Paper short abstract:

Anthropology and psychoanalysis both share a belief that human behaviour can be scientifically analysed and explained, and there is a long line of authors, from Freud, via Kroeber, Roheim, to Devereux, Stoller and Herdt, who profited from their realtionship.

Paper long abstract:

When it comes to relationship between anthropology and psychoanalysis, W. H. R. Rivers was one of the early champions of the new approach, a view echoed by the "culture and personality" school in the US (DuBois, Benedict, Mead), as well as by anthropologists like Kluckhohn. Over the decades, other anthropologists, trained in psychoanalysis or psychology (like Kardiner), did produce influential and important studies, culminating in Devereux's "ethnopsychological" approach. Somewhat paradoxically, ethnopsychoanalysis became one of the most prominent features of the German-language anthropology during 1960s and 1970s, thanks to Paul Parin's establishment of the seminar at the University of Zürich. There is also a long line between Malinowski's interest in the "sexual life of the savages," just after the First World War (with his original enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, later to be replaced with scepticism, during the famous LSE postgraduate seminars), via Leach's grudging acceptance that psychoanalysis did have some value, to Obeyesekere's studies of "Medusa's hair" and Spiro's re-examination of Oedipus in the Trobriands (1982). Henrietta L. Moore, explored in great length the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology in her work (2007) - just as the French analyst Eric Smadja did, from a psychoanalytic perspective (2009).

Overall, in more recent years, relational approach opens a new venue for possible collaboration between the two disciplines. Some of its aspects are reflected in the work of several very influential contemporary psychoanalysts, like Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips.