Paper short abstract:

the transgenerational cultural scripts the therapist and anthropologist access a creative space (Winnicott,1969) of making and re-making the encounter with the other. The experience of writing and reading kinship experience is an encounter of semantic metalangague, a shared act of recognition.

Paper long abstract:

From the psychoanalytical frame the transgenerational cultural scripts the therapist and anthropologist access a creative space (Winnicott,1969) of making and re-making the encounter with the other. The experience of writing and reading kinship experience is an encounter of semantic metalangague, a shared act of recognition.

Psychoanalytical ethnography (Obeyesekere, 1990) challenges anthropology's casting the 'Other' as the object of description rather than the relational assemblage of experience. How is there a disassociation in becoming a relational other and their environment. Is it a case of an act within act (Thompson & Taylor, 2006) which provides an interface between the real and imagined world encounters serving to bridge the cultural gap(s) and the internalisation of cultural representations of primary attachments in the host culture.

A creative space of play offers the blank writing up of tales of fieldwork ( Van Maanen,1988) through a lens of the psychoanalytical frame offer's the ethnographer the 'play space' (Winnicott,2005). In that moment does introspection, self examination and analysis (LeVine, 1980) much like the co-created dialogue of therapy sessions takes place?