Psychoanalytic Anthropology

Introduction

There has always been a kinship between anthropology and psychoanalysis, however uneven, from Freud’s interest in anthropological data and his attempts to link the psyche with social forms, to more contemporary shared theorizations of the self and subjectivity in culturally diverse contexts. Psychoanalyst and anthropologist Elizabeth Bott-Spillius believed that while the content and expressions between psychoanalysis and social anthropology differed, their fundamental mode of thinking, generally speaking, was “surprisingly similar” (“Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: A Personal Concordance,” The Sociological Review, 2005, p. 670). Indeed, anthropologists have described a number of interpretive parallels between the disciplines, compared our ways of listening and orienting toward the other, emphasized the importance of attending to one’s own subjectivity, and even remarked that psychoanalysis is, ultimately, a “microethnography.”

The disciplines of psychoanalysis and anthropology opened the 20th century with, according to Waud Kracke, two important insights into the nature of humanity: Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the power of desires of which we are unaware, and the recognition that humans are “profoundly” cultural beings. While these two insights, Kracke continues, are not incompatible, they have, at times, seemed to pull in opposite directions (“Between Desire and Culture: Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Anthropology,” in Anthony Molino, ed., The Sociological Review, 2004, p. 175). For a significant portion of their inter and cross-disciplinary history, scholars have characterized the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology by both their productive engagements and antagonistic foreclosures. Historically, a number of anthropologists have been generally cautious of psychoanalytic

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theory and anthropological interpretations that turn toward “the internal.” A number of accounts concerning the relationship between the disciplines further describe the territorial squabbles, dismissiveness, and failures to acknowledge cross-disciplinary influences and debts. Dated and nearly cliché critiques of psychoanalytic reductionism or of how psychoanalysis ignores cultural diversity continue to circulate among those who refuse to consider a vision of psychoanalysis beyond Freudian theory or recognize the contributions of psychoanalytic anthropology over 75 years. Working from two disciplines is not without its complications. Charles Lindholm describes how the difficulties of marrying distinct disciplines such as anthropology and psychology risk producing “bastard offspring” that could be perceived as a threat to the integrity of each discipline and would not be acceptable to either field (Culture and Identity, 2007, p. 10).

Despite the historical tensions, I remain increasingly optimistic that the intersections between anthropology and psychoanalysis will continue to produce innovative insights into our broader, mutual quest to understand humanity. It is in these spaces of overlap, whether imbued with tension or enthusiasm, where the productive dialogue occurs and where psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists generate a range of insights, interpretations, and contributions to our understandings of, for example, symbolism, cultural meaning, dreams, fantasy, the self, subjectivity, and a range of intrapersonal processes and their relationship to sociocultural worlds.

The diversity of perspectives within anthropology and psychoanalysis and the innumerable ways in which anthropologists use psychoanalytic themes make it difficult to articulate a decisive definition or to characterize a unified vision of psychoanalytic anthropology today. I am hesitant to refer to psychoanalytic anthropology as a distinct disciplinary subfield within anthropology (see also Stein this issue), despite several past references to it as such. Psychoanalytic orientations in anthropology cut across several sub-fields and anthropologists often draw upon psychoanalytic perspectives to enhance or frame selected parts of their ethnographic work, rather than committing themselves to dedicated psychoanalytic research agendas. Perhaps a more accurate depiction of the contem-

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porary landscape of psychoanalytic anthropology is to say that there are “psychoanalytically oriented” anthropologists or that there are anthropologists working from positions that are psychoanalytically informed. This notion of what it means to have a psychoanalytic orientation will become clear shortly.

Despite my hesitancy, I broadly define a psychoanalytically oriented anthropology as using a range of psychoanalytic theories, methods, and practices in ethnographic research, interpretation, and

writing to frame research and interpretive efforts, orientations toward others, ways of listening, and modes of understanding the diversity of human life-worlds within their contexts. There is a shared recognition that we cannot ignore the intertwined relationships between our embodiment, the subjective, and the intrapsychic and the sociocultural, political economic, and historical life worlds in which we dwell.

