The clinician as ethnographer: a psychoanalytic perspective on the epistemology of fieldwork

Ethnography is process yielding a particular kind of knowledge, From the psychoanalytic perspective this bears on the question: how many individual lives which report their own experience, but cannot directly apprehend the unconscious factors behind that experience, be related to social life which does not report itself but is observed and interpreted by others? The person of the ethnographer and ethnographer-informant relationships are considered in this respect. Clinicians' informants include people to whom they relate in the course of adaptation to the new community; those who are help-seeking (patients) with whom their relationship is both therapeutic and investigative; and clients in health-service (e.g., family planning)contexts who may be studied with tests and structured interviews. The clinician's status, role, helping and scientific values are examined as factors determining the nature of knowledge gained under these various circumstances. To the degree that the clinician is an intentional transformer, data emerge as the informant's consciousness changes in the therapeutic or research process. Research or therapy-aimed interventions based on psychoanalytic theory add their own epistemological problems to the process.