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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 30
clearly coloured by his own unconscious. All fieldworkers find the issue of gifts
difficult: he personally had strong associations to his difficult relationship with his
demanding younger sister. He argues that despite their personal and subjective nature,
these experiences are nonetheless extremely valuable in terms of highlighting issues in
the culture that are of interest and importance, almost like rough edges on which
personal sensitivities get caught. Also, the process of introspection, as in clinical
psychoanalytic work, may reveal much that is valuable in terms of further
understanding once attention has been focussed. Interestingly, Kracke makes sense of
the early affinity with children and young people in the culture. When he was feeling
regressed on encounter and was, for example, unable to speak much of the language or
accomplish much useful activity, his experience shared many aspects of theirs as he
functioned more like a child than a grown-up. This also represents well the bewildering
experience of moving from objective and realistic conceptions of psychological therapy
to the use of personal and subjective experience required by a clinical practice learning
group. A further association of my own to this work and perspective is that it makes use
of Bion’s (1970) concept of negative capability, the avoidance of action and the
toleration of not-knowing.
Leaving psychoanalytic anthropology for now, I draw particularly on the notion of a
psychoanalytic ethnographer approaching the learning group as part of an exotic culture.
The task of ethnography can been described as making the exotic familiar (Chandler,
2001), which when applied reflexively, for example, to psychoanalytic anthropology
itself, includes also making the familiar exotic. Together with a position both within and
without psychoanalysis, this discipline offers a perspective on my topic that balances
insider awareness with ‘alongsider’ critical perspective. The contribution of
psychoanalytic ethnography to the study is particularly (but not exclusively) to the