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“These are not simply methodological issues: in psychoanalysis transference and countertransference are the points at which clinical practice meets the theorization of psychic dynamics.“Central to this perspective is the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if variably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members.” –“Thus while individuals' internal states will have an impact on the institutional culture, the latter cannot be reduced

"Despite limitations, the founding insight of the group-relations approach remains, supported by synchronic empirical studies: that psychic defense mechanisms may inhere as properties of collectively held cultural systems." (373)"Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad. The integrity of the object is fragmented, as is the perception of it and the ambivalence that it evokes. In this state simple difference becomes imbued with extreme evaluation.

"questions of pathology haunt the work. It is time to drop the problematic of pathology" (373)"psychoanalysis bequeaths a set of tools for analyzing the complete spectrum of human states... psychoanalysis may be generalized and used as part of a hermeneutic process of gaining critical insight into sociocultural phenomena without imputing either judgments of clinical pathology or questions of practical intervention" (373)I like Born's instrumentalization (or the more neutral toolificaiton) of psychoanalysis to understand sociocultural phenomena.

"Kleinian and Lacanian approaches also differ in terms of their ontologies and epistemologies (Frosh 1987: ch. 5; Rustin 1991: ch. 7, 1995).

Born (1998) asks how psychoanalytic methods and theories can be useful for ethnography. Specifically, she looks at how “splitting” and “antidiscourse” are useful on broader scales for understanding social and historical processes. After defining “splitting” and “antidiscourse,” Born presents a coherent argument for using psychoanalytic  theories on ethnographic scales.

I learned how the text of every day Anglo interactions is influenced by the psychoanalytic studies of children by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud: "You're being defensive!"; "Do not project on me"; "You are in denial"; "You are being paranoid".

Splitting and Antidiscourse as platforms on which to study society and history. "the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if viarably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members." (Born, 373)."Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad.