Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis

Salman Akhtar, Stuart Twemlow, Salman Akhtar, Stuart Twemlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000157390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Émotions en psychologie

The Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis is a unique and original contribution to the field of psychoanalysis. Emphasizing and underscoring the need for interdisciplinary discourse in understanding the dialectical relationship between mind and culture, this volume addresses a multiplicity of realms. These include anthropology, religion, philosophy, history, as well as evolutionary psychology, medicine, race, poverty, migration, and prejudice. Dimensions of social praxis such as education, health policy, and cyberpsychology are also addressed. The enrichment of our understanding of the fine arts (e.g. painting, sculpture, poetry) and performing arts (e.g. music, dance, cinema) by the application of psychoanalytic principles and the enhancement of psychoanalysis by bringing such arts to bear upon it also form areas of this book's concern. This magisterial volume brings distinguished psychoanalysts, philosophers, musicians, poets, businessmen, architects, and movie critics together to create a chorus of modern, anthropologically-informed and culturally sensitive psychoanalysis.

PART I

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURAL
UNDERSTANDING OF MANKIND

CHAPTER ONE

Anthropology

Robert Paul

We now have behind us a century that witnessed the emergence, efflorescence, and—it must be admitted—(partial) decline of the fields of both psychoanalysis and (cultural) anthropology. From this perspective, we can take stock of what, if anything, was accomplished in the efforts to forge a link between them.

Relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology

Parallels

The fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology were both invented by secularized Western European Jews who were close contemporaries: Freud was born in 1856; both Durkheim and Boas, the main founders of the modern academic discipline of anthropology, were born in 1858. Each field represented a challenge to the existing self-knowledge of Western civilization: psychoanalysis by revealing unconscious thought “beneath” it, and anthropology by taking a respectful and relativistic empirical approach to other ways of life “outside” it.

Both disciplines take seriously, and try to make sensible, ideas and practices that might seem bizarre or whimsical from the ordinary, rational point of view of the modern Western observer. Both rely, for the most part, not on the hypothetic-deductive or experimental research method, but on the prolonged immersion of the investigator in the rich and complex details of a particular case. Both also rely on the subjectivity and interpretive and empathic capacities of the observer. Both disciplines, in principle, straddle and draw on the biological as well as the cultural disciplines, though this dichotomy remains a tension that sometimes veers toward the one and sometimes toward the other pole in both fields.

Both psychoanalysis and anthropology provide opportunities for the typical Western observer to achieve a creative alienation from ordinary habits of thought so as to achieve greater self-awareness. And both disciplines, while having once enjoyed a period of great influence on the intellectual world at large, have now to some degree been relegated to places closer to the corners and margins of informed scholarly and public opinion, for better or for worse.

Differences

Despite the parallels described above, the relationship between the two fields has never been an easy or even a very friendly one, and there are as many forces separating them as those that might seem to unite them. While both ethnographic field work and psychoanalytic clinical work afford to the person who undertakes them unparalleled access to empirical knowledge in depth of the ways of thinking and feeling of other people, there are crucial differences in the way this knowledge is collected and the kind of knowledge that results.

The most obvious difference is that one discipline is a research endeavor, the other a treatment. The people being studied by the ethnographer do not want to change and have not asked to be observed. They put up with the investigation of their lives with varying degrees of willingness, and often with monetary or other inducements. On the other hand, the ethnographer does not require them to delve into matters they would prefer to keep hidden (though they may well volunteer these in the course of conversation). The people observed by the analyst, by contrast, have come voluntarily—indeed, they pay handsomely for the privilege—for the purpose of being treated and, they hope, made better in some way by the process they undergo. In return, they are asked to abandon the usual restraints on discourse and to explore the very matters about which they have the most shame, guilt, and dread. The idiomatic discourse of psychoanalysis, arising as it does from the diagnosis and treatment of disorders, almost inevitably implies that there is something wrong with the object of observation, but this discourse, when applied to ethnography, is bound to rub many people up the wrong way by apparently pathologizing the objects of study.

Add to these differences the following—that psychoanalysis is a procedure that can only be conducted with a tiny minority of educated Western subjects, and could not logistically or otherwise be carried out in the field under almost any imaginable conditions; that the conduct of psychoanalysis requires of the practitioner a thorough knowledge of the cultural milieu in which both he or she and the analysand live, whereas the ethnographer, by design, attempts to acquire such knowledge from an initial position of ignorance; that the rules of confidentiality and the ethical considerations that should prevail in all our dealings with others do not allow the truthful publication of the most interesting and potentially valuable aspects of a psychoanalytic treatment, so that psychoanalysis is in the odd position of having access to a vast amount of excellent data, none of which can be shared with anyone or put to further use—and one can see that the orientation of the psychoanalyst and the ethnographer are, as the great psychoanalytic anthropologist George Devereux (1978) proposed, complementary endeavors that cannot be conducted simultaneously, and even may be, to some extent, mutually exclusive and contradictory.

