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During luncheon break at a meeting on Chaos Theory and Psychoanalysis (Mohonk Mountain Lodge, May 20, 1995), I was walking with Gail Young, who had many years before been president of the American Mathematical Society. An editor from Scientific American joined us. Young had been a discussant for the morning panel and I and the editor were members of that audience. I commented that the relevance of that morning's discussion to psychoanalysis was not yet clear to me. The editor piped in quickly, “I'm reasonably certain that these talks had little to do with Science.” And Dr. Young, whom I had known in the 1960s and even then was a distinguished yet humble Mathematician and gentleman (he carried the title of Kentucky Colonel—a Southern gentleman), finished it off in an uncharacteristic way: “And they know virtually nothing about Mathematics! Mixed marriages in the Sciences are, indeed, not infrequently akin to the folle journee, the crazy day, of the Marriage of Figaro … too many people trying to fit too many incompatibles together.”
Psychoanalysis has a history of attempting to conjoin itself with Literary Criticism, political movements and with sundry Sciences (most recently with neurobiology), but the first of these courtships, arguably, was with anthropology. Freud's Totem and Taboo , his Civilization and Its Discontents , and the Group Psychology paper represented just a beginning. We now know that Freud's anthropological thinking went so far as to consider phylogenetic hypotheses about Ice Age man (in a recently discovered discarded paper from the Metapsychology series). The importance of his interest in these matters, furthermore, cannot be diminished by Kardiner's (1977, p. 75) comment that Freud, during Kardiner's analysis with Freud, purportedly dismissed the conclusions of Totem and Taboo and its Lamarckian underpinnings with, “Oh, don't take that too seriously. That's something I dreamed up on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” The first prize in psychoanalysis (s