This brief volume by William Manson recreates the excitement of a long-term flirtation between psychoanalytic thinking and anthropology that never quite resulted in a marriage.

Using Abram Kardiner as a central figure, this book recalls vividly to the reader those halcyon days when anthropology and psychoanalysis came so deliciously close, long before catacholamines and mapping the genome burst that bubble. Kardiner is chosen well as a central figure because he was one of the very few who had his foot solidly in each camp. In contrast, Mararet Mead was clearly an anthropologist and boasted that she had never been analyzed; Ralph Linton was definitely in anthropology; and only Geza Róheim embraced psychoanalysis so completely that despite being an anthropologist he seemed to be a total Freudian.