Culture, Subject, Psyche: Dialogues in Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. By Anthony Molino, ed. London:  Whurr, 2004..

Social and cultural anthropologists have a long history of dismissing psychological accounts of social life, and psychoanalytic approaches in particular. In tandem with this attitude, they have tended to misrepresent many aspects of psychoanalysis; most notably, they have all too often equated psychoanalysis with “classical” Freudian theories and practices, thereby ignoring the wide range of post-Freudian theoretical and methodological developments. Yet the cultural interpretations put forward by even the most resolutely anti-psychological post-Geertzian anthropologists seem to unwittingly invite (even to require) supplementation by some kind of psychodynamic analysis. A new book edited by Anthony Molino, Culture, Subject and Psyche: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, attempts to rectify these distortions and omissions by demonstrating that contemporary psychoanalysis offers some sophisticated theories and techniques for exploring fundamental aspects of social life such as subjectivity, motivation, and psychic conflict.

The book is a collection of interviews with prominent social researchers who draw upon and engage with psychoanalytic theories and methods in a variety of ways. Molino has chosen his interview subjects carefully and thoughtfully. Vincent Crapanzano, Katharine Ewing, and Gananath Obeyesekere, who are all psychoanalytic anthropologists, are three of the most intellectually astute, open-minded and influential figures in the field, and I found their interviews to be very rich and fascinating to read. I am less familiar with the writing of the other four subjects—anthropologists Kathleen Stewart and Marc Auge, social theorist Michael Rustin, and psychoanalyst-anthropologist Paul Williams— but those interviews, too, offer stimulating perspectives on the interface of individual subjectivity and social life. Molino is a skilled and knowledgeable interlocutor, and clearly his subjects appreciate his questions and feel he is asking the “right” ones.