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Géza Róheim, the Hungarian-born anthropologist who settled in the United States shortly before the Second World War, always thought of himself as a psychoanalytic anthropologist and harbored no illusions that his life's work would be easily accepted, let alone assimilated by his fellow anthropologists (Spitz, 1953; Balint, 1954; La Barre, 1967). For almost two decades, he was alone in his rigorous pressuring for psychoanalytic ways of thinking and technique in anthropology and bore the brunt of polemic and ostracism for his efforts. Since his death in 1953, his anthropological work in particular has suffered from a general neglect and disparagement.1 Recently, however, Róheim has come in for some surprising re-consideration (one might even say notoriety) from several sources: First and foremost of these has been the serious re-examination of many of his works as a part of intellectual political (radical) history, the so-called “Radical Freudian movement or tradition” (Robinson, 1969). (A recent expression of this has been the singling out and “adoption” of certain of Róheim's formulations—supposedly taken as advocating a type of sexual-political freedom and radical cultural philosophy—by particular radical-student and communal groups.) Second has been a renewed interest, along with some favorable re-evalution, of his position in the culture-and-personality movement of the pre-World War II years in the light of neo-evolutionary theory (Harris, 1968; Eissler, ; and others). Both of these re-considerations, as I hope to show, are instrinsically linked to and form the main issues for discussion in this paper.
As noted, Róheim has recently been linked with and comes in for renewed interest as one of the so-called prophets of radical or left tradition in psychoanalysis and, by implication,