Some implications of culture theory for anthropology and psychology.

Abstract

HE relations between anthropology and psychology have an interestingT and curious history. In the first and second decades of this century, psychologists, particularly Freud and the Freudians, borrowed handily from anthropological data for the buttressing of psychiatric theory. Totem and Taboo, which remains the heart of Freudian psychological theory, owes more than most analysts realize to ethnological accounts of the culture of Australian aborigines.In the third decade of the century there was marked reaction on the part of anthropologists against what they felt was the loose use and interpretation of their material by psychologists. The lively controversy between Bronislaw Malinowski and such Freudians as Ernest Jones regarding the oedipus complex belong to this period (1).By the fourth decade, a growing number of psychologists of various schools, and anthropologists as well, concluded that each side had much to learn from the other. The heightened interest in psychological materials, methods and findings is reflected in the writings of such anthropologists as Sapir (2), Mekeel (3), Hallowell (4), Benedict (S), Mead (6), and Linton (7), and the impact of anthropological findings on psychologists is clearly to be discerned during this period in the work of Horney (8) , Glover (9) , Bartlett (lo), Klineberg (ll), Alexander (12), Warden (13), and Erikson ( 14), to name only a few.If the relations between the two disciplines during the last decade were characterized by mutual respect and prevailingly friendly inquiry, the situation during the present decade can be described in terms of interchange and collaboration. We have seen trained psychiatrists such as Dorothea Leighton and Alexander H. Leighton turn increasingly to anthropological field-work and writing (15). We have seen trained anthropologists such as DuBois, Henry and LaBarre acquire considerable psychological training and sophistication. We are familiar with the collaborative efforts of Kardiner and DuBois ( 16), Kardiner and Linton (16), Kluckhohn and Mowrer (17), Leighton and Kluckhohn (18), Schachtel and Henry (19), Thompson and Joseph (20), Chapple and Lindemann (21), and many others.Many may see no reason for retracing this familiar ground. The development may seem to them merely reasonable and inevitable. Two rather young disciplines find, as they broaden their researches, that their interests touch