Anthropology and Psychoanalysis

An Encounter Through Culture

Ariane Deluz, Suzette Heald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134861521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

In Anthropology and Psychoanalysis the contributors, both practising anthropologists and psychoanalysts, explore in detail the interface between the two disciplines and locate this within the history of both anthropology and psychoanalysis. In particular, they deal with the distinctive reactions of British, French and American anthropology to psychoanalysis and the way in which the present fracturing of each of these national traditions and their post-modern turn has led to a new willingness to investigate the relationships between the disciplines and the role of the unconscious in cultural life. They also address important issues of methodology, and present a critical discussion of the concept of culture and the academic specialisation of knowledge.
Anthropology and Psychoanalysis will be invaluable reading to all anthropologists and psychoanalysts.

1 Introduction

Suzette Heald with Ariane Deluz and Pierre-Yves Jacopin

This book brings anthropologists and psychoanalysts together in a common project, exploring the interface between the two disciplines through the interpretation of culture. It is based on papers presented at a colloquium, entitled Culture, Psychanalyse, Interprétation, held in Paris in July 1991 at the Collège de France, organised by Ariane Deluz and Suzette Heald. The colloquium took the form of anthropologists—French, British, Australian and North American—experimenting with psychoanalytic interpretations of their material. A group of psychoanalysts, also from international backgrounds, was then invited to comment on these interpretations. The book keeps the same structure in the hope of purveying some of the excitement of the colloquium and in order to point to new ways of conceiving the relationship between the disciplines and to new possibilities for collaboration.

The project begun by Freud on the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture has been largely ignored, when not explicitly rejected, by European anthropology, though even an unsympathetic commentator such as Edmund Leach (1958) could admit that the puzzle posed by a parallelism in interpretations has continued to fascinate. Today this fascination has new relevance as anthropologists have become interested in problems of subjectivity; in exploring the different conceptions of the self in a way which extends beyond the simple description of cultural difference to attempt to grasp something of the internal dynamic of a worldview. As the old reified view of society has been abandoned, anthropologists have shown a readiness to engage in a dialogue with a discipline which was at one time regarded as antithetical. At the same time psychoanalysis itself has moved on, with new interpretative methods which stress the importance of the interactive context and the temporal dimensions of symbolic formations. Symbolic complexes are no longer held to yield a determinate meaning, but rather seen as moving gestalts of signification. With both disciplines attempting to grapple with the radical indeterminacy of meaning, the time appears ripe for a rapprochement.

The analysts and the anthropologists came from a variety of traditions and nationalities but, above all, this was an Anglo-French dialogue, both the analysts and anthropologists working within their respective European traditions. In order to sketch out the lines along which such a rapprochement can take place, this introduction is divided into three sections. In the first, there is an attempt at a brief history of the relationship between European anthropology and psychoanalysis. The second considers the centrality of the fieldwork experience and leads to a comparison of the two situations of analyst and anthropologist in terms of the type of ‘voyage’ in which both are engaged. Exploring the nature of this ‘voyage’ and the epistemological issues it raises leads us to re-examine the contribution psychoanalysis can potentially offer for understanding the fieldwork situation as well as for the anthropological understanding of culture. Thirdly, we turn to the separate contributions to the book, and discuss the varied ways in which the sliding perspectives of psychoanalysis may support ethnographic interpretation and give insight into the lability of the symbolic process.

A HISTORY OF DIFFERENCE

Psychoanalysis has always been a literature of excess: it exceeded custom and reason, it overstepped acceptable scientific limits, it courageously explored beyond the prescribed authorities of modern thought. (Kohon, 1986:75)

Perhaps the most notable feature of European anthropology and psychoanalysis over the last sixty years has been their estrangement. Initially, this was due as much to Freud’s idea of anthropology as to the anthropologists’ own concept of their discipline. Giving an ontological status to the phylogenetic evolution of humanity, in Totem and Taboo, Freud tried to apply the method he discovered for understanding the development of the individual psyche to society. But social history is not a simple reflex of the psyche and, since then, most anthropologists have remained rightly suspicious about psychoanalytic interpretations of anthropological data in terms predominantly of sexual symbolism. Despite this, the reception of psychoanalysis and its influence cannot be so summarily dismissed.

Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, anthropologists were among the first to apply and popularise Freudian ideas. Just as both Freud and Jung borrowed anthropological materials, in Britain, working still within the broadly conceived idea of the sciences of man developed in the mid-nineteenth century, Rivers, Seligman and, above all, Malinowksi had few hesitations in using psychoanalytic ideas to interpret their fieldwork. As Fortes (1957) has remarked, Malinowksi welded psychoanalysis naturally into his functionalism, with his emphasis on the clash between culture and instinct and his penchant for a genetic interpretation of culture. The Trobrianders became the pointers to a new age of sexual permissiveness which Freudian doctrines were seen to promise. In America, the linkage of anthropology with psychoanalytic ideas was even stronger and Margaret Mead brought the convergence to an ever-wider audience. Yet the syntheses and applications that were here developed became increasingly marginalised on both sides of the Atlantic as anthropology came to define itself as a rationalistic and distinctive generalising science.

From then on the story has largely been one of divergence: anthropologists have seen themselves as dealing with cultural phenomena and analysts with the individual psyche, the one to be explored in collective settings, the other in the privacy of the clinical session. The relationship came to be seen in terms of a series of binary contrasts: collective/ individual, public/private, normal/abnormal. With each discipline sticking to its lasts, while there have been ‘flirtations’ and even maverick figures such as Roheim, Bateson and Devereux, there have been few systematic explorations of the interface between the two disciplines until recently, and, even here, very few and largely American.

Yet, despite the small numbers of practising psychoanalysts and the absence of psychoanalysis as a discipline from representation in universities, it has had a disproportionate effect on the very structures of our understanding of ourselves in the west. As Gellner writes, within a span of less than half a century, psychoanalysis has conquered the world, ‘becoming the dominant idiom for the discussion of the human personality and of human relations’ (1985:5). Whether explicitly cited or not, it provides a perspective on the nature of the human condition which furnishes a set of background assumptions for all who have worked on the interpretation of culture. Whether ‘for’ or ‘against’, it is a perspective which has proved both durable and difficult to dismiss in its entirety. From lay psychologising to the critique of culture, the influence of Freud can be clearly discerned. As Ricoeur has argued, psychoanalysis provides a hermeneutics of culture which ‘changes the world by interpreting it’ (1979:301). He cites Freud as one of the three twentieth-century ‘masters of suspicion’, who, together with Marx and Nietzsche, have questioned our illusions of consciousness and in so doing revolutionised our concepts of culture.

Yet, as has been pointed out, the different national traditions have interpreted the Freudian corpus in remarkably different ways, and this is reflected at least in part by its acceptance in the different anthropological approaches which have arisen in the United States, Great Britain and France. In order to understand the reception of psychoanalysis in these different traditions, we have also to comment on the different readings of the Freudian texts. To draw with a very broad brush, the Freudian tropos of ego, superego and id has been differently developed and elaborated, so that much American psychoanalysis has been seen to address itself to the nature and structure of the ego. In contrast, British psychoanalysis of the Kleinian persuasion has developed the deep moral implications involved in the creation of the super-ego, while the ‘French Freud’, as represented in the writings of Lacan, takes the unconscious as the true realm for psychoanalytic explorations.

America, somewhat to Freud’s own surprise, from the very beginning proved extremely receptive to psychoanalytic ideas. As early as 1927, psychoanalysis was incorporated by the medical profession and its practice was (against the wishes of Freud himself) limited to qualified doctors. The American reading of Freud emphasises aspects of his work that have proved antithetical to some of the European traditions. Indeed, as Bettelheim (1983) points out, the translation into English of the German, das Ich, das über-ich and das es into the cold technical jargon of ego, super-ego and id, had the effect of destroying their immediate personal connotations and converting them into a reified set of scientific concepts. Linked with its basis in the medical profession, this led to an over-emphasis on the mechanisation present in some aspects of Freud’s thinking, just as it converted psychoanalysis to a utilitarian schema whose aim was ‘cure’.

