| This dissertation utilized the Biographic Interpretive Method to explore through extensive interviews the life of Grammy winning musician and composer Odell Brown. The purpose of the phenomenological, qualitative study was to discover the evolving meaning-making process of Brown's early growth as a person and composer, the trauma of simultaneous multiple losses through death of his family and friends, his later life experience of disappearing onto skid row, and his redemptive recovery that came through a sustaining relationship with his music, his wife and his personal psychotherapy. The Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method involved an ecosystems epistemology, whereby the researcher could know the person within the context of his story. Brown's life story, transcribed from those extensive interviews, formed a narrative of autobiographical memories, which were interpreted through the researcher's interactions with Brown and his wife (including some of their letters to each other), and through integration of selected academic literature, which addressed narratives of relational self discovery and self-determination. Understood via a Humanistic Existential Family Systems narrative knowing, the person quae person presented a story involving many relationships, known and shared by the experiencing subject within his tale as remembered and told. As observer-participant, the researcher phenomenologically looked to the object of inquiry---Brown himself---to inform the investigator how the subject could be known and what was to be known. The Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method of inquiry thus became a dialogical knowing, interactive, interdependent and interpenetrating, containing dialogue that affected the researcher as well as the subject. Increased self awareness about loss and survival thus generated insight into the investigator's own life events, which had occurred proximate to her inquiry into Brown's life therefore, related biographic narratives of the researcher are presented as Epilogue. Implicit integration of Brown's narrative and the investigator's narrative was aided by a theoretical foundation wedding several back-story approaches, including ecosystems, hermeneutics, psycho historiography, dramatic thought, autobiographical memory, and narrative formation. This story study of Brown's existence, including his creativity and music as well as his loves and losses, provided knowledge deemed useful in a professional reflective psychology. |
