Returning to an Old Text
From Dissertation to Essay
In 2009, I submitted my doctoral dissertation on shame in the context of child sexual abuse. It was the result of five years of research, but also of several decades of work in social work, child welfare, and treatment. The dissertation was entitled An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse. It was written in English, extended to almost five hundred pages, and was shaped by the requirements placed upon a doctoral dissertation concerning theory, method, documentation, and scientific argumentation.
Now, seventeen years later, I return to this text.
I do not do so in order to write the dissertation again. Nor do I return because I believe the original text was unsuccessful. It belongs to its time and to its particular form. It had to demonstrate how the study had been conducted, which theoretical perspectives had been chosen, how the material had been analysed, and how the conclusions could be defended. A doctoral dissertation must do more than communicate insight. It must also document the path by which that insight was reached.
Yet there are thoughts within a dissertation that easily remain in the shadow of its scientific structure. They may become buried beneath definitions, methodological chapters, references, tables, and discussions. They are present, but they are not always given the space they deserve.
These are the thoughts I now wish to bring forward again.
A Text Does Not Remain Still
We may imagine that a completed text is also a closed text. It has been printed, submitted, and approved. It has been given a date, an ISBN number, and a place in a library. In this sense, the dissertation from 2009 is a completed work.
But a text does not live only in the form it was once given. It also lives in the encounter with those who read it. And when the author returns to the text after many years, a new encounter takes place. I am no longer the same person who wrote it. Nor is the world surrounding the text the same.
This is a fundamental hermeneutical experience. We never read from a neutral position. We read from the time in which we find ourselves, from the experiences we have acquired, and from the questions that now concern us. When I wrote the dissertation, I was concerned with developing a scientific language capable of carrying difficult and sensitive material. I had to demonstrate that shame was not merely a vague concept from everyday language, but a phenomenon that could be investigated philosophically, sociologically, psychologically, and within the field of social work.
When I read the text today, I notice something else. I see more clearly the human questions that were present beneath the research all along:
What happens to a person who begins to regard themselves as worthless?
How can a violation of the body become a judgement upon the entire self?
What happens when trust in other human beings is destroyed?
How can a person reclaim the right to their own life and their own story?
And what is required of the person who attempts to help?
These are not questions that belong to 2009. Nor are they confined to the academic context of a doctoral dissertation. They concern human existence.
The Dissertation and the Essay
The dissertation and the essay both seek knowledge, but they move in different ways.
The dissertation must account for its claims. It must define, delimit, and justify. It must show which sources it draws upon, how concepts are used, and how the researcher arrived at the results. A scientific text must be able to withstand critical examination.
The essay has a freer form. It may pause at a question without immediately offering an answer. It can follow a thought, explore an experience, and return to a concept from several directions. The essay does not need to conceal doubt or uncertainty. On the contrary, it may allow the process of thinking itself to become visible.
This does not mean that the essay is less demanding than the dissertation. Freedom does not release the author from the obligations of truthfulness, caution, and respect. When the texts are based upon people’s experiences of child sexual abuse, the same ethical responsibility applies today as when the research was originally conducted.
The difference lies rather in what the text is attempting to do.
The dissertation examined shame as a concept and a phenomenon. The essay can ask what this knowledge means within a lived life.
The dissertation described how shame may arise in the relationship between the self and others. The essay can dwell upon the human gaze and the painful experience of seeing oneself as one imagines that others see us.
The dissertation discussed recognition as a concept within social philosophy. The essay can explore what it means to be encountered as a human being when one has lost belief in one’s own worth.
The dissertation had to carry an argument forward. The essay may remain with that which cannot be brought to a conclusion.
Finding One’s Own Voice
In the introduction to the dissertation, I wrote that finding my own voice, and daring to use it, had been a personal challenge. I was indebted to many researchers, philosophers, social workers, therapists, and psychologists. Their writings had helped me to understand the material. At the same time, all these professional and academic voices could make it difficult to hear my own.
This is a familiar problem in academic writing. We learn to write by referring to others. We position our own thoughts in relation to what has already been written. This is necessary. No one thinks alone, and no scientific text emerges without a tradition.
But there is also a danger. The author may remain hidden behind the sources. The great names may function as a form of protection. Kierkegaard has said. Buber has argued. Honneth has demonstrated. Gadamer has written. In this way, the author may avoid saying clearly: This is what I see. This is what I believe is at stake.
Finding one’s own voice does not mean freeing oneself from everyone else. Nor does it mean becoming independent of the knowledge one has received. One’s own voice arises within a conversation with other voices. But at some point, one must step forward and take responsibility for one’s own understanding.