The individualist and hedonistic bent of Freudian theory in America has been seen as a clear ideological product of American capitalism (Craib, 1989). It ties in closely with the cultural values of American culture, with its essential optimism and the emphasis on personal freedom. The individual is seen as capable of affecting the course of his life, capable of changing him-or herself. This aspect has become more and more dominant in American psychoanalysis and its many offshoots as they have penetrated the general culture. The various theorists of what has been dubbed ‘ego psychology’, from Hartmann to Erikson, Fromm, Horney and Stack Sullivan, have been seen as developing an understanding of the conscious, self-directing aspects of the personality and its possibilities for ‘adaptation’. In so doing, they underplayed the tragic aspects of the Freudian vision, associated with the forces of the id, of the unconscious and of the conflictual structures of the self.

If the optimistic strata in Freudian thinking came to dominate in America, as Hearnshaw (1964) has pointed out, a similarly purged and even more eclectic hybrid became conspicuous in the inter-war period in Britain. He comments that its compromises were perhaps typically British.¹ Yet, at the same time, a more pessimistic school of thought was developing in Britain through the work of Melanie Klein, and this has become increasingly influential in the post-war years, developed in various ways by Bion and Winnicott. In what is known as the ‘British School’ and as ‘object-relations’ theory, analyses have centred around the earliest infantile period, with the inevitable experience of conflict and the development of a moral sense arising in and through the social interaction of mother and child. Klein finds the genesis of moral consciousness in the ‘depressive position’, in the child’s awareness of pain and suffering as an inevitable part of human relatedness. As the first stage of individuation, Rustin writes, ‘the capacity for moral feeling is thus seen as a defining attribute of human beings’ (1991:20) and, unlike the super-ego of orthodox Freudian theory, not an external constraint, a source of guilt from which the individual may be liberated. Conflict is at the very heart of the theory, in the processes of splitting, of the projection and introjection of contradictory images and feelings which arise in interactional settings.

In France the neglect of Freud has been most noticeable, at the beginning reflecting the much more general neglect of Freud both by French intellectual culture and by the psychiatric establishment. The influence of psychoanalysis was subterranean, flourishing in the pre-war milieu of the café world of artists and intellectuals, particularly amongst the surrealists. A number of writers have commented on how the rationalistic basis of French thought, with its emphasis on human freedom, largely resisted psychoanalysis until it had produced Lacan, an ‘indigenous heretic’ whose structuralism and linguistic emphasis were resonant with the French Cartesian tradition (Hughes, 1966:290; Turkle, 1978:49). Even then, the influence was late, slowly developing in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to a positive explosion of interest in the 1970s which Turkle relates to the aftermath of May 1968. The interplay between the Marxists (especially Althusser) and Lacan was possibly decisive here, both because of the large part Lacanian analysts had played in the May movement and in the links that had developed between the left and Lacan. Deconstructionist, left-wing and unorthodox, psychoanalysis is not seen as the ‘talking cure’ but as a radical scientific discipline, a mode of research into the unconscious. Lacan’s reading of Freud emphasises the first tropos of unconscious, preconscious and conscious, and the relations of meaning rather than those of mechanism. His most heated attacks have been on ego psychology: the ego is seen as the source of misapprehension, to be by-passed in the task of understanding the unconscious.

