Between Geertz and Kohut: Chicago in the 1960s (article)

My life during the 1960s was split three ways: between the University of Chicago, where I was on the faculty; the Institute for Psychoanalysis, where I was a “research candidate” (a student not to be certified for practice); and, fieldwork in Nigeria and Kenya (in Nigeria before and after psychoanalytic training, and in Kenya during most summers). At the beginning, in 1962, I was the only anthropologist in psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute. My analyst was Gerhart Piers, a Viennese who had succeeded Franz Alexander as director of the Institute and had published a book on shame and guilt with Milton Singer. I saw him five times

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a week most of the year, though he allowed me two months off during the summers to go to Africa (instead of one month—a counter-transferential mistake?).

After two years in analysis (1962 to 1964), I was admitted to classes at the Institute. No theoretical course had a more exciting reputation than “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis,” taught by Heinz Kohut, another Viennese analyst, who delivered extremely coherent and deeply insightful lectures without notes. During each lecture after the first, he would ask a student in the first row where he had left off and would then begin lecturing without pauses or hesitations.

My notes on his lectures reflect his coherence; I had never taken such good notes. I particularly appreciated the fact that his view of psychoanalysis and neurosis contained so many points I had never encountered before. Three years later, in 1967, I took Heinz Kohut’s Continuing Case Seminar, in which we heard material from Kohut’s supervisee Arnold Goldberg and first encountered some of the concepts Kohut detailed in his book, The Analysis of the Self (1971), including narcissistic character disorder, and his novel therapeutic approach to such cases.

I joined the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in 1960 and immediately joined the Committee for the Study of New Nations. That committee was started by a political scientist, David Apter, whom I had known in East Africa, with the sociologist Edward Shils and with Clifford Geertz and Lloyd A. Fallers, two newly arrived anthropologists I had known during my student years. Geertz and I were colleagues in the Anthropology Department, but it was at the weekly meetings of the New Nations Committee that we engaged in intellectual dialogue. This was the period when Geertz was writing the papers like “Religion as a Cultural System” that formed the core of his approach, some of which were later published together in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).

Cliff and I had been doctoral students together at Harvard—he three years ahead of me—but he returned from fieldwork in Java without having taken his “specials” (that is, the written and oral exams in social anthropology) beforehand. That meant he was in di-

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rect competition with the rest of us novices on the exam, and we inevitably appeared mediocre by comparison with his brilliance and erudition; I felt lucky to have passed. However, what came between us primarily was our notion of research: I was a passionate logical positivist who had studied briefly with Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel and found my ideals embodied in John Whiting’s cross-cultural approach; Cliff was an avowed phenomenologist who regarded positivism with disdain.

At Chicago’s New Nations Seminar, these differences were not in focus, and I became more interested in Cliff’s elegant formulations. After 1968, when the Africanist Victor Turner joined the faculty, my aversion to cultural phenomenology, as represented by his work and Geertz’s, began to erode. I could see that their approaches took account of religion as cultural fantasy in ways that were compatible with psychoanalysis (Turner agreed). At the Institute for Psychoanalysis, Kohut was now espousing what amounted to a phenomenological version of psychoanalysis, with “empathicunderstanding” as its key tool and his injunction to “clarify the sur-

face before going to the depths” as a point of convergence between his approach and those of Geertz and Turner.

I don’t mean that I ever fully agreed with either Geertz or Kohut about theory and method. They both viewed their work as closer to the humanities than the sciences, while I always took science as the goal for psychocultural research. Still, their positions were taken largely in opposition to conceptions of science as restricted to the search for universal generalizations and that had no place for the particulars of the individual psyche, the local culture, or the historical period. Since the work of Geertz and Kohut was focused on just such particulars, they rejected the physics-based models of science then prevalent among social scientists—in my view, however, Darwinian biology was a more suitable model of science for social scientists, and it did have places for particulars and variations as well as uniformities. But Geertz and Kohut formulated standards of credibility for cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis, standards that made them as skeptical as I was of interpretation or depth analysis without sufficient attention to context. Thus, I found myself influenced by them as well as by Vic Turner.

I want to emphasize that the convergence of my viewpoint

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with those of Geertz and Kohut was mine; neither of them changed their minds about any of the issues. I worked with Kohut regarding the founding of the Center for Psychosocial Studies in the early 1970s, and I participated in the conference given in honor of his 60th birthday in 1973. The last time I saw him was on a return visit to Chicago in 1977, when I gave a lecture that was co-sponsored by the Institute and the University of Chicago’s Continuing Education Program. Kohut was in the audience when I said his theory of childhood psychic development has a “Japanese problem,” in that evidence from Japan shows early development there has a normal course that would be “pathogenic” according to his theory. My lecture was the only one in the series to be rejected for publication in the Chicago Institute’s Annual of Psychoanalysis, on the grounds that it was “insufficiently psychoanalytic.”

As for Cliff, I had a warm relationship with him that did not involve criticizing each other’s viewpoints. Then in 2002, when I participated in an American Anthropological Association panel celebrating him and presented a brief paper, “Coded Communications: Symbolic Psychological Anthropology,” suggesting that he needed but did not have an explicit psychological or psychoanalytic dimension in his writings, he agreed, explained why—exaggerating issues with the earlier culture and personality period—and indicated a willingness to consider new trends in psychocultural research (Richard Shweder and Byron Good, eds., Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues, 2005, pp. 24-27). I am unaware that there is any sign of having made other statements on this subject before his death a few years later. It was quite different with Vic Turner, who wrote a chapter called “Encounter with Freud” in George Spindlers’ The Making of Psychological Anthropology (1978) and also told me how much he regretted about not incorporating a psychoanalytic dimension in his work.

I presented an initial form of the convergence between Kohut, Geertz, and my own views in the book Culture, Behavior and Personality in 1973 and a more advanced form in an additional chapter, “The Self in Culture,” added to its second edition (1982). That chapter proposed the idea of a person-centered ethnography as fieldwork that may or may not reach the depths to which Freud aspired. It is a project that others have carried out with success, and

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one to which I hope to make a further contribution in the next years. As I argued in my 2010 book of readings Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self and Culture, we have made some progress in this field, and there is reason to think that more is possible.

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