Psychoanalysis and anthropology share concern with determination of wish and intent, and rely upon study of lives over time as the means for understanding the significance of meaning. Culture provides the matrix of meanings which serves as the basis for the life story as enacted within the psychoanalytic situation. Further, these two human-science disciplines rely upon the relationship between two persons as the experiential foundations providing understanding of meaning. Recent contributions by LeVine (1982), Briggs (1987), Crapanzano (1980), Kracke (1981, 1987), Herdt (1987b), Ewing (1987), and others, have documented the value of the reflexive approach characteristic of clinical psychoanalysis for cultural study, focusing on the experience-near study of the relationship between ethnographer and informant.

Much of the misunderstanding regarding the significance of psychoanalysis for cultural study may be attributed to the confusion between the experience-distant metapsychology, reflecting Freud's scientistic world view, and the clinical theory, focusing on meaning, and arising from this psychoanalytic study (Klein 1976; Cohler 1987; Galatzer-Levy and Cohler 1989). Indeed, it is Freud's distinctive approach to the study of subjectivity, rather than his scientific world-view, which has had particular impact upon twentieth-century study in the human sciences and the arts.