The Exchange of Women and the Work of the Unconscious: Rereading Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Mitchell

This article applies psychoanalytic metapsychology to Lévi-Strauss's paradigm of elementary kinship, clarifying how unconscious identifications and affective investments are organized by alliance rules and naming practices. We first synthesize key concepts in Freud and Lacan with structural anthropology to specify the psychic mechanisms, namely, repression, substitution, sublimation, that mediate incest prohibition in elementary systems. We then advance an applied analytic model showing how cross-cousin marriage cycles encode deferred desire and how onomastic conventions can trace transgenerational affect. The discussion reframes “female passivity” not as a theoretical given but as the outcome of intergenerational identifications operating within exchange logics, while distinguishing patrilateral “social incest” from matrilateral integration. Conceptually, the paper offers a bridge between psychoanalytic theory and anthropological description; methodologically, it sets out a hermeneutic–comparative framework suitable for applied psychoanalytic studies. Implications include a refined account of the social transmission of desire and guidance for interpreting family dynamics in culturally embedded settings.