George Devereux, an early figure who trained first as an anthropologist and later as a psychoanalyst, frequently emphasized that understanding human behavior requires the application and cross fertilization of both social and psychoanalytic methods and explanations. He was adamant about the inclusion of the psychological with the sociocultural and remarked it is “impossible” for any meaningful framework for the study of humanity to “dissociate the study of Culture from the study of the psyche,” since they are inseparable yet complementarity concepts (Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, 1980, p. 71). While emphasizing the importance of the psyche and the social, however, Devereux believed the psychoanalytic and sociocultural could not be blended or fused together; rather, they must stand in a complementary relationship to each other (p. 320).

Few, if any, anthropologists work solely from a psychoanalytic paradigm. While psychoanalytic theories and methods can enhance our perceptual and analytic thinking, they alone cannot be the sole mode of ethnographic analysis. They are best used alongside other approaches or, in Devereux’s words, be employed in a “serial manner.” Recently, Michael D. Jackson emphasized that rather than binding ourselves to specific theories, it is wise for both scholars and clinicians to explore a variety of theoretical and methodological guidelines—or employ a “toolkit”—that varies accord-

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ing to the “exigencies of the situation we are trying to understand.” Such a toolkit could be used to provide the most “therapeutically useful, analytically productive, or intellectually satisfying understanding” (“Commentary: The Complementarity of Intrapsychic and Intersubjective Dimensions of Social Reality,” Ethos 40: 1, 2012, p. 114).

The notion of a psychoanalytic and ethnographic toolkit is an adept metaphor for this issue. The contributing authors demonstrate a range of dialogues, integrations, and overlaps between anthropology and psychoanalysis in their theoretical discussions, personal reflections and histories, and psychoanalytically oriented ethnographic cases and interpretations. In the remainder of this introduction, I offer a brief and by no means complete glimpse into the variations within psychoanalytic anthropology. I start with a discussion of how several anthropologists “discovered” or gravitated toward psychoanalytic perspectives followed by a synthesis of the diverse approaches and strengths within the psychoanalytic orientation in anthropology.

The Gravitation toward Psychoanalysis

While preparing for this issue, I was drawn into the narratives of how anthropologists discovered or came to value psychoanalytic perspectives and I came to consider how these narratives are central to understanding the foundations of an author’s work. Understanding what brings people to psychoanalytic theory is one way to demonstrate the strengths of the perspective and, more importantly, inform how we introduce it to others.

A common discovery narrative involved reading Freud or another noted psychoanalyst who captured the readers’ interest and opened them up to new ways of thinking about humanity. This initial exposure often leads to further psychoanalytic exploration. Elizabeth Bott-Spillius remarked that after reading Klein, she knew psychoanalysis was for her and she subsequently continued reading other analysts as she began fieldwork with British families and soon began formal psychoanalytic training (“On Becoming a British Psychoanalyst,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 29, p. 204). Gananath Obeyesekere, distinguished by his research on personal symbols and religion, came to psychoanalysis from literature and a fascination with unconscious motivation. Vincent Crapanzano, noted for

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his work on theories of interpretation, found psychoanalysis to be a useful interpretive schema against which to reflect (see Anthony Molino, Culture, Subject, Psyche, 2004). Howard Stein (this issue) notes how he found himself gravitating to the field after taking a class on culture and personality in anthropology. Stein also credits a series of mentors that helped guide his reading and further his development. Ellen Corin (this issue) describes how she did not initially suspect that when she first explored psychoanalytic theory it would become such a central part of her life.

In my case, it was the other way around; psychoanalysis is what finally drew me into anthropology. During my early work as a child and family mental health counselor, I was fortunate to work for an agency that remained open to thinking from psychodynamic and other perspectives. While exploring a selection of readings, I came across a collection of work in psychoanalytic and psychological anthropology, which opened new ways for me to think about mental health and the relationship between individual experience, family dynamics, and the sociocultural and political-economic context. The merging of psychological perspectives with anthropology offered more holistic and satisfying explanations that better fit how I was thinking through my work. However, later on in graduate school, the interpretive approach of Clifford Geertz remained dominant—underscoring the inaccessibility of the mind with an emphasis that the study of culture rests only within what is visible. It was not until my first long-term period of fieldwork in Northern Ghana, where I studied infanticide, discourse, and practice and family perceptions of children considered to be spirits, that again brought to the fore the importance of integrating psychoanalytic perspectives into my considerations of the relationships between the subjectivity, intra and interpersonal processes, and the sociocultural.

