Influence, as the literary critic, Harold Bloom, argued in his book, The Anxiety of Influence, is usually no simple matter of the wholesale incorporation of the thought of a precursor by a follower. On the contrary, as a Freudian perspective would indeed require, the influence of a strong precursor of the stature and power of Freud would necessarily involve creative misreadings on the part of the followers, who would display the marks of the influence of the strong precursor even as they wrestled with, reinterpreted, or attempted to reject that very influence.
Taking that as a given, it is probably not an exaggeration to say Sigmund Freud's influence has been greater in the field of anthropology than in any other academic discipline—perhaps even including psychology (except insofar as the whole of that latter discipline can be seen as a concerted attempt to deny that Freud ever existed). Freud's deconstruction of the sovereign subject of the Enlightenment, his thoroughgoing critique of the objective observer, of “the Transcendental Ego,” of the conscious self supposedly transparent to itself, had a parallel in the decentering of the Eurocentric perspective effected by the radical cultural relativism that was the central intellectual and ethical premise of founders of 20th century anthropology. For figures such as Franz Boas and Emile Durkheim, who set modern anthropology on its course as a discipline, the recognition of the validity of great varieties of coherent lived worlds beyond the borders of the West served as the opening of a horizon in space just as the Freudian revolution revealed a vast unexplored psychic domain beyond the boundaries of consciousness and “reason.” At the same time, the spirit of bohemian rebellion, of the critique of bourgeois society, and of being an outsider even in one's own culture characterized many who were captivated by both psychoanalysis and anthropology and linked them in a common but uneasily yoked enterprise.
A list of those eminent anthropologists throughout the 20th century who were explicitly influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis reads like a roll call of the titans of the field. There were, of course, those figures who, by virtue of being trained in, or at least practicing, both disciplines established a subfield of “psychoanalytic anthropology,” (while at the same time ensuring for themselves a somewhat marginal place in both disciplines). I have in mind such figures as Geza Roheim, Georges Devereux, Abram Kardiner, L. Bryce Boyer, and others, as well as Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm, who, as psychoanalysts, deeply immersed themselves in the study of culture. But even within the mainstream of 20th century anthropology, one has only to think of Rivers, Malinowski, Meyer Fortes, and Victor Turner in Britain, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Clyde Kluckhohn, A. I. Hallowell, Weston LaBarre, and many others in America, and Claude Levi-Strauss in France to be convinced that, whether they agreed with him or not, the thinkers who framed the theoretical course of modern anthropology took Freud seriously enough to wrestle with him in original and intellectually exciting ways. Clifford Geertz, too, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the last several decades, was certainly deeply engaged with and influenced by Freud, even though it may not be explicitly obvious: He did not name his most important book The Interpretation of Cultures for no reason.
One can also turn in the present connection to those social theorists who, while not anthropologists, contributed concepts that entered into the intellectual discourse of anthropology at various stages of its development. The Frankfurt School in Germany included figures as disparate as Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse, all of whom incorporated psychoanalytic ideas into their work to a great or lesser extent, and all of whom have, at one point or another, been important in shaping anthropological theory. In France, Freud has always been taken seriously as one of the great thinkers in the Western canon. Not only did Sartre wrestle famously with him, but more importantly for anthropology, the structuralists and post-structuralists, including not only Levi-Strauss but also Derrida,
Robert A. Paul, Ph.D., whose doctoral degree is in cultural anthropology, is currently dean of Emory College. He also holds an appointment as associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Emory and maintains a private clinical practice in Atlanta.
Foucault, and, of course, Lacan, who played such a crucial role in the construction of contemporary cultural theorizing in many arenas, including anthropology, always regarded Freud as a major figure to be reckoned with. In America, some of the most important social theorists of the middle part of the century, including Robert Merton and especially Talcott Parsons, under whose tutelage so many of the leading anthropologists of the subsequent generation were trained, were very explicit in their debt to Freud and psychoanalysis.
The idea of “Culture” was anthropology's great contribution to the intellectual life of the 20th century, just as the “Unconscious” was that of psychoanalysis. Cultural theory helped form and then dominate the rather extreme environmentalism and emphasis on learning, social experience, and external influences in the formation of human life, personality, and society that prevailed in various forms, including behaviorism and social psychology, through much of the century.
Moreover, despite the apparent waning influence of psychoanalytic thought one must bear in mind that the most recent wave of feminist theory, which had a profoundly transformative effect on contemporary anthropology, was deeply engaged with and influenced by psychoanalytic thinking. Among its most important voices have been those of analysts, such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and many others who either were analysts or were immersed in a struggle with analytic thought. The same goes for post-colonial theorists, from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhaba, whose works rely heavily on psychoanalysis and whose influence continues to ramify throughout contemporary cultural anthropology and the newer field of cultural studies, from which cultural anthropology daily becomes less distinguishable. One may add the unclassifiable Slavoj Zizek to round out the list of social thinkers and cultural critics whose positions are deeply inflected by the aftereffects of Freud's paradigm-shifting ideas and who themselves shape the thinking of today's cultural theorists in anthropology and outside it.
