Born (1998) asks how psychoanalytic methods and theories can be useful for ethnography. Specifically, she looks at how “splitting” and “antidiscourse” are useful on broader scales for understanding social and historical processes. After defining “splitting” and “antidiscourse,” Born presents a coherent argument for using psychoanalytic theories on ethnographic scales. She concludes by stating: “This would be an ethnography that seeks out disjuncture and difference, both intersubjective and intrasubjective difference, as they articulate with dominant cultural systems and resonate with collective psychic states. Far from indulging in a poststructuralist fetishism of difference, the intention must be to generate empirical fuel for a more complex and adequate account of cultural historical process” (382). Born’s work draws on her own fieldwork and research to demonstrate the value in psychoanalytic theory for anthropological questions. Quotes & Questions:
- “Central to this perspective is the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if variably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members” (373).
- “This is where Kleinian ideas are insightful. It is the tendency for binary oppositions and the classificatory systems that encompass them to be experienced an- tagonistically and evaluatively, the systematic idealization or advocacy of one pole and denigration of the other, that is captured powerfully by the concept of splitting. Thus splitting can provide a crucial link for theorizing the relation between classification and ideology in general, as well as giving insight into their subjective internalization, reproduction, and power” (376).
- “By antidiscourse I imply a discourse that is engaged in the denial or ‘absenting’ of the existence of a rival discourse. Antidiscursive denial may thus be as characteristic of hegemonic cultural systems as subordinate ones. It may also be central to the reproduction of dominant cultural systems over time” (379).
What are examples of antidiscourse? Many of the readings focus on how psychoanalytic practice can be applied to other fields, but what sort of theories from outside psychoanalysis have been applied to psychoanalysis and what other possibilities are there? What are the bounds of studying a collective psyche and to understanding culture?