Introduction

The contributions of culture to the understanding of the inner world—to the deeper forms of subjectivity and creativity long considered the province of psychoanalysis and outside anthropology—are at the heart of this special issue. The editors themselves, two anthropologists and a psychoanalyst, together with the anthropological contributors, have sought a means of studying special creative processes that lie outside of conscious awareness but are vital to the production of culture. We are aware of the difficulties and complexities attendant upon the issues, issues that have been long discussed in the history of the relationship between these two fields (Herdt & Stoller, 1990; Obeysekere, 1991).

For more than half a century, psychoanalysis has had to withstand attacks — as well as friendly criticism — from what we might call the “right” field, that is, from scholars concerned with its alleged mythic approaches and deviations from a scientific, logical-empiricist model. Anthropology has had a similar history, both disciplines being enduringly affected by what Suzanne Langer (1942) has called the age of symbols, with its heavy reliance on the still growing disciplines of hermeneutics and semiotics. But now that logical positivism is dead, structuralism middleaged, and postmodernism in its adolescence — now new criticisms are coming from what Barratt (1988, 1993) calls the “left” field.

This discussion has a history. In a 1982 symposium held at the School of American Research, a discussion of bricolage in the construction of myths and dreams led to the question of whether Freud's postulated “primary process” thinking could be purged of its connotation of psychological primitivity to allow for the complexity of metaphoric and imagistic thought in art, myth, and dreaming (see Tedlock, 1987, for the published papers). Or would the whole