Building a dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology today

Abstract

Anthropology and psychoanalysis are recent disciplines. Anthropology has some claim to priority, given that the academic foundation of the discipline dates back to Morgan in 1881, while the term "psychoanalysis" only appeared in Freud's writings some fifteen years later. However, their subjects have become intertwined for two main reasons. On the one hand, Freud considered that the unconscious motivations of human desire originated in a prehistoric drama that each individual development recapitulated, including in Vienna and Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. This is a powerful, but vigorously contested, thesis according to which ontogenesis (the development of each individual) unconsciously recapitulates phylogeny (the sedimentation of prehistoric dramas). On the other hand, psychoanalysts and anthropologists have sought to identify the personality types induced by the logic of cultures, from Géza Róheim to G. Devereux. Finally, the theme of incest, its taboo (versus psychoanalytic) or its prohibition (versus anthropological), seems to run like a common thread through these two disciplines during their golden age.