Introduction

Many anthropologists cringe when they hear the word “psychoanalysis.” Even those who focus on phenomena such as the “self” or “emotions” may carefully differentiate their object of study, “culture,” from anything that they construe as the domain of psychology. This almost visceral rejection is usually justified by reference to the misappropriation of the object of anthropological study by psychoanalysts beginning with Freud and perhaps best epitomized by his phantasy about the evolution of society in Totem and Taboo (1950). Cultural relativists reject Freud's claims for the universality of the Oedipus complex, accepting on hearsay (and misinterpreting) Malinowski's 1927 counterclaim (1955) as the definitive last word, despite the glaring flaws in Malinowski's argument that have been effectively pointed out by Spiro (1982). With the rise of interpretive approaches in anthropology, Freud's biological-drive theory, based on a reification of motivation as mechanical forces and counterforces, also strikes many as outdated and irrelevant. But Freud's theorizing about the origins of society and the functioning of the mind occurred at a time when the founding fathers of social science, such as Durkheim, were themselves developing some rather remarkable theories about the origins and functioning of various social institutions. Fortunately, we do not today reject all of Durkheim because of his “alka seltzer” theory of the origins of ritual in a state of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1965). Durkheim produced a complex, not entirely consistent, body of theory that subsequent thinkers have elaborated, modified, and extended in many different directions, so that it continues to undergird anthropological theorizing today.