IT IS A PLEASURE TO HAVE the opportunity to discuss Dr. Davidson's paper on culture and psychoanalysis. This is a broadranging historical review of the interrelations between the two fields. At the same time, it is pragmatic and useful in the way it points to a therapeutic approach which can arise from the co-mingling of the two disciplines.

As Dr. Davidson emphasizes, this useful outcome is not one that has been, or can be, easily achieved. In addition to the stumbling blocks that she mentions—such as the ethnocentrism of most Americans and the confining walls of the universalistic, structural aspects of classical psychoanalytic theory—there is the problem resulting from the fact that anthropology has never developed a stable, over-arching theory. It has always been a fragmented discipline and is becoming more so. Matching this theoretical chaos in anthropology is the problem of the current additions to and modifications of psychoanalytic theory with respect to "object relations"