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It is now taken for granted that psychoanalysis and anthropology have profound effects on each other. The interface between these two disciplines continues to produce a rich harvest of theoretical and practical problems. Some of them will be briefly outlined in this Editorial.
When Freud published Totem and Taboo in 1918, he was vehemently attacked by leading anthropologists who accused him of three basic errors: a) He had attempted to reconstruct a universal history of mankind based on obsolete evolutionist assumptions used during the nineteenth century. b) Freud's historical reconstruction was based on an apparent equation of Occidental infantile fantasies with primitive personality. Such an equation seemed to endow the primitives with an inferior mind whereas anthropologists, especially in the United States, were taking pains to fight racism. Furthermore, Freud's extrapolation from individual to collective phenomena went against the sociological assumption that social facts could be explained only by other social facts. c) Freud's evolutionism did not take into account the fact that all human societies had produced unique and valuable cultures.
Conversely, following Boas, more and more anthropologists endeavored to prove that every culture makes individuals psychologically different from those sharing other cultures. Some undertook the study of such phenomenon as adolescence, sexual differences, competition, aggressivity, normality, and Oedipus situations, to show that they were culture-bound. The dissonances between anthropology and psychoanalysis boiled down to one basic difference: Anthropologists, in their effort to demonstrate the importance of social structures and cultural patterns, had been blind to the fact that conflicts and individual differences play an important