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Thirty years ago, when Weston La Barre published his classic essay “The Influence of Freud on Anthropology” (1958) in American Imago, the interdisciplinary rapprochement between psychoanalysis and anthropology was largely represented by the “culture-and-personality” studies spearheaded by Margaret Mead, Abram Kardiner and other psychocultural theorists. Emerging in the 1930s, “culture-and-personality” rapidly evolved from the anthropologist Ruth Benedict's Volksgeist orientation, in which culture was viewed as “personality writ large,” to neo-Freudian approaches which selectively incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into models of the culture-specific formation of “tribal character” or “communal personality” (Spindler 1978, Manson 1988). As a pioneering proponent of the psychoanalytic study of culture, La Barre was eminently qualified to assess the impact of Freud on anthropology. An acute observer of changing currents in cultural theory over two decades, La Barre also expressed quiet satisfaction that the prevailing indifference of anthropologists to psychoanalysis in the 1930s had been at least partially superseded by an open-minded receptivity in the 1950s. Culture-and-personality studies, La Barre could write in 1958, “remain essentially Freudian in concept and outlook” (1958: 281). In his essay, La Barre traced the historical development of psychoanalytically-informed anthropology and suggested future possibilities for research in this promising interdisciplinary field.
As a graduate student at Yale in the 1930s, La Barre encountered Freud's writings under the tutelage of Edward Sapir, the eminent anthropologist and linguist who “was almost alone in his inclusion of…psychoanalytic books on his lists of required reading for graduate students” (La Barre