Devereux’s dictum is applicable not just at the intellectual level but also at a highly pragmatic one: not only is it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to receive full professional training as both an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, but the requirements and commitments of a career carrying out the clinical practice of multiyear, four- or five-day-a-week analyses effectively preclude the possibility of also pursuing the long-term residence in another community necessary for good ethnographic research.

Freud’s early interdisciplinary foray

In spite of these difficulties, a number of researchers and thinkers over the years have been drawn to the subject matter and intellectual projects of both disciplines. These individuals have sought in various ways to combine the two disciplines, integrate them, incorporate one into the other, or otherwise cross the real boundaries that do separate them. In the ninety years since Freud’s fateful foray in anthropology with his book, Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), a field of “psycho-analytic anthropology” has emerged and flourished and has made a number of contributions to knowledge worth surveying.

Totem and Taboo is based on the premise that customs, practices, and beliefs can be subjected to the same sort of analysis that had already shown much success in making sense of such phenomena as dreams, jokes, everyday slips of the tongue, and, most important, the symptoms of the disorders known as the “transference neuroses,” as well as the unconscious fantasies that underlie and animate them. This premise reflects the further belief that the history of human civilization follows a unilineal developmental trajectory analogous to the one that characterizes the life span of an individual person. By this analogy, the rituals and beliefs of contemporary society reflect memories of events that occurred during the infancy and childhood of civilization, while the primitive peoples of today give us a glimpse into what life was like during the primordial stages of the evolution of culture. These views represent extensions of the then-current anthropological assumption that human civilization had indeed passed through a series of stages on its ascent to modern civilization, and that contemporary non-Western peoples represented stages now surpassed by the West.

The text to which Freud submits his interpretive theories is Totemism and Exogamy by Sir James G. Frazer, a four-volume comparative work that had appeared in 1910 when Sir James’s prestige as the great anthropologist of the age was at its peak. Frazer examined the evidence for a link between “totemism”—the supposed original religion of the primordial state of human life featuring a special set of attitudes toward animals—and “exogamy”—the practice whereby members of clans, named after particular animals and holding that animal sacred, are not allowed to marry clan-mates, but must exchange wives with members of other clans with other animal names.

Convinced that the original form of human life had been the polygynous family (such as that which characterizes gorillas), as Darwin had maintained, Freud hypothesized an event that was supposed to explain how the family, in a precultural state of nature, was transformed into the first level of human culture, that of totemism and exogamy. This well-known theory has it that after the sons of the primal father of the family, or “horde” (as Darwin had called it), rebelled against the involuntary celibacy enforced by the jealous senior male, who maintained a monopoly on sexual relations with the women of the group, and killed and cannibalized him, they were seized with remorse. In retrospective guilt, they imposed on themselves the worship of the now-deified father imagined in animal form, along with the prohibitions on killing the paternal animal and on committing “incest”— that is, sex with women of the same horde (thus renouncing the sexual objects for whom they had committed the crime). Exogamy is just the flip side of the prohibitions on incest—one must marry outside instead of within the group if one’s group mates are forbidden—while “totemism” is the set of beliefs and customs surrounding the memory of the murder of the primal father (symbolized as the totem animal) and the fear of retribution that followed it.

The challenge of cultural anthropology

Freud’s theory of the primal crime was accepted by his early disciples, and it continued to inspire work based on similar premises by a number of analysts, such as Theodor Reik, Otto Rank, and Géza Róheim (about whom more in a moment). But in the field of anthropology (and I will here limit myself mainly to the field of cultural anthropology as it developed in America), the intellectual and professional revolution inspired by Franz Boas at the turn of the twentieth century summarily rejected Frazer and all he stood for: the “armchair” comparative method, the premise that civilization had undergone a single evolutionary or unilineal developmental process, and the consequent belief that contemporary primitives were survivors of an earlier historical epoch. Instead, basing their ideas on the principles of cultural relativism and a belief that there are vastly many human stories, not just one, modern anthropologists were to be first and foremost fieldworkers who immersed themselves as participant observers in the lives and lived worlds of other peoples. These peoples were to be understood in their own terms and through their own eyes, with no assumptions about their place in any hierarchy, evolutionary or otherwise. Words such as Freud’s, even without the controversial story of the primal crime and the privileging of the Oedipus complex as the foundation of civilization, now seemed to belong to an antiquated genre from which contemporary anthropologists wished to distance themselves. The reception of Totem and Taboo in anthropology thus ranged from bemused indifference to outright rejection (In my book, Moses and Civilization, however, I have rescued Freud’s “primal crime” theory, unconvincing as it may be if taken as an explanatory theory, from the dustbin of history and have shown in detail how it accurately analyses the core myth of Judeo-Christian civilization [Paul, 1996]).

