, such evaluative action also has the potential for revealing dimensions of human experience that would otherwise be occluded as part of the social fabric that we take for granted out of sheer habit.
PAUL RlCOEUR: ENLARGING THE CONCEPT OF SELF-CRITIQUE
Ricoeur (1970) contrasts "two interpretations of interpretation, the one as recollection of meaning, the other as reduction of illusions and lies of consciousness" (p. 32). In the former, what is affirmed is the possibility of understanding the phenomenon—a symbol, an event, an utterance--in undistorted form. In the latter, what is central is the suspicion that the phenomena may not be what they seem. This suspiciousness is nurtured into a theoretical stance that plays with discrepancies, conflict, difference, and absence to reveal the unexamined (often unspoken or unrevealed) conditions that produce phenomena. In the first "interpretation of interpretation"--a hermeneutics of recollection and affirmation—Ricoeur stresses faith:
The first imprint of this faith in a revelation through the word is to be seen in the care or concern for the object, a characteristic of all phenomenological analysis. That concern, as we know, presents itself as a 'neutral' wish to describe and not to reduce.... (p. 28)
For would I be interested in the object, could I stress concern for the object...if I did not expect, from within understanding, this something to 'address' itself to me? Is not the expectation of being spoken to what motivates the concern for the object? Implied in this explanation is a confidence in language: the belief that language, which bears symbols, is not so much spoken by men as spoken to men, that men are born into language...It is this expectation, this confidence, this belief, that confers on the study of symbols its particular seriousness.... (pp.29-30)...[T]here is a "truth" of symbols; this truth, in the neutral attitude of the Husserlian epoche [bracketing], means merely the fulfillment...of the signifying intention...(pp. 30).
In contrast to a phenomenology that affirms the capacity of objects to speak through their symbols in language, Ricoeur describes "the school of suspicion" (p. 32) and its three masters, Marx, Neitzsche and Freud, who have in common "the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as 'false consciousness"' (p. 33). This is the second "interpretation of interpretation. Ricoeur (1970) says:
Hence forward, to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning, but to decipher its expressions...For Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown or, if your prefer, simulated-manifested...
Freud entered the problem of false consciousness via the double road of dreams and neurotic symptoms...Marx attacks the problem of ideologies from within the limits of economic alienation, now in the sense of political economy. Nietzsche, focusing on the problem of 'value'—of evaluation and transvaluation—looks for the key to lying and masks on the side of the 'force' and 'weakness" of the will to power...
All three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering; all three, however, far from being detractors of 'consciousness', aim at extending it. (pp.33-34)
The dialectic, or opposition, of attitudes grounded in affirmative hermeneutics and suspicious hermeneutics has been a dominant one in contemporary discussion about the relationship between philosophy and the study of human life, and it has become important in my thinking about the distinction between self-reflexivity and self-deception in the research situation. I have found Ricoeur's work particularly valuable because he provides several suggestive lines of argument that are potentially useful for qualitative researchers who look to the phenomenological and hermeneutic literature for an epistemological foundation for their methods.
First, Ricoeur's (1970) study of Freud's thought provides a philosophical basis for freeing psychoanalysis from its American encapsulation in clinical practice and medical science, and reveals the essential connection, most fully explored in French scholarship since Lacan (Turkle, 1992), between psychoanalytic interpretation, hermeneutics and social theory. Thus, he opens a way for greater inclusion of psychoanalytic considerations in our thinking about research methodology (For examples, see Kvale, 1986; Parker & Parker, 1995; Wertz, 1993). In short, psychoanalysis as interpretive or critical theory is made more accessible for dealing with self-deception in the research situation (Ricoeur, 1970; 1974/1979; 1977/1981).
