Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds
Annual Review of Anthropology October 24, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110107 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Over the past 30 years, anthropologists have increasingly drawn on contemporary psychoanalytic theories, moving beyond Freud to explore how marginal or liminal states of consciousness shape human experience and are shaped by worldly entanglements. This review examines research on dreams, fantasies, imaginal thought, loss, melancholia, emotional suffering, distress, alienation, and the effects of transference and countertransference in fieldwork. It also addresses how being haunted by personal and social injustices influences ethics and morality, arguing that such phenomena should be central to anthropological theorizing.
Study at a glance
| Design | review |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Anthropological work informed by contemporary psychoanalysis reveals that marginal states of consciousness—such as dreams, fantasies, and haunting—are central to understanding human experience and should be integrated into anthropological theory rather than ignored. |
Abstract
This article reviews work in anthropology over the last 30 years that has been informed by psychoanalysis, much of it drawing on contemporary schools of psychoanalytic thought that further develop or even directly challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the original Freudian corpus. It assumes that what happens at the margins or horizons of human consciousness, as a body of work, should be closely examined and included in anthropological theorizing rather than ignored or downplayed, and it examines how such states of consciousness both affect and are affected by entanglements with the world. Focal topics of the review include work on dreams, fantasies, and imaginal thought; loss and melancholia; aspects of emotional suffering, distress, and alienation; the effects of transference and countertransference on fieldwork; the sense of being haunted by personal and social injustices; and how the contingencies of self-awareness affect the development of ethics and morality.