This research report documents one instance of a continuing effort to deal with the application of the clinical psychoanalytic perspective to the understanding of a dimension of culture that is inaccessible by other means: the internal, unconscious significance of cultural group membership, as it develops and is transformed over time through individual experience. This particular long-term study, The Japanese American Project, has its roots in one of the tragedies of World War II, and was initiated in 1944 through the joint collaboration of the United States government, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the Division of Social Sciences of the University of Chicago.