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Freud's forays into what has come to be called “applied psychoanalysis” followed two trajectories. One pertained to fiction, sculpture, and memoirs. The other addressed religion, civic institutions, group regression, and war. Regardless of the difference in their focus, both types of contributions constituted psychoanalytic anthropology. They set aside the principles and determining variables of the discipline under study and gave premium to psychoanalytic metapsychology. Culture was seen as a product of the mind, personality development schemes were Eurocentric, and societal events were not felt to be present in clinical work.
The cataclysmic events of mid-century Europe jolted the field of psychoanalysis into recognizing that history, politics, ethnicity, religion, prejudice, and geographical dislocation have a far greater role in mental functioning. The proposal of “joint acceptance of reality of the Holocaust” (Auerhahn & Laub, 1987), deemed necessary in the treatment of survivors and their offspring, had the automatic corollary of extending similar “joint acceptance of reality” to African Americans (who have a deeply traumatic history of slavery) and those from the erstwhile European colonies (who have been the subject of imperialistic “gaslighting”). Add to this list the psychoanalytic work with the urban poor in the United States; the psychoanalytic discourse on personality functioning in India, China, Japan, and South Korea; the in-depth study of the ethnic divide in Australia, and psychoanalytic contributions to the understanding of prejudice, ethnic conflict, diplomacy, immigration, and exile. Having done that, one ends up with a new picture of “applied psychoanalysis” altogether. As opposed to the psychoanalytic anthropology of the past, today's cultural rejuvenation of our field has given birth to anthropological psychoanalysis. The former sought to understand cultural matters using a psychoanalytic lens. The latter brings cultural matters to bear upon ps