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From 1920 to 1923, the preeminent American anthropologist, Alfred L. Kroeber of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an active practice as a lay psychoanalyst, with an office in San Francisco. His own published account of his psychoanalytic work appeared incidentally in introductory material in a collection of his papers that appeared in 1952. He was defending his authority to speak about the place of Freud's thinking in anthropology: “I have undergone at least a brief control psychoanalysis; and from 1920 to 1923 I practiced psychoanalysis in San Francisco, part of the time under medical sponsorship in the neuropsychiatric clinic of a hospital, part of the time independently.” (Kroeber, 1952, p. 300)
This incident has not made sense to biographers. As one of the major shapers of the discipline of anthropology, Kroeber did not utilize Freud's teachings in any obvious and major way. The architects of the culture and personality school, who were contemporaries of Kroeber, in contrast, for example, employed psychoanalytic thinking in a profound way. They formed a perhaps dominant school that involved many anthropologists as well as psychoanalysts and psychologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century.1
In what follows, I use printed records, including biographical materials published by the family,2 the now-printed correspondence of Kroeber with his close friend, Edward Sapir, documents from the Bancroft Library Kroeber Papers (from