Narratives of how one’s respondents or the community taught the anthropologist the importance of psychoanalytic thought are common. George Devereux conducted several fieldwork trips in a Mohave community while working from a non-psychoanalytic perspective. He remained, in his words, “anti-Freudian” until his Mohave informant, he explains, “taught me psychoanalysis, as

Freud’s patients had taught it to him” (“The Works of George Devereux” in George D. Spindler, ed., The Making of Psychologi-

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cal Anthropology, 1978, p. 333). Recently, Byron Good emphasized the importance of a psychoanalytically attuned form of listening and conception of the self in fieldwork. He described how this realization occurred during a routine visit with a young Javanese man who had earlier experienced his first episode of psychotic illness. Good notes how his phenomenological interest in the spirits and magical forces haunting the man, while fascinating, were incomplete. It was a psychological attunement that demonstrated a haunting that was, as he describes, “something far less exotic but more primal, the loss of his father.” Working solely from a phenomenological perspective missed important elements of the man’s experience and loss. Good recognized that another sort of listening is necessary, one that is able to better attend to the “unspoken, unsaid, repressed, unspeakable—in politics and in everyday life, as well as in psychopathology” (“Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Subjectivity in Java,” Ethos 40: 1, 2012, p. 32).

The background and training of psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists is eclectic. Early American anthropologists were encouraged to enter psychoanalysis under the belief that it would help in conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Today, teachers and advisors with an interest in psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology play a significant role in introducing and mentoring students. Some students and scholars are able to take advantage of psychoanalytic institutes or societies and participate in seminars and, in some cases, enter formal training programs. A small number of psychoanalytically trained anthropologists maintain a clinical practice while also working in academic settings. Several anthropologists approach the literature alone. One senior scholar remarked that much of her engagement in psychoanalytic ethnography has been self-taught. She described her trajectory to me as, “Nothing special. I just started reading about it and doing it.” Jadran Mimica describes how experience in analysis and ongoing reading of psychoanalytic publications and case studies are essential to developing a psychoanalytic understanding of human experience (Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography, 2007, p. 3).

There is significant diversity in how anthropologists have engaged or adopted psychoanalytic methods and theory in their ethnographic research and writing. To summarize these perspectives, I

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grouped these approaches into four categories. While presented as distinct, the categories often overlap and are not mutually exclusive.

“An Awareness of One’s Awareness”

Psychoanalytic ideas and practices have played a far-reaching role in directing attention to the role we play in the lives of those we work with and the influence of our intrapsychic processes in shaping the research trajectory. Psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists often work from a mode of attention that considers how their inevitable involvement consciously and unconsciously shapes the research design, interviews, interpretive and analytic processes, representations, and relationships with consultants. Attending to our participation in the research process can heighten our awareness of the role of desires, power relations, and self-other processes that shape the ethnographic dialogue and can inform how our anxieties and ethnocentrism, for example, influence the research. George Devereux is most noted for calling attention to the use of countertransference and our anxieties to better understand what it is that might blind us to other interpretations or lines of inquiry—proposing, in his words, the need for “an awareness of one’s awareness” (Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences,1967, p. 23). For Devereux, the ethnographer’s anxieties and counter-transference are essential data that should not be simply explained away but be used as part of the explanation for the data and as a tool to understand what might be impeding our research. Ultimately, knowledge of psychoanalytic observational practices, Katherine Ewing notes, can help us overcome some of the difficulties and issues surrounding participant observation and how our relationship with informants shape our research and writing (“Is Psychoanalysis Relevant for Anthropology?” in Theodore Schwartz, et al., eds., New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, 1992, p. 252).

Method and Practice

Psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists adopt a wide range of psychoanalytic methods and practices, many of which are akin to clinically oriented techniques. These practices, when used alongside ethnographic methods, enhance our ability to examine symbols, relational and interactive processes, and that which re-

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mains unsaid—specifically, the gaps, non-verbal communications, assumptions, and structures present in our interactions. Depth metaphors are common in descriptions of what these methods offer. Scholars speak of deep listening and attending to what lies beneath, underground, or in the shadows of our field interactions. One might argue that this notion of depth is misleading or not relevant across cultures, since it implies an untapped or hidden repository requiring special skills to access. Ewing remarked that the metaphor of depth is “unfortunate” because of its association with something underlying or not directly observable within our dark interiors and thus outside the reach of anthropology and restricted to the domain of psychologists (p. 253).

