You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As psychoanalysts well know, an understanding of culture and the external world, particularly in these troubled times, requires an understanding of the internal world; but equally, an understanding of the internal world requires an understanding of culture and the external world, which psychoanalysis has to some extent neglected. The embeddedness of mind and culture goes both ways. Such is the thesis of Salman Akhtar's timely and highly informative new book. In his own introductory words:
This book emerges from two motives. The first pertains to my wish to say something—both as an ordinary citizen and as a psychoanalyst—about the current global turmoil. The second involves my desire to expand the purview of my discipline, psychoanalysis, by forging links between the internal world it has mapped out so well and the external reality it has only lately come to recognize as important [p. xiii].
The second exploration he calls “anthropological psychoanalysis” as distinct from “psychoanalytic anthropology,” which he maintains is informed too much by Western conceptions of, for example, child-rearing, parent-child relationships, masculinity and femininity, and autonomy. Akhtar credits Freud with the dual insight that culture and repression are outgrowths of each other. (In my words: what is repressed in the superego, for example, are not only aggression and forbidden desires, but also the cultural taboos that are integral to the internalized father.)
The book is dense with political and cultural information, perhaps too much for the average psychoanalytic reader, and I will focus on only five of its seven chapters. The two I omit, “Religion, Politics, and Migration