ABSTRACT
The principles and guidelines for collecting data in the field or from the couch can be organized according to analogous aims. The psychoanalyst and the psychoanalytic anthropologist are interested in personal meanings and in the relationship between those personal meanings and the experience and background of the individual. An overriding feature of successful psychoanalytic clinical work is the development of an organized and integrated picture of a patient’s life history and functioning in the present. The method to produce data that is consistent and reliable for the construction of the research narrative is the research interview. Investigations in the field have been profoundly influenced by one or another aspect of the context and have created — or extrapolated — systems of organization and meaning based on that personally significant aspect. One myth of the field is that it is possible to “understand” a culture, via participant-observation, as if the state of mind of the ethnographer ordinarily simulates that of native.