Second, by forging a link between social action and textual interpretation, Ricoeur (1971/1981) saves hermeneutic methods from the criticism that they are confined to linguistics and literature. He says (1981):
For it is with writing that the text acquires its semantic autonomy in relation to the speaker, the original audience and the discursive situation common to the interlocutors. It is also with writing that the problems of reference assume all their acuteness, when the world of the text is dissociated from the ostensive references peculiar to oral discourse. However, from the outset the notion of the text incorporated features that freed it partially from the relation to writing as opposed to oral discourse. Text implies texture, that is, complexity of composition. Text also implies work, that is, labour in forming language. Finally, text implies inscription, in a durable monument of language, of an experience to which it bears testimony. By all of these features, the notion of the text prepares itself for an analogical extension to phenomena not specifically limited to writing, nor even to discourse. (p.37)
As this quote demonstrates, Ricoeur argues that hermeneutics can become a mode of reflection on direct social experience rather than on texts alone—a theme that has been taken up by some social scientists (e.g., Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979; Packer, 1985; Packer & Addison, 1989).
Third, by clarifying two distinct and conflicting themes within hermeneutic practice—interpretation as recollection and affirmation of meaning, and interpretation as the exercise of suspicion—Ricoeur (1970, ch. 2) points the way toward incorporation of psychological and social critique into research practice. At the same time, he retains an affirmative stance toward direct experience. In an essay on the debate between Gadamer and Habermas, which serves to cast each of the conflicting themes of affirmation and suspicion relation to the other, he says (1973/1981)
....In reading, I "unrealize myself." Reading introduces me to imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego.
In the idea of the "imaginative variation of the ego", I see the most fundamental possibility for a critique of the illusions of the subject. This link could remain hidden or undeveloped in a hermeneutics of tradition which introduced prematurely a concept of appropriation (Aneignung) directed against alienating distanciation. However, if distanciation from oneself is not a fault to be combated, but rather the condition of possibility of understanding oneself in front of the text, then appropriation is the dialectical counterpart of distanciation. Thus, the critique of ideology can be assumed by the concept of self-understanding which organically implies a critique of the illusions of the subject. Distanciation from oneself demands that the appropriation of the proposed worlds offered by the text passes through the disappropriation of the self. The critique of false consciousness can thus become an integral part of hermeneutics, conferring upon the critique of ideology that meta-hermeneutical dimension which Habermas assigns to it. (Pp.94-95)
Thus, Ricoeur sees the distance between direct participation (i.e., an affirmation of our immediate experience of "reality") and the rendering of participation in language (i.e., a distiancing step back to talk "about" experience) as an opportunity for self-reflection and self-critique rather than as a gap to be closed. In the distance between the facticity of the world and language about that world is space for a playful series of varied ego-selves to encounter illuminating differences. We are all aware of how our own "stories" of events in our lives vary according to the passage of time and the demands of differing audiences.
Fourth, Ricoeur does not reject a concern with method. In the philosophical debates that took place between Gadamer and Betti over the role that technical methods should play in hermeneutic interpretation (see Palmer, 1969, eh.4), Ricoeur has remained sympathetic to Gadamer's (1960/1975) concern that the reification of method is not a way to ensure truth in interpretation. However, he has essentially supported Betti's (1962/1980) and Hirsch's (1967) contention that public judgments about the validity of interpret-ations need to be made, and they must have a credible foundation in social practice (Ricoeur, 1976, ch.4). Such a stance helps the researcher in the task of translating epistemology into methodological action. It is this stance on methods that points to a related question, discussed in my next section: What are the implications of my discussion of Ricoeur's work for qualitative research methodology?
III. Implications for Qualitative Methodology
Qualitative research is an essentially hermeneutic endeavor. Once we have fixed our participation in the everyday world of our subjects in a written record, for example, in field notes, on film, in transcribed interviews, such records have become in effect texts. These records then become subject to all of the complexities that attend analysis and interpretation of texts generally, including the complex issues of referentiality and reflexivity. Once participation is recorded, we are in the realm of language and symbolic meaning. Because of the ambiguous relationship between symbols of ''things'' and the "things-themselves", we have entered the hermeneutic circle—a form of self-reflexivity in which the referential relationship between text and World is dialectical and nonreducible. However, this circle does not revolve around the text (or the symbol) in isolation, but includes and has reference to the direct participation by the researcher that engendered the need to symbolize in the first place (see Ricoeur, 1977, ch. 1).
