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While psychoanalysis emerged in the clinical context of treating neurotic symptoms, a substantial portion of its attention was directed, from its earliest days, to sociocultural matters. Its founder, Sigmund Freud, made bold and wide-ranging forays in his effort to unravel the mysteries of creativity (1908), group psychology (1921), religious belief (1927), civilization at large (1930) and the human tendency of going to war (1933). With a few exceptions (e.g., Fromm, Marcuse, Roheim), his followers made fewer contributions to this sort of application of psychoanalytic understanding. Their extra-clinical observations remained restricted to speculations about renowned artists, poets, novelists, and political leaders. As a result, Freud's “applied psychoanalysis” shrank and became esoteric, and a sort of arm-chair luxury. And, to wit, it continued a lock, stock, and barrel extrapolation of psychoanalytic metapsychology to diverse social phenomena in a brazen, if unmentalized, act of theoretical imperialism. Applied psychoanalysis thus turned into “psychoanalytic anthropology” (Akhtar, 2018). This state of affairs lasted till the mid-1950s when Erikson's social task-oriented scheme of the life span's unfolding cracked open the shell of such heuristic solipsism. The beginning studies of long-term effects of the Nazi Holocaust upon its survivors and their offspring also highlighted that there was more—much more—to be psychoanalytically studied than an interesting novel or a breathtaking painting. Further impetus to the growing need for psychoanalysis to become socially wide-eyed came from the theoretical and clinical input from India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, and Iran, all of which added nuances to the theory and praxis in our field.
Two developments followed. One consisted of the birth of “anthropological psychoanalysis” (Akhtar, 2018) and the other consisted of psychoanalysis' stepping out of the consulting room and facing the travails o