Just as the essential optimism of American culture led to an acceptance of a particular version of Freudianism and its popularisation, it likewise bred the same attitude in anthropology. Ruth Benedict’s (1934) insistence on the malleability of culture and the plasticity of individuals is a good example here and, although she rigorously excluded psychoanalytic terms from her own interpretations, the idea of cultures being personalities writ large was there in the anthropology of the post-First World War period. Cultures were integrated like personalities—some more, some less. With the development of studies of national character and of culture and personality studies, closely associated with Ruth Benedict’s colleague Margaret Mead, child-rearing practices became the key for many to understanding cultural values and patterns. Under the umbrella of cultural psychology a number of distinctive approaches arose, from the early configurationalism of Benedict, Sapir, Mead and Hallowell to studies of national character and modal personality associated with Kardiner, Kluckholm, Linton, DuBois, Gorer and Wallace among many others.² From the 1950s a more explicitly cross-cultural approach to the testing of Freudian-based hypotheses, as seen in the work of Whiting, Spiro, LeVine and Spindler, became more characteristic of American psychoanalytic anthropology, though increasingly marginalised in the context of American anthropology itself. Since the 1970s there has, however, been a strong resurgence in these approaches, uniting a fairly wide spectrum of opinion under the umbrella of cultural psychology.³

No such recognition has been accorded psychoanalysis in Britain despite the calls in the late 1970s that the time had come for a reassessment (Lewis, 1977; Hook, 1979). Hostility has remained the keynote in the relationship.⁴ While this is not the place to review the ‘phobic’ relationship of British social anthropology to psychoanalysis extensively (see Lewis, 1977), some comment is due, for the antagonism to American cultural anthropology was equally marked. For the European traditions resting on Durkheim, the autonomy of the social and its irreducibility to the individual remained the basic tenet. With the growing distance between British and American anthropology, American cultural anthropology came to be seen as unrigorous and the development of culture and personality studies as reductionist and circular. Lewis is scathing in calling them the ‘prostitution of anthropological ideas and material’ (1977:5). In this he was following a line of ridicule and calumny which had dominated debates in this field and which established hard lines between the social and the individual, the collective and the personal. The famous debate over Trobriand ‘virgin’ birth is an example here, and one cannot but have sympathy with Spiro who, in reviewing the literature on symbolic and structural anthropology in 1979, was moved to write:

It used to be that one had to be a Freudian to believe that nonsexual themes in ritual and myth might possibly be viewed as disguised expressions of sexual concerns. It now appears that only a Freudian might believe that undisguised sexual themes might be expressions of sexual concerns. (Spiro, 1979:6)

In France, the long separation between anthropology and psychoanalysis is perhaps more difficult to explain. For example, in the 1930s there began an important interchange between surrealism, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Parisian intellectual life brought together people like Betaille, Leiris, Lacan and Max Ernst. Later, during the war, Lévi-Strauss knew Breton and Ernst and their social circles overlapped in complex ways. The influence of surrealism, with its valuation of the unexpected mélange, the connection of otherwise disparate elements, can be traced in a certain poetic freedom which can also be discerned in the work of both Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, both revelling in the word-play and the pun. Yet, for neither is this mélange fortuitous: both drew for inspiration on structural linguistics and both put a model of language at the centre of their work. In each case the structure of the unconscious, whether in the individual or in cultural forms, is the structure of language. Despite these common and continuing intellectual roots, the written corpus demonstrates a history of largely independent development. Thus, while Lévi-Strauss claims Freud as a major intellectual influence, his theories of the human mind as the creator of culture have dealt with the psyche solely as an intellectual product, independent of psychoanalysis. For example, although his work on mythology may be said to cover the same terrain as psychoanalysis (as does his famous article on shamanistic cure, 1963a), it does so without engaging in debate or using psychoanalytic concepts. For Lévi-Strauss, it is logic not poetry which holds sway in ordering the unruly bric-à-brac of culture and its representations in mythology.

If this is true of Lévi-Strauss and his school, it is true more generally of French anthropology, despite its diversified, not to say schismatic, tradition. The organisation of the institutions for teaching and research and of the universities in Paris, together with the insistence on institutional and personal loyalties, divided anthropologists into mutually exclusive groupings. Each group has thus become ass...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• PART I: COMPLEMENTARITY
• PART II: THE ANALYSIS OF DREAMS
• PART III: THE LACANIAN PERSPECTIVE
• PART IV: WORKING MODELS