Anthropologists commonly describe two similar psychoanalytically oriented ethnographic approaches: person-centered ethnography and clinical ethnography. Articulated by Robert Levy and Douglas Hollan, person-centered ethnography reflects a mode of inquiry and listening that prioritizes the individual and their experiences of their social context and life-world. When compared to other ethnographic approaches, interviews are frequently longer in duration and ongoing. The ethnographer closely attends to self-processes and involvement in the present interaction. Consideration is also given to the relationship between the consultants, communities, and their sociocultural and historical contexts. Common themes of interest include inquiries into conflicts, coherences, and transformations. Since the self is a focal area of study, closely related constructs such as the body, emotions, morality, and understandings around illness and healing are of particular interest (Robert Levy and Douglas Hollan, “Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation” in H. Russell Bernard ed., Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 1998, pp. 333-364). Similarly, clinical ethnography, as described by Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller, is the cross-cultural study and close examination of subjectivity, both that of the researcher and the participants. Attention is paid to the symbols, context, demonstrations of agency, and the ways in which people express feelings, beliefs, and motives (Intimate Communications, 1990, pp. 29-30). Herdt, an anthropologist, and Stoller, a psychoanalyst, conducted ethnographic research together with the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, demonstrating their unique anthro-

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pologist-psychoanalyst collative ethnographic effort. Practitioners using psychoanalytic practices recognize that the contexts and situations encountered during fieldwork are often quite different from those of Western clinical practice. Time limits, research scope, and a less controlled setting can be limiting factors; however, ethnographers make efforts for privacy and long-term, multi-year arrangements. Moreover, compared to clinical settings, ethnographers have the benefit of living within the community and participating in and observing daily life at a level not otherwise available in a clinical setting. Nevertheless, while psychoanalytic approaches can be beneficial for short-term projects and brief interactions, clinical ethnography, Herdt and Stoller explain, “is like psychoanalysis, best done for years” (p. 31).

Interpretation and the Relations between Self and Society

Central to the psychoanalytic orientation in anthropology is the application of psychoanalytic concepts and theory to the interpretive process. Vincent Crapanzano noted that interpretation has become a bridge between anthropology and psychoanalysis (“Some Thoughts on Hermeneutics and Psychoanalytic Anthropology,” in Theodore Schwartz, et al., eds., New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, 1992, p. 296). Psychoanalytic anthropologists have been interested in interpreting symbolic expressions and processes and the role they play in emotional experiences, meaning creation, dream, fantasy, psychic conflict, and, importantly, how culture and other contexts shape these areas. Key areas of inquiry include, for example, the interpretation of myth, rituals, and their symbolic content, the use of personal symbols and their relationship to the public, culturally constituted defense mechanisms and their role in managing psychic conflict (see Rae-Espinoza this issue) and the relationship between symbolism, gender, and sexuality, and unconscious desires. In their interpretive efforts, anthropologists will often include the effects of social change, stability, and globalization, for example. Other ongoing themes of interest include descriptive and theoretical inquiries into the construction of personhood, the self, lived-experience, the subject, and subjectivity across sociocultural contexts.

Anthropologists are also interested in “cultural psychodynamics”—the study of the complex relationship between the sub-

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ject, the vicissitudes of individual subjective experience, and the sociocultural context in which these processes are embedded. This study of the relationship between intrapsychic processes, such as defenses and fantasies, and the larger social structures and cultural representations, has been an enduring area of study dating back to Freud. Early in the history of anthropology, Meyer Fortes regarded one of the more important questions within anthropology to be how culture corresponds to, or is a product of, the various “mechanisms” revealed by psychoanalysis. For example, in his discussion of the relationship between social structure and “psychological substructure,” Fortes described how Oedipal dynamics demonstrated between fathers and the first-born sons are built into Tallensi social organization as a means to manage it (Oedipus and Job in West African Religion, 1959). More recently, Robert LeVine described Mel Spiro’s exploration of the relationship between behavior, defense mechanisms, unconscious desires, and culture and Gananath Obeyesekere’s work on the connections of cultural narratives and the symbolic means of managing tension as important examples of research in cultural psychodynamics (Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture, 2010, p. 122).

