The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, V. 13

Essays in Honor of Weston LaBarre

L. Bryce Boyer, Simon A. Grolnick, L. Bryce Boyer, Simon A. Grolnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317737148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Volume 13 includes chapters on the contributions of Weston LaBarre (B. Kilbourne); Geza Roheim's theory of myth (S. Morales); the origins of Christianity (W. Meissner); myths in Inuit religion (D. Merkur); the psychology of a Sherpa shaman (R. Paul); the psychoanalytic study of urban legends (M. Carroll); and the dogma of technology (H. Stein & R. Hill).

1
Weston LaBarre: Pioneer, Gadfly, and Scholar¹

BENJAMIN KILBORNE

Psychoanalysis is the first psychology to preoccupy itself with the symbolic content and purpose, as opposed to the mere modalities and processes, of thinking.

—The Ghost Dance

A shrewd analyst of the human animal, Weston LaBarre has done much to keep psychoanalytically oriented anthropology alive at a time when the dry winds of behaviorism and various forms of reductionism threaten discourse concerned with human beings. “There is nobody here but us people and our behaviors,” wrote this theorist (1971, p. 19), who has consistently demonstrated faithfulness to people.

In addition to a heartening respect for the complexity of human beings, LaBarre has repeatedly shown an exceptional grasp of the relations between psychoanalysis and anthropology. One of his most frequently quoted papers, “The Influence of Freud on Anthropology” (1958), combines theory with intellectual history in one of the finest available overviews of psychoanalytic anthropology. But perhaps LaBarre’s most outstanding contribution to psychoanalytically oriented anthropology has been the formulation of crucial problems to which he draws our attention, as well as the ways in which he chooses to approach them.

The Peyote Cult (1969a), LaBarre’s doctoral dissertation, which explored the use of alcoholic drinks and peyote, made a major contribution to the literature on altered states of consciousness. Since its initial publication it has gone through 12 printings by five different publishers. Few doctoral dissertations in the social sciences have ever had such an impact.

Despite the prevalence of cultural relativism in the 50s and despite initial opposition to his ideas, LaBarre argued for a theory of human nature. Although racial differences have nothing to do with cultural differences, he pointed out, culture itself may be seen as a form of species-specific adaptation and ecology, thereby linking culture to the nature of the human animal. LaBarre waged the battle against cultural relativism on many fronts. By emphasizing universal human nature, the body as a place to live in, and inherent drives, he marshaled a biological argument; by his work on symbolism (e.g., And They Shall Take Up Serpents [1969b]) he pursued the dirctions taken by his mentor at Yale, Edward Sapir; in LaBarre’s work on taxonomy and classification, he established still another approach to thinking, one now claimed by “cognitive” anthropologists. Unlike such cognitive anthropologists, however, LaBarre never severed his ideas about thinking from an overarching notion of human nature. In short, LaBarre effectively confronted cultural relativism in terms of biological, symbolic, and cognitive approaches.

An omnivorous reader with very considerable erudition on a wide variety of subjects, LaBarre wrote, for example, on ethnobotany and potato taxonomy. But typically he never lost sight of the meanings for the actors of taxonomic systems. He was concerned not merely with motifs in folklore and with universal themes, but also with the meanings of such motifs and themes for the people who use them. LaBarre’s voice carries above the din of cultural relativists, structuralists, modern symbolic anthropologists, of social behaviorists and social biologists alike. Belonging to no particular school, he has retained throughout his enormously productive life that independence of mind and respect for intractable, disagreeable realities which mark great scholars.

Another hallmark of LaBarre’s work is his emphasis on holism in anthropology. Precisely because he belonged to no particular school, he developed possibilities for integrating perspectives perceived by others to be mutually contradictory or even exclusive. In one of his best known books, The Human Animal (1954), LaBarre argues that specifically human traits—language, family, culture, as well as systems of values, beliefs, institutions, and obligations—all may be related to the biology of the human species. If the family is organized around the incest taboo and oedipal conflicts, and if the prolonged dependency of the human infant is uniquely characteristic of the human species, then family and group are fundamentally dependent. LaBarre explains that “the oedipal situation is universal among human beings [because] man is fundamentally and quintessentially a familial animal.” From this it follows that the family is the outcome of biological drives and needs and that the institution of marriage is a cultural phenonemon. To be sure, the form of the family varies from culture to culture (is culturally relative). However, such variations “never can and never do impugn the norm which familial sociability constitutes universally for all mankind” [quoted in Muensterberger, 1951, p. 165]

LaBarre’s independence of spirit is reflected also in the variety of stances he takes on various fundamental questions with respect to individual psychodynamics, cultural systems, science, and social values. Indeed, LaBarre (1972) maintains that social values can be wrong, when and where they go against human needs and realities. “Once we accept and only if we accept the possibility that the ‘culture’ of a society may be as much in error as the ‘personality’ of a psychotic do we have the wit and the need to invent the as-if method of a scientific hypothesis. If … then makes sense only if we have learned to say ‘if’”. (p. 630).

