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This essay approaches intergroup, specifically international, relations from the perspective of psychogeography. I argue that a psychogeographic understanding of people's perception and investment in their own group and in other groups, and of consequent actions, contributes a needed dimension toward understanding the nature of international conflict. Although a plethora of studies of national character, ethnicity, and group identity have been written since the 1930s, little has been said of the relation between one's sense of group identity and sense of place. Psychogeography, the psychoanalytic study of spatial representation (Stein, 1984c; see also Niederland, 1956, 1957, 1971a, 1971b; Volkan, 1979) is an approach that may help to unravel why who one is comes to be experienced as indistinguishable from where one is, and in turn where and who others are perceived to be in relation to one.
In its widest compass, psychogeography consists of the representation of developmental time and the playing out of its vicissitudes on the stage of space. Space is often used as metaphor—sometimes