At the May meetings in San Francisco, distinguished anthropologist Melford Spiro will be awarded Honorary Membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association. Spiro's many psychoanalytically informed works are marked by a rare combination of humanistic engagement and empirical rigor. His research on Micronesian culture ; kibbutzim , including issues of childhood and gender formation and culture ; Burmese Buddhist society , including supernaturalism and kinship and marriage ; his brilliant reevaluation of Malinowski's findings ; and such challenging methodological essays as “Whatever Happened to the Id?” reveal him as a scholar who can compellingly integrate psychodynamics with field work and theory building. He is today the single most distinguished advocate of Freud in the field of anthropology.

Spiro's first engagement with psychoanalysis occurred during his graduate work with A. Irving Hallowell, a cultural and personality anthropologist, at Northwestern University. Currently Presidential Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded and heads what is today the leading department of psychological anthropology in the country, Spiro has taught also at Washington University and the Universities of Connecticut, Washington, and Chicago. In 1973 he became the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute's first CORST candidate.

Peter Loewenberg