This was what I attempted to do in the dissertation. I wanted to write with a moral voice without becoming moralising.
This distinction remains important.
A moralising text places the author above the other person. It distributes blame, passes judgement, and tells others how they ought to live. A moral voice does something different. It attempts to make injustice visible. It asks who bears the consequences of an action, who is made responsible, and who is not heard. It takes a position without denying the humanity of the other.
In the study of shame, this was crucial. A study of shame may itself inflict shame. It may describe people in ways that reduce them to deviations, diagnoses, or victims. It may turn their experiences into the researcher’s material without at the same time recognising them as acting and interpreting human beings.
The researcher’s responsibility was therefore not only to reproduce accurately what had been said. It was also to avoid repeating the violation that the research sought to understand.
The same responsibility applies when the dissertation is now transformed into essays.
Knowledge That Changes the One Who Investigates
In the dissertation, I described the interviews as a journey to the edge of existence. The nineteen people who participated spoke of experiences that could not be met through professional distance alone. Their stories concerned shame, guilt, the body, self-harm, food, parents, siblings, children, sexuality, and the loss of trust.
This was not merely information to be collected, organised, and analysed. These were the lived experiences of human beings.
Science has rightly developed methods intended to protect research from arbitrariness. The researcher must be able to distinguish between personal assumptions and what the material actually reveals. Yet the idea that research into human suffering can take place without the researcher being affected is more difficult to defend.
Some forms of knowledge change the person who receives them.
This does not mean that emotion should replace analysis. It means that understanding also has a moral dimension. When another human being speaks of humiliation, betrayal, and the loss of self-worth, we do not merely receive information. We are being entrusted with something.
This trust creates a responsibility.
Practical philosophy begins precisely here: not only with the question of what we can know, but with the question of what this knowledge requires of us. What do we do once we have seen? How do we continue to live with what we now know? How do we allow another person’s story to matter without making it our own?
These questions cannot be answered once and for all. They must be asked anew in every encounter.
Reading from a Distance of Seventeen Years
When I read the dissertation today, I see formulations that I would now write differently. Some passages are heavier than they need to be. Some thoughts are surrounded by more theory than is necessary in order to understand them. The academic language bears the mark of its time, and certain concepts may now require new explanations.
That is how it must be.
An old text should not be judged only according to the language we would use today. It must also be understood as an expression of the time, the knowledge, and the situation in which it was written. Returning to it therefore does not mean placing oneself above one’s former self and correcting every error. It means entering into conversation with the person one once was.
I can ask the earlier text:
What were you trying to understand?
What did you see clearly?
What were you not yet able to express?
Where did you hide behind theory?
And which insights deserve to be brought forward again?
At the same time, the old text can question me:
Do you still have the courage to speak with a moral voice?
Is recognition still more than an academic concept?
Do you still believe that social work must begin where the other person is?
Have the years made you wiser, or merely more certain?
In this way, rereading becomes a dialogue between two moments within a single life. One voice belongs to the researcher who stood in the midst of the work. The other belongs to the older reader who knows something of the distance between what we once hoped to understand and what life later taught us.
Neither voice possesses the whole truth.
Not a Closed Past
A doctoral dissertation comes to an end. It is submitted, defended, and approved. But the questions that gave rise to it do not necessarily end.
Shame is still present in human lives. Children are still made responsible for the actions of adults. Mothers are still blamed for violations they did not commit. People still attempt to hide because they experience something as fundamentally wrong with who they are. Helpers are still confronted by the question of how they can meet suffering without reducing the other person to a case.
This is why I return.
I wish to take these thoughts out of the scientific architecture of the dissertation and give them another kind of space. Not to make them simpler than they are, but to make them more accessible. Not to remove theory, but to allow theory to step back when it stands in the way of the human question.
This series will explore shame as something more than an emotion. Shame concerns our relationship with ourselves, with the body, with other human beings, and with the community to which we seek to belong. It may arise when the bonds between people are threatened or broken. It may cause a person to withdraw, remain silent, and make themselves invisible. But shame can also be encountered. It can be given language. And through recognition, a person may slowly begin to reclaim themselves.
This was a fundamental idea in the dissertation.
It is no less important today.
Returning to an old text is therefore not merely a matter of looking backwards. It is a way of asking whether something from the past may still open a path forward. The dissertation belongs to 2009. The questions still belong to us.
This essay introduces the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based on the doctoral dissertation: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. NTNU.
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