Malinowski

Ironically, given his characterization in received wisdom as an opponent of psychoanalytic thinking, Bronislaw Malinowski, the great Polish/British anthropologist and ethnographic fieldworker par excellence, as one of the anthropologists most receptive to Freud’s ideas, and to the idea of the Oedipus complex, recognized, as his diaries (1967) make clear, its applicability to himself. His attempt (Malinowski, 1927) to delineate a “matrilineal complex” characteristic of the Trobriand islanders of the southwest Pacific whom he studied was intended as a “friendly amendment” to psychoanalytic theory, preserving the notion of a core nuclear family complex but replacing Freud’s unilineal approach to a supposed world civilization with a viewpoint informed by the new cultural relativism and respect for the diversities of societies. In amending Freud’s theory, Malinowski showed that in cultures where descent is reckoned through the maternal line, the leading incestuous fantasies revolve around the sister, not the mother, while the struggles over authority refer to the mother’s brother, not the father, as the one who wields power over the young man’s fate.

For better or worse, psychoanalysis in the early 1920s was in no mood to have its core tenets challenged in any way, and far from accepting Malinowski’s ideas, Ernest Jones (1925) rejected them out of hand. What might have been an alliance based on a synthesis that accepted oedipal dynamics while recognizing the variations in outcome and resolution of them was not to be, at least not just then. But Malinowski’s claims did act as a challenge to Géza Róheim, another of Freud’s faithful inner circle, who was partially goaded into undertaking fieldwork himself with the explicit intention of refuting Malinowski’s ideas about the supposed Trobriand matrilineal complex.

Róheim

Róheim, a Hungarian geographer, folklorist, and anthropologist trained in Berlin, underwent analysis with his countryman Ferenczi and became a fervent adherent of psychoanalysis, and especially of Freud’s theory of the primal horde, which he used to organize vast amounts of ethnographic material (gathered and published by others) about the culture of the aboriginal peoples of Australia. He accepted Freud’s equation of the thought of neurotic individuals and that of primitive peoples, though he was quick to clarify that this did not imply that primitive people were neurotic: It was their cultural forms, not they themselves, that displayed themes and modes of symbolization typical of the fantasies of Western neurotic individuals. Thus, just as Freud in Totem and Taboo compared to Frazer’s concept of contagious magic the “contagion” in the thought of obsessional neurotic individuals, Róheim (1922) argued, for example, that a clinical case report on a patient with a phobia about how things were handed to him for fear he would not grow paralleled the widespread belief in folklore that babies must not be handed through windows or over the threshold because they would not grow. He traced this to oedipal dynamics thus: “The house in this case represents a woman, the window represents the vagina, and passing through or lifting over represents coitus. For we know from analysis that a fear that something will not grow is a castration-fear” (p. 13).

This is the sort of apparently formulaic overconfidence in the handling of “symbols” that has won such psychoanalytic interpretations a bad name in many circles. Yet when approached with a sympathetic and analytically informed attitude, Róheim’s excursions in the vast forest of symbols, customs, and rituals available to him in the ethnographic record of his day should be read today for the many nuggets of insight they contain. He was the first to chart this territory, and in effect he invented the field of psychoanalytic anthropology.

In 1929, with financial backing from Marie Bonaparte and Freud’s blessing, Róheim and his wife undertook ethnographic fieldwork in several locales, most importantly the central Australian desert and also the Normanby Islands, close to the Trobriands and, like them, having peoples with cultures characterized by a matrilineal descent system. Even anthropologists who are not in sympathy with Róheim’s psychoanalytic approach continue to regard the quality of his ethnographic work as excellent.

It was no great surprise that he argued, contra Malinowski, that the Normanby islanders had a regular Oedipus complex despite their matrilineal kinship system. But more important, after his fieldwork, Róheim relied less on the primal horde scenario as a key to the decoding of cultural symbolism, and in place of Freud’s phylogenetic theory, he developed an ontological theory of cultural difference that was to have wide ramifications (Róheim, 1934).

According to this theory, childhood traumas that typically occur in a particular cultural setting lead to a distinctive characterological outcome among adults of that culture, one reflected in institutions that represent projections of childhood fantasies induced by the shared typical trauma. So, for example, Róheim argued that the hypermasculinity found among the peoples of central Australia, and reflected in their elaborate men’s cults and high valuation of war, can be traced to childhood sleeping arrangements. It is common for mothers to lie on top of their infants during sleep, and this, Róheim reason...