Looking at Us Through Their Eyes. The Analytical Process from Ethnographic Perspectives1

Abstract

This article looks at the analytical situation through the Others’ eyes—through examples from contemporary ethnographies of foreign cultures. It discusses the following issues: a) The analogy between the ontological worlds of the dead, ghosts, animals and dreams in “primitive populations” and the analytical psychological descriptions of the unconscious; b) The way most cultures conceptualize and organize the relationship between “this” world and the “other” ones, compared with the ever-growing Western psychology’s awareness of the role of transgenerational transmission, i.e., something that goes much beyond the importance of the one’s individual biography; c) The transferential field and process as a liminal space, within Victor Turner’s symbolic interpretation of rituals (2008) and Catherine Lutz (1988) and Alma Gottlieb’s (2004) ethnographies. Hence, the analytical process as a contemporary, modern ritual will be taken into consideration, together with transformation of the nature of language, which may shift from a referential language, to a performative one; d) Lastly, the article analyses the psycho-social pathology of mass shooters in the USA as an archetypal emergence of a specific ritual, described by Maurice Bloch in his book Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (1991), as a perverted way to harness and control the archetypal violence that permeates our societies, especially the American one.