Freud and anthropology. A history and reappraisal

EDWIN R. WALLACE (IV), Freud and anthropology. A history and reappraisal, New York, International Universities Press, 1983, 8vo, pp. xi, 306, $22.50. No scientific discipline outside his own gave Sigmund Freud's ideas such long-sustained and critical attention as did anthropology. Conversely, no other social or behavioural science so affected Freud's thinking over the course of his long career. This is the first full-length study to deal with both sides of the question with Freud's influence on anthropology and its influence on him, and it is superb: comprehensive, balanced, and judicious. Totem and taboo is the key work, but Wallace stresses Freud's long prior interest in anthropology and his use of it to bolster his emerging ideas on the Oedipus complex, symbolism, and many other topics. Freud's thinking was shaped by his reading of Lubbock, Tylor, and Spencer, as well as by his self-analysis, clinical work, and psychological and personal concerns. Wallace suggests that what finally drove Freud to write on the anthropological topics of totem and taboo in 1911 was not only his recent reading in Wundt and Fraser but his fear that Jung, his young disciple and emerging rival, was moving toward the same topics. If Jung would deny the role of the Oedipus complex in culture, then Freud would emphasize it all the more as both a psychological and historical fact. Freud also saw this as an opportunity to carry psychoanalysis beyond psychology and psychiatry, to make it a full-fledged social science. Wallace sketches the recent history of anthropology from early twentieth-century critiques of the evolutionary theorists whom Freud used through cultural relativism and finally to increasing acceptance of modified and refined schemes of cultural evolution beginning in the 1940s. Anthropologists have consistently been dubious of Freud's anthropology, but they have been profoundly affected by the psychological understandings which that anthropology, in part, helped him to reach, especially his emphasis on the significance of childhood and on the universality of certain psychic mechanisms. Anthropologists in the early twentieth century were looking for a psychology rich and full enough to help them explain the phenomena of mind as revealed in various cultures. For a time, at least, they found what they needed in psychoanalysis. This book sets forth the connexions between Freud's developing ideas and nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists on the one hand and Freudian thought and twentieth-century cultural anthropology on the other. Together they constitute one of the more remarkable instances of the value of cross-fertilization of disciplines in the history of the behavioural sciences. Joan Mark Editor for the Behavioural Sciences Harvard University Press