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David Spain has assembled an excellent collection of essays in the field of psychoanalytic anthropology to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Freud's death. The features of this book contribute to the definition of the field.
The first five chapters, which constitute Part One, subtitled 'Field and Clinic-Based Studies', more or less reflect the definition of psychoanalytic anthropology as 'that subdiscipline of anthropology devoted to the use of psychoanalytic concepts, method and theory in the study of culture' (p. 2). Most of the remaining six chapters, which constitute Part Two, 'Theoretical and Critical Studies', illustrate another purpose of psychoanalytic anthropology, 'namely, using the ethnographic and theoretical works of anthropology to foster the development and clarification of psychoanalytic theory' (p. 2). These essays allow us to see how psychoanalytic thought can infuse psychoanalytic anthropology and in turn be invigorated by ethnographic findings. These papers are an amalgam of epistemic conversations rather than a collection of homogeneous essays that strive to see one central foundation. Accordingly they show us how these diverse contributions treat theoretical and orienting assumptions as heuristic tools.
How are these heuristic tools presented? Robert Levine's lead essay on 'The self in African culture' is a first-rate exegesis of how our theoretical pretexts discipline and shape our research and inform our findings. His ethnographic research is influenced to some considerable degree by Kohut's psychoanalytic self psychology and Kohut's reading of basic Freudian principles, which suggest that a practitioner 'clarify the surface before going to the depths' (p. 39). In other words, 'a surface psychology, i.e.,