The “postmodern” turn in contemporary anthropological thought, which involves a distrust of the authority of the “objective” ethnographic observer, exposes the power asymmetry inherent in the ethnographic situation. This places a great emphasis on the uncertainties inherent in writing itself, and seeks to further challenge the privilege of the Western observer in favor of dialogue with the Other that transforms (at the same time as it reflects the presence of) the ethnographer. There is a parallel in the recent shift in emphasis in American psychoanalysis to a more inter-subjective stance; the self-certainty of the analyst's perspective is placed on the same shifting footing as that of the analysand, and the counter-transference ranks as high in importance as does the transference. Thus, while the current importance of many of the figures to whom I have alluded has already waned in the contemporary intellectual milieu, anthropology and psychoanalysis, in continuing to develop in ways that reflect each other, rely on further extensions of implications, hints, challenges, and critiques already to some degree inherent in Freud's thought, though not fully developed by him. Nor would the current thinkers have been able to achieve their original vision if these great forbears who have carried forward the spirit embedded in Freud's writings had not prepared the way for them.
So far I have been talking about cultural anthropology as if it were the whole of our field, but, of course, it is not. The idea of “Culture” was anthropology's great contribution to the intellectual life of the 20th century, just as the “Unconscious” was that of psychoanalysis. Cultural theory helped form and then dominate the rather extreme environmentalism and emphasis on learning, social experience, and external influences in the formation of human life, personality, and society that prevailed in various forms, including behaviorism and social psychology, through much of the century. This trend helped fuel the transformations of psychoanalytic theory that began with the work of the so-called culturalists who, directly responding to the influence of cultural theory in anthropology, stressed the importance of social relationships and enculturation at the expense of the emphasis on the drives and on the biological grounding associated with Freud's metapsychology.
But if culture was the key anthropological concept for much of its history as a discipline, that position was challenged more and more aggressively through the latter half of the century by the revitalization of the theory of evolution. Long cast into the shadows by its association with such unpopular ideas as eugenics, social Darwinism, and racism, biological explanations for human behavior came into their own again, beginning with the important revisions of William Hamilton in the '60s that led to the development of the fields of sociobiology and then of evolutionary psychology, both of which rested squarely on neo-Darwinian evolutionary concepts. Hamilton's ideas about kin selection and inclusive fitness made it possible to rethink social and group phenomena, as well as psychological concepts, from a point of view that assumed: first, that innate behavioral programs had been written into the human genome by natural selection during the long period during which we, Homo sapiens sapiens and our immediate ancestors lived as hunting and foraging bands; and, second, that these behaviors reflected the same pressures to survive, compete, and reproduce exhibited by the behavior of any other species, social or not.
Freud was, of course, a Darwinian himself, and his theories are very often grounded in biological concepts. While he lived before neo-Darwinism took its contemporary form, he saw the importance of looking to the body and its evolved dispositions and drives in explaining the goals and motives people pursue. Indeed it was just this aspect of his thought that the culturalists, along with many object relations theorists and others, tried to eliminate or replace in psychoanalytic theory. His attempt, for example, to derive the propensity for the Oedipus complex in humans from an evolutionary past, while certainly very much dated in its details, is quite in the spirit of the contemporary evolutionary perspective.
While only a few contemporary evolutionary anthropological thinkers, such as Robin Fox (in his book, The Red Lamp of Incest), have been receptive to Freud's ideas, or at least willing to admit it, nonetheless Freud's influence and still more his affinity for this strain of thinking is as important to note as has been his impact on cultural anthropology. As evolutionary and biological thinkers find less and less in common with cultural thinkers, in both anthropology and psychoanalysis—to the extent that several prominent anthropology departments have recently divided into two separate departments over the cultural/biological divide—Freud stands as a model of a thinker who was able to move comfortably and productively over and between both domains. To my mind, the most important task confronting the human sciences at this moment is the integration of these two great overarching paradigms, and there is still much to be learned from Freud in this regard.
There are so many dimensions to Freud's protean creativity that it is not possible to narrowly delimit his influence on the practice of anthropologists throughout the 20th century. From those who seek a biological, neurological, or evolutionary grounding for the particularities and universals of human life and behavior, to those who look for childhood determinants of adult cultural phenomena, to those who interest themselves in the transference/countertransference relationship in ethnography or engage in dialogical mutual explorations of individual others in the ethnographic context; from those who derive cultural formations such as myths and rituals from psychodynamic factors to those who revel in the interpretations of symbolism in myth and folklore from a “Freudian” viewpoint—all, as different as each is, are following one particular line of thought and exploration laid down in the enduring legacy of one seminal thinker whose sesquicentennial year we have the honor of recognizing.