Can this reflexive interpretive process be captured in a method? Earlier, I mentioned Ricoeur's attention to the debate between Gadamer and Betti over the role that method can and should play in hermeneutic interpretation. Gadamer (1960/1975) expressed the fear that method is a form of alienating distanciation from Being. On the other hand, Betti (1962) feared that without attention to method per se acts of interpretation would be little more than a subjectivization of experience.
While direct involvement of the researcher with others is characteristic of qualitative research, subjective participation alone is not constitutive of research. A record of participatory experience is "brought back," so to speak, first in memory—already a distantiation—then fixed in text, to provide the data/text through which the process of data interpretation and analysis then proceeds. No research project ends with the gathering of data. The "self' of participation is not the same "self' who reads and reflects on the record of that experience and contemplates its multiple meanings. Each of these selves draws upon a different zone of subjectivity, if only temporarily.
Again, Ricoeur is helpful here when he speaks of the "imaginative variations of the ego" (1973/1981,94) that can occur in the act of reflective reading, in which we come to understand our selves "in front of the text" (p. 95) by imagining forms of participation that are varying intrepretations. Here, in the activity of reconstructing participation, the work of critical hermeneutics begins. What is required is a suspiciousness that seeks out and explores the discrepancies, conflicts, and absences that the data/text reveal. In short, our own subjective meaning-making as researchers is deconstructed after the fact as an antidote to self-deceptive interpretation. As Ricoeur (1973/1981) says, "...the appropriation of the proposed worlds offered by the text passes through the disappropriation of the self" (p. 95), and critical interpretation, not critical participation, becomes the activity through which self-deception and self-reflexivity are discriminated methodologically. In other words, "....I exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text." (Ricoeur 1975a/1981,113).
Conclusion
Because the phenomenon of self-deception is not plausible unless we accept the possibility that we can hide the truth not just from other people but from ourselves, qualitative researchers are in need of a way to incorporate a critical perspective into their work. A direction for doing that is pointed by Paul Ricoeur, whose dialectical approach suggests the following:
1. By viewing social action as a text to be "read", we are better able to understand the relationship between experience and language, appropriation of the world in consciousness and distantiated "fixing" of that experience in an account of or about it.
2. The distance between the world-as-experienced and our language text about that world provides an opportunity, a window we might say, on the relationship between the participating self and the evaluating self. In the gap, we "read" a variety of interpretations into the experience, and, at the same time, imaginatively vary the ego who stands in relation to these readings. Thus, by deliberately varying the text we deliberately vary the self. One comes to understand one's self (and its infinite possibilities) ``in front of the text" in what is a dialectic between experiential appropriation and distantiation that permits systematic reflection and critique.
3. Such critique, however, lacks a fundamental corrective unless it can incorporate an understanding of the unconscious and its motivated, systematic self-protection from certain cruel aspects of the "facts" of experience—a motive that can conflict with the motive to research. The motives to protect the self must ultimately yield to the motive to research, and an outcome of the research is a new view of the researcher/self. An example of how demanding self-critique can become is provided in Lather's (1995) description and analysis of her own role researching the experience of women with HIV/AIDS.
4. Systematic critique takes place, methodologically speaking, during reflection on experience, that is, during our reading of the texts of experience. Since one cannot distantiate oneself from participation without destroying the act of participation itself, systematic critique is an act of reflection—after the fact. It is interpretation regardless of whether it is a fleeting moment or a sustained analysis.
Finally, my exploration of the relationship between self-reflexivity and self-deception points in the direction of collaboration as essential to validation. In the mirror of the other, we can find the blind spots which occlude our vision of ourselves and our interpretation of the life world in which we must act. Ultimately, our relationship with others mediates our own awareness of the ways in which we deceive ourselves. "Truth is always a statement about another statement in the arbitrary punctuation of a relationship" (Lacan, 1968, 228).
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