Such a stance is obviously at loggerheads with cultural relativist positions, dependent as these are on the assumption that the observer cannot make a value judgment about social values of members of other societies. Cultural relativists believe that the observer ought not to make such value judgments and that they are not possible given the scientific method, a position that itself naturally implies value judgments. LaBarre’s tough-minded determination not to shrink from disagreeable conclusions when they are dictated by social, biological, or psychological realities lends additional weight and substance to his use of an encompassing notion of human nature to which concepts of cultural systems and individual psychodynamics may be subordinated. In The Human Animal (1954) LaBarre emphasizes the meanings for all human beings of the body as a place to live in, a portable home, as it were, the source of feelings about our perceptions and of sensations, without which there could be no understanding.

The concept of universal elements in human nature guided LaBarre’s research on religion, as well as his work on hallucinogenic drugs (such as peyote) and their functions in different cultures. The Ghost Dance (1972) continues his examination of hallucinogens and religion while allowing him to extend his analysis to ecstatic experiences more generally. Once again, in this work LaBarre remains independent of established trends and of counterculture alike, arguing that the mature mind does not need, and should not seek, any kind of guru.

An independent and courageous thinker, LaBarre also wrote in defense of the counterculture by warning psychiatrists to attend to their own countertransference, a warning increasingly heeded today. Like George Devereux, LaBarre never wavered from the position that the observer is necessarily part of what he observes. Therefore, when dealing with human beings, observers cannot abstract themselves from other human beings having an influence on what they observe, as they can when studying, for example, rats or bees. Since it is impossible, LaBarre maintains, to understand human behavior without reference to the irrational—and it is precisely an irrational that ants, bees, and monkeys do not have—such reference necessarily includes irrational reactions and fantasies of both the observer and those he observes. About this LaBarre (1972) is unambiguous:

And make no mistake of it: our human nature is built upon volcanoes and tensions of potential earthquakes, the clear, rational mind lies uneasily above archaic Titans fettered beneath the darkness. … No man ever grows beyond the reach of its influence … [Furthermore] to maintain that he does is to mask anguish with the coward lie of self-deceiving denial and false indifference. And that anguish is the root of religion, the way we suffer that anguish the secret of who we are [The Ghost Dance, 1972, pp. 691–692].

While his contemporaries in anthropology and other social sciences often sought rational explanations for human behavior in reductionist guise—mechanical functionalism, structuralism, economic determinism—LaBarre persisted in exploring the irrational contexts and motivations of the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, ideas, and feelings of those he studied.

LaBarre’s resolute independence of mind set him at odds with those swayed by fashion and fad. He remained critical of Malinowski, Mead, and Levi-Strauss, despite their popularity, but has also been generous in praising those he admires, even if they are relatively unknown. His friendship, for example, with George Devereux is reflected in copious correspondence, prefaces, and dedications in a host of books written by these two friends and in a lifetime of interactions.

A man of astonishing erudition, LaBarre has written on subjects as diverse as cynosure, ritual public confession among American Indians, nonverbal communication, the history and ethnography of marijuana, folktales recorded in phonemic Aymara, and the cultural relativity of obscene humor compiled in a work on bawdy limericks.

Not content to remain within the walls of academia, LaBarre contributed substantially and publicly to anthropology and psychiatry by giving innumerable public lectures to social workers, to psychiatrists and medical staff, and to lay audiences. For example, he addressed the Plenary Session of the American Psychoanalytic Association and was invited to give the Simmel-Fenichel Lectures.

In his contribution to Spindler’s The Making of Psychological Athropology, LaBarre speaks of the clinic and the field as two dimensions of all his work. In this paper he provides an overview of his career, bringing into sharp focus his emphasis on the need for self-conscious, insightful, and independent analyses of the observer as fieldworker.

