Psychoanalytic ethnography

Psychoanalytic ethnography is a label that spans a rich variety of applied concepts, methods, and methodologies. Drawing upon years of welfare studies research applying psychoanalytic ethnography, the author sketches out its roots and horizon and provides a wide range of illustrative examples. Psychoanalytic ethnography is based on an epistemology that deconstructs ‘the rational subject’ and displays the multitude of motives, drives, and meanings that human beings attach to inner and outer worlds. In this sense, these studies often enlarge our understandings of human behaviour and interactions in the world. This chapter elaborates three pillars founding psychoanalytic ethnography: firstly, psychoanalytic reflectivity; secondly, ethnopsychoanalysis and the third space; and thirdly, transference and countertransference. Psychoanalytic fieldwork provides deep understandings and, as such, applying psychoanalytic ethnography provides representation of how groups, organisations, and networks function, how power is taken, practised, and avoided, and how men and women work, live, compete, crave, perform, love, and fight