What is it like looking back on a nearly two-hundred page thesis after almost three years?

This site was primarily launched as a follow-up to my thesis ‘Comics in Clinical Practice: a Grounded Theory Exploration of How Sequential Art is Applied to Talking Therapy’ (which is available to read in full, for free, here).

I’ll be starting a summary of the thesis and the overall research project it was about in another series of posts, but wanted to reflect a bit on what the project is like to revisit in this post.

I’m told choosing a subject for a doctoral project is always difficult, but I only have my own experience to go on. In some psychologist trainings this involves choosing from a selection of options from a supervisor, and in other doctoral programmes outside of psychology it’s typical for people to have to pitch a detailed explanation of their research project before they’re even considered as an applicant for their doctoral training.

In my experience, I was two years into training as a counselling psychologist in the UK before I needed to formally submit any sort of proposal, and I was told the subject could be about anything I liked as long as it was to do with counselling psychology and talking therapy.

Anyone who’s ever seen a ten-page menu knows there’s such a thing as too much choice. This level of openness paralysed everyone in my cohort, including me. Looking back at the finished work now, my first though is “how lucky was I to find a subject that fit me, my interests, and my personal history as well as this subject did”. Some of my peers changed their research topic numerous times (one changed seven times) but once I’d hit on this topic I knew it had legs and I knew I needed to stick with it.

My second thought is, I think, a bit more interesting and is something I’m going to explore further in future. It’s about how defensive I was of this topic once I’d decided to explore it. This wasn’t limited to me either, a pretty broad range of the research literature I consumed during my literature review was written from a very defensive position. It was as if I, and other researchers before me, anticipated that researching the subject of sequential art would be met with a harsh response of some kind.

In many ways, the experience I’ve had of people being interested in the subject of applying sequential art to talking therapy seems to come from their surprise that the practice would exist in the first place. For some people this is a surprise that seems to delight them, to spark their imagination and to suggest a new range of possibilities. For others, they seem to experience it as amusing, even “cute”. Initially this can lead them to engage with the subject a bit, but often I’ve found that they don’t engage for very long.

When I got into the process of considering how I’d go about doing the research I was a bit hung up on the idea of trying to make the case that “comics could be a viable clinical tool actually!” because I was assuming that this case needed to be made. I was wrong though, all that was necessary was to acknowledge that this tool was already being used. The numbers might have been small, but the work was being done. So, in my research project, defending the potential of sequential art as a viable clinical tool was…kind of unnecessary. I could just approach therapists that had been doing the work and explore what that had been like for them and their clients, and see if there was something to learn from a cross-section of these experiences.

I still see people approaching this subject from a defensive position today, and I empathise with them, but I think this field is now at a stage where we can start to explore why the defensiveness is there. I think the medium of sequential art, and the work of therapists that apply it to their work responsibly, are both robust enough to stand on their own.