“The anthropologist may and must use his humanity to perceive the human,” he writes in The Ghost Dance (1972, p. 4). The “human” designates what is human about the anthropologist as much as what is human about the people he is studying. Therefore, this important observation of an established fact has methodological and theoretical implications that are of absolutely fundamental importance not only for anthropology but for all human sciences.

Let me illustrate this emphasis with respect to recent discussions within anthropology about the relative merits of “emic” and “etic” approaches respectively. “Emic” approaches stress what the subject knows as an individual self or as a member of a group; “etic” approaches concentrate on the observer qua knower, thereby abstracting the subject. Those who advocate emic approaches stress that what the subject knows is believed to be empirical, or at the very least, relatively objective; those who advocate the etic approach train the rational light upon the subjective understanding of the observer, leaving the observed (the subject) in the darkness of oblivion. Both approaches fail to grasp the intersubjective field, or the interaction that is so important for any adequate understanding of fieldwork. The controversy is therefore a tempest in a teapot, which may whistle and call attention to itself but which is hardly the only pot on the stove.

Indeed, the controversy is worse than an innocuous tempest in a teapot, for it presupposes that knower and known can be split. While attempts to isolate and oppose knower and known may be useful in the physical sciences, in which what (or who) is known has no idea of the knower (we must suppose that the creatures studied are ignorant of the observer), such attempts are clearly impossible and even pernicious when applied to the human sciences.

Furthermore, the opposition neglects a factor of overarching importance for any analysis of the field situation: the interaction between anthropologist and informant, which lies at the very heart of anthropological inquiry. LaBarre would certainly concur with Devereux’s (1967) statement that “the greatest obstacle to the creation of a scientific behavioral science is the investigator’s improperly used emotional involvment with his material which, in the final analysis, is himself and therefore inevitably arouses anxiety” (p. 6).

LaBarre’s analysis of the fieldworker includes the worker’s irrational, anxiety-provoking reactions and defenses against such inevitable reactions, as well as unconscious dimensions of the behaviors of people observed. Not content to define or to limit religion functionally to goal-directed activities, rational strategies designed to somehow reinforce social solidarity, he probes beliefs in the soul and other beliefs that we tend to label “superstitious.” Revitalization movements and crisis cults became a major focus of his work, and his books and articles on acculturation and religious belief systems remain standard fare for anyone concerned with these subjects (see, for example, his monumental The Ghost Dance).

In sum, LaBarre’s independence of thought, his scholarship, his wide interests, his disinclination to stay within the comfortable confines of academia, and his enormously active contributions to essential questions in psychological anthropology—all these make him a most exceptional man whose achievements we here salute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEVEREUX, G. (1967), From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton.

LABARRE, W. (1954), The Human Animal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

—— (1958), The influence of Freud on Anthropology. Amer. Imago, 15:275–328.

—— (1969a), The Peyote Cult. New York: Shocken Books.

—— (1969b), And They Shall Take Up Serpents. New York: Shocken Books.

—— (1971), Materials for a History of Studies of Crisis Cults: Current Anthropol., 12:3–44.

—— (1972), The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion. New York: Dell.

MUENSTERBERGER, W. & WILBER, G. B., ed. (1951), Psychoanalysis and Culture. New York: Wiley.

SPINDLER, G. (1976), The Making of Psychological Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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^1. An earlier version of this paper was published as “Weston La Barre: A Tribute,” in The Journal of Psychological Anthropology, 9:193–198, 1986.

2
Géza Róheim’s Theory of the Dream Origin of Myth

SARAH CALDWELL MORALES

Géza Róheim’s prolific and exuberant theoretical forays into the worlds of anthropology, psychology, and folklore have met sadly with silence from virtually every quarter since his death in 1953. In several hundred articles and twenty books, Róheim presented a series of ingenious and original studies of cultural products scanning the globe throughout known history. Perhaps Róheim’s uneven style, ranging from lucid to bizarre, has deterred unlucky readers happening on one of his less clear works; yet to be audience to one of the tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Editors
• Contributors
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Publications of Weston LaBarre
• 1. Weston LaBarre: Pioneer, Gadfly, and Scholar
• 2. Géza Róheim’s Theory of the Dream Origin of Myth
• 3. The Origins of Christianity
• 4. Adaptive Symbolism and the Theory of Myth: The Symbolic Understanding of Myths in Inuit Religion
• 5. Fire and Ice: The Psychology of a Sherpa Shaman
• 6. The Sick Old Lady Is a Man: A Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Study of Urban Legends
• 7. The Dogma of Technology
• Author Index
• Subject Index