While Robert LeVine characterizes cultural psychodynamics as a later phase in psychoanalytic anthropology that focuses on topics such as culturally constituted psychic defenses and drive-based psychoanalytic theories, other recent perspectives in cultural psychodynamics continue to integrate newer work from contemporary relational models emphasizing, for example, the role of intersubjectivity. Kevin Groark offers a productive contemporary perspective on cultural psychodynamics that remains open to integrating a variety of paradigms as a way to understand the complex mediation between individual idiosyncrasies and sociocultural worlds.

Avoiding both the reductionism of an individual psychology alone and social determinism, Groark describes cultural psychodynamics as bridging “the often disparate worldviews of anthropology and psychoanalysis, yielding a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which human subjectivity is shaped—and is, in turn, shaped by—the cultural world in which it is always embedded” (“Willful Souls: Dreaming and the Dialectics of Self-Experience Among the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mex-

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ico,” in Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop, eds., Toward an Anthropology of the Will, 2010, 122).

Shared Psychic Processes

This final category concerns the examination of shared or universal psychological processes, concerns, and cross-cultural comparisons. Early interests in psychoanalytic anthropology were oriented toward whole cultures, characterizing the structures that constituted a basic personality within a culture, and discovering the larger patterns of thought and emotion. Anthropologists took interest in finding similar psychological patterns or processes across cultures and studied topics such as the Oedipus complex, human developmental stages, child rearing practices, the presence of the unconscious across cultures, the ubiquity of sexual desire, and the cross-cultural presence of defense mechanisms such as repression. Researchers also were concerned with constructions of normality and abnormality across cultures. Melford Spiro, working from a biosocial Freudianism, argued that humans do share universal cultural patterns and common features of social interaction that are deeply rooted in the mind (Charles Lindholm, Culture and Identity, 2007, p. 161). Discussions concerning universal psychological processes are relevant to a range of anthropological debates concerning relativism, the Western origin of our theories, the relationship between structure and agency, and the prioritization of individuals versus shared processes within and between groups. In general, anthropologists today are less likely to support or develop universalistic models. Rather, greater interest rests in reframing the universalist questions to focus on variation, existential concerns, relational processes, lived experiences, the influence of context and its relationship with psychological processes, and explaining how what appear to be human universals are creatively handled in each situation (Robert Paul, “Psychoanalytic Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 18, 1989, p. 189).

This Issue

Many anthropologists remain adamant that we cannot understand culture and human experience without adequate consideration of the psychological. While we cannot directly access or see into the minds of others, the inclusion of psychoanalytic orientations in anthropology can enhance our research efforts and offer

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greater openness toward and insight into self-processes, self-representations, and subjective experiences. As described above, psychoanalytic perspectives work best when part of a larger anthropological toolkit and are deployed according to one’s research goals and circumstances. Further work in psychoanalytic anthropology will continue to recognize the benefit of the psychoanalytic tools available and, ideally, anthropologists will increasingly apply them to examine important topics ranging from inquiries into individual subjectivity in post-colonial settings to larger topics such as trans-nationalism and globalization, the entrenchment of neoliberalism, and the consequences of rapid social change.

The articles within this issue demonstrate the diversity of contemporary anthropological thinking and writing at the juncture of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In preparing for this issue, I offered the authors a broad framework, asking them to discuss the role of psychoanalysis in their ethnographic work and lives or to describe their ethnographic fieldwork from the intersection of the two disciplines. I suggested authors offer engaging ethnographic examples, fieldwork accounts, personal histories, and discussions of their relationship to psychoanalytic theory and practice. This rather broad net captured a range of ideas from scholars working in a variety of ethnographic settings and from several psychoanalytic traditions and levels of expertise. This is by no means a comprehensive representation of the diversity of psychoanalytic approaches in anthropology, but an engaging glimpse into the value of

psychoanalytic orientations in enhancing anthropological thinking and enriching our mutual efforts to come to novel and more helpful understandings of humanity.

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