The Psychodynamics of Culture Abram Kardiner and Neo-Freudian Anthropology

Subjects:

• Anthropology » Anthropology (General)

Reviews:

• Abram Kardiner was a pioneer in the application of ego-oriented, adaptational psychodynamics to problems in the social sciences. A medically trained psychoanalyst, he had benefitted during his early years from graduate course work in anthropology with Franz Boas and from a didactic analysis with Freud himself. In the late 1930s, Kardiner began what would prove to be an extremely fruitful collaboration with anthropologists Cora Du Bois and Ralph Linton. Their psychocultural seminars, sponsored initially by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and later by the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, gave rise to the personality-mediation model of culture and personality relations, with its key features of `basic personality structure,' and `projective systems,' and `primary and secondary institutions.' Participants and guest lecturers in the seminar over the decade of its existence included Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, RUth Bunzel, and Carl Withers , as well as John Gillin, Victor Barnouw, David Aberle, Francis Hsu, and Alexander and Dorothea Leighton. The post-war period witnessed a drastic deterioration in Kardiner's ties with psychologically oriented anthropologists. Ultimately, a disenchanted and even embittered Kardiner abandoned hope of a genuine and enduring raprochement between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Manson's study, a substantial expansion of an earlier published essay, is devoted to retrieving Kardiner from the limbo into which he lapsed some 30 years ago. The author offers a historical reconstruction of the classic psychocultural seminars and reassesses the theoretical and methodological innovations that emerged from them. As a historian Manson displays an impressive command of his materials. He does an admirable job of summarizing the ethnographic data on which Kardiner based his psychodynamic formulations and interpretations. He even manages to evoke something of the emotional flavor of the seminar sessions and the very different personalities involved. This is a consequence of his judicious use of rich primary sources: the exhaustive unpublished reminiscences of Kardiner himself, the private papers of Margaret Mead, and the recollections and/or seminar notes of Aberle, Barnouw, Du Bois and others. . . . a most worthwhile volume, one that should be read by specialists in culture and personality and by anyone interested in what took place in American anthropology between the wars.
  —American Anthropologist

Table of Contents:

• Trauma and Adaptation
• Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinary Social Science
• The Emergence of "Basic Personality Structure"
• Divergent Developments in Neo-Freudian Anthropology
• At Columbia: Alor and "Plainville"
• Amerindian Cultures: Tapirapé and Ojibwa
• Configurations of "National Character"
• The Legacy of Psychocultural Synthesis
• Bibliography
• Index