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This 13th volume of the series, The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, is edited by L. Bryce Boyer and Simon A. Grolnick and is dedicated to Weston LaBarre. The editors have assembled seven essays that follow the approach pioneered by LaBarre, who, for about 50 years pursued a psychoanalytic approach to the study of expressive culture. The essays investigate myth, religion, and folklore, past and present, with a strong oedipal drive and conflict orientation, and they also view environmental-cultural processes as interacting with intrapsychic development.
The volume begins with a detailed list of LaBarre's publications extending from 1938 through 1987. This is followed by a brief biographical sketch of LaBarre by Benjamin Kilborne. Here LaBarre is portrayed as a “pioneer,” a “gadfly,” and a “scholar” who battled against cultural relativism in the human sciences. Instead, LaBarre emphasized a view of universal human nature. He focused on the meanings of the body as a place to live in, the body as the home of inherent drives and as the source of sensations and feelings about our perceptions that provide a basis for common understanding. Borrowing from Freudian theory, LaBarre argued that such uniquely human traits as language, family, and culture, as well as value systems, beliefs, institutions, and obligations, are all rooted in the biology of the human species.
Kilborne tells us that LaBarre viewed the human family as an adaptation to the biological fact of the prolonged dependency of the human infant and child. LaBarre also believed that all human families must accommodate to the universal biosocial facts of the incest taboo and related oedipal conflicts. Thus, while he recognized that the structure of the family is relative