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The personality-and-culture movement in the social sciences (actually a borderline discipline between psychoanalytic psychology and cultural anthropology) is an excellent example of the “integration” of these two disciplines by means of a forced philosophical shift in psychoanalytic philosophy and its consequences. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was an irresistible attraction between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Beginning with the Malinowski-Jones (and later the Malinowski-Róheim) disputes over the universality of the Oedipus complex—actually related to the argument over regularities in development and the idea of the psychic unity of man—psychoanalysis was given a very conditional and ambivalent reception in anthropology. This ambivalence was characterized by the exclusion of certain basic psychoanalytic postulates and resulted in a number of popularized yet seminally influential works in anthropology. Among these were Ruth Benedict's (1934) highly influential Patterns of Culture, which offered neopsychoanalytic explanations of how different cultures accommodated deviant personalities. In a similar vein were Margaret Mead's well-publicized personality-and-culture analyses of the South Pacific cultures in which she went to great pains to stress the absence of maturational regularities; for example, adolescence is not always a time of stress, children are not necessarily more imaginative than adults, women are not necessarily more passive than men.
But what was it that brought about the reconciliation of cultural anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis as seen in the personality-and-culture movement? Almost without exception, the major anthropologists involved in the movement “accepted” the psychoanalytic