Editors' Introduction

This issue of JPCS contains, among other articles, papers that represent two intersecting special topics, one on ethnography and psychoanalysis and another on the psychic and the social in the clinical encounter. In April of 2002, the Human Sciences graduate program at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., sponsored its eighth annual conference. The focus was to examine relationships among psychoanalysis, culture, and ethnography. Academic scholars from California, New York, Belgium, China, and elsewhere, gathered with many local analysts from the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute to hear keynote talks by Christiane Hartnack, Vincent Crapanzano, Paul Verhaeghe, John Kafka, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. We are delighted to publish some of the contributions from that conference, including papers by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere on Russian icons, jan jagodzinski on body-building, Kimberly Chabot Davis on psychoanalysis and the Birmingham tradition of audience studies, Shannon May on trauma and Chinese cinema, and Ricardo Ainslie on the repercussions of the murder of James Byrd.

Ainslie and Brabeck's piece, in which they interview residents of Jasper, Texas (where Byrd was killed) to understand what factors play into the heightening or containment of racial tensions, is also an excellent contribution to the declared special topic for this issue: the psychic and the social in clinical work. The papers we have assembled for this special section illuminate two aspects of this topic. First, there are a number of articles and notes that illustrate some of the ways that psychoanalytic understanding can be applied to social situations and group experiences. Among these are the articles by Ainslie and Brabeck and by Julie Oxenberg, about a project in which she worked with children of Nazis and children of Holocaust survivors. This aspect of the psychic and the social is also illustrated in the international notes by Linda Robinson, who writes about the Middle East and comp