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For the past decade the first author has worked in three small communities in Texas where conflicts related to race have been salient. In Anson, Texas, he explored the impact of a post Jim Crow reality on a community that had been entirely white prior to the Civil Rights Era but was now over a third minority, mostly Latino. In Hempstead, Texas he studied the effects of a school desegregation process that had erased all traces of the local historically African American school, leaving enormous conflict and resentment among African Americans with respect to the local education system. More recently, for the past two-and-a-half years the authors have been working in Jasper, Texas, exploring the impact of the murder of James Byrd on that community. The methodological basis for the work in all three of these communities has been a psychoanalytic ethnographic approach. That is, this work has drawn significantly from both disciplines to frame an understanding of the work and the processes observed, as well as using them as a methodological guide in approaching these communities and those who live within them.
Psychoanalysis is a set of concepts and assumptions about how the mind works, but these concepts can also be a resource for our attempts to understand community conflicts and group processes. For example, in Anson, Texas, the first author used a psychoanalytic understanding of symptoms and their function as symbolic reference points to underlying conflicts, tensions, and anxieties, in order to formulate the conscious and unconscious dimensions of a community conflict (drawing equally, however, from the work of Clifford Geertz and symbolic interactionism, notwithstanding his sharp reservations about psychoanalysis). In Hempstead, he used psychoanalytic theorizing about repression and the power of experiences that are excommunicated from consciousness to understand the legacy of school desegregation. Similarly, he employed a psychoanalytic understanding of th