903

THE IMPACT OF FREUD ON

ANTHROPOLOGY*
CLYDE K. KLUCKHOHN, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

aLTHOUGH psychoanalysts turned their attention to an-

thropological data as early as the first decade of the
21A ENineteenth Century, psychoanalysis has had a serious in-
E J Hqwfluence
upon anthropology for only (roughly) the past
twenty years. The first reactions of anthropologists were
largely negative.** Indeed, to this day the impact outside the English-
speaking world has been either casual or negative or both.t British inter-
est in psychoanalysis was relatively early because of a psychologist
turned anthropologist (W. H. R. Rivers) and a physician turned an-
thropologist (C. G. Seligman). The latter interested Malinowski before
Malinowski did his famous field work among the Trobriand Islanders,
and the result was Malinowski's well-known attempt to refute the uni-
versality of the Oedipus Complex.
The publication of Totem and Taboo made cultural anthropologists
aware-even if unfavorably aware-of psychoanalysis. Circumstances
were not propitious. In France, Germany and the United States an-
thropology was at this time-to varying degree and for varying reasons
-resolutely anti-psychological. Such psychological interest as remained
active in anthropology at this time was found among the epigoni of the
British evolutionary school. And these anthropologists were too intel-
lectualistic to be prepared to understand or accept the depth approach
of Freud. They were concerned only to "psychologize" in a half-
hearted, mentalistic sort of way about ethnological data. In the second
place, Totem and Tabu was calculated to irritate the most sensitive
tissues of the anthropological body at this particular point. For anthro-
* Presented at A Meeting in Commemoration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Sigmund
Freud, held at The New York Academy of Medicine, April 20, 1956.
**So far as the United States for the period before 1942 is concerned, detailed documentation for
this and for statements that follow will be found in Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Influence of
Psychiatry on Anthropology in America during the Past One Hundred Years." In: One Hundred
Years of American Psychietry, 1944. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 569-617.
t Geza Roheim is not a valid exception because his fundamental outlook was that of a psycho-
analyst rather than that of an anthropologist. There are, of course, a few genuine exceptions to
this generalization. See, e.g., E. S. van Kloosterhuis, Freud als Ethnoloog (Amsterdam, 1933).

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K. KLUCKHOHN
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pology was dominantly oriented to history as well as away from psy-

chology. And Totem and Taboo struck anthropologists as outrageously
speculative, psychologistic history. Moreover, Freud drew primarily
upon authors (such as Sir James Frazer and Robertson-Smith) whose
methods had been rejected by the anthropological profession before
Totem and Taboo reached it. If Freud had only relied for his anthro-
pology upon his age-mate, Franz Boas, the results of the first significant
impact of psychoanalysis might have been altogether different!
Totem and Taboo may be-I am certain that in some respects it surely
is-profound psychology. But as history it can hardly be taken seriously
as other than metaphorical history. As Freud himself remarked in reply
to the criticisms of the anthropologist, A. L. Kroeber, Totem and Taboo
is a "Just So" story. Boas-then the unchallenged pontiff of American
anthropology-observed in I920 that the origins of such phenomena as
totemism are exceedingly complex and subject to influences from the
total historical process that cannot be simply equated with the forces
that control the psychology of the individual. Boas' criticisms were
largely general and methodological, but those of Kroeber were exceed-
ingly specific and detailed. He listed ten major factual and logical ob-
jections, most of which would require only minor editorial revisions
after the lapse of 37 years. Other anthropological criticisms (e.g., those
of Morris Opler and Margaret Mead) have been equally explicit and
detailed. Freud himself in Moses and Monotheism took account of these
objections at least to the extent of speaking of such things as the revolt
of the tribal sons against the father not as a unique and specific his-
torical event, but rather as "typical" and as "occurring again and again
over thousands of years." It is therefore the more astonishing to read in
Volume Two (p. 360) of Ernest Jones' great life of Freud:
I have, however, not come across any of their [anthro-
pological] criticisms that contained serious arguments; mere
expressions of disbelief seemed as adequate to them as similar
expressions seemed to psychologists when Freud published his
Interpretation of Dreams.
How did it happen that, in spite of these somewhat unfortunate be-
ginnings, Freud has had his tremendous impact upon anthropology-at
any rate in the United States during the last two decades? I believe there
are two principal reasons-one mainly intellectual, the other more ex-
periential and personal.

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 THE IMPACT OF FREUD ON ANTHROPOLOGY 9 05
Because of developments that occurred largely within American
anthropology itself, anthropologists came more and more to feel the
need for a usable psychology. We found-and this remains largely true
to the present day-very little in academic psychology that seemed
serviceable. But such psychoanalytic concepts as "ambivalence" did help
us to understand hitherto puzzling phenomena of death beliefs and prac-
tices; "projection" certainly illuminated witchcraft anxieties; some
similarities between compulsion neuroses and ritual activities were too
unmistakable to be denied' One could give many more examples.
Moreover, there were the experiential factors that drew the psycho-
analysts and the anthropologists together. Psychiatrists of all persuasions
were showing that there was meaning in the most apparently chaotic
and nonadaptive acts of the mentally ill. This struck an answering chord
for the anthropologist, for he was engaged in demonstrating the fact
that the seemingly bizarre patterns of non-Western cultures performed
the same basic functions as did our familiar customs. The same amnesty
that the psychoanalyst grants to incestuous dreams the anthropologist
had learned to accede to strange customs. That is, both insisted that even
"weird" behavior had significance in the economy of the individual or
of the culture. There is also the circumstance that psychoanalysis de-
veloped and used a series of concepts (phantasy, libido, the unconscious,
identification, projection) that applied specifically to hunlan beings and
which anthropologists found useful toward a better understanding of
religion, art, and other symbolic phenomena. The main concepts of
learning theory (drive, response, cue, and reinforcement), on the other
hand, applied to animals at least as much as to humans. This is a great
advantage for comparative psychology, but is too limited a repertoire
for the phenomena with which anthropologists have to deal.
The dominant experience of cultural anthropologists had been as
"unscientific"-in the narrow sense of that term-as that of psycho-
analysts. Both groups operate with procedures that are essentially
"clinical." Ordinarily the anthropologist working under field conditions
has as little chance to do controlled experiments as has the psycho-
analyst who sees his patient for an hour a day in the consulting room.
The skilled of both professions do make predictions of a crude order
and test them by subsequent observation. But these observations do not
lend themselves to presentation in neat graphs nor to "t" tests. Indeed,
both groups would maintain, without disparaging the indispensable im-

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 9 o6 906 C. K. KLUCKHOHN
C. K.
KLUCKHOHN~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
portance of statistics for other purposes, that some of their main prob-
lems involve matters of form, position, and arrangement more than the
incidence and clusterings of atomized variations. Probably in all culture,
as well as in that aspect known as linguistics, the crucial issue is not that
of size or frequency but of what point in what pattern. One may com-
pare the principle of the circle, which does not depend upon measure-
ment as such but upon a fixed patterning, even though measurements
are necessary to draw any particular circle to specification. This particu-
lar pattern may be generalized in an equation, but the form of the circle
can be recognized by those who are ignorant of the equation.
And so the anthropologist, however skeptical he may be of certain
psychoanalytical dogmas, tends to feel in some measure at home in psy-
choanalytic psychology. He recognizes that there are certain similarities
in the problems that confront him in describing and interpreting a cul-
ture and those met by a psychoanalyst in diagnosing a personality: the
relationship between forms and meanings, between content and or-
ganization, between stability and change. It must also be freely recog-
nized that psychoanalysis and much of cultural anthropology suffer
from some similar defects and limitations.
Finally, let me try to sum up briefly and schematically what appear
to me to have been the principal results of the impact of Freud upon
anthropology thus far. First, psychoanalysis has enabled many anthro-
pologists to gain a better understanding of and control over their
principal instruments-themselves. A sizable number of American an-
thropologists have had didactic analyses. A fair number have even done
control analyses. Second, cultural anthropologists, including those who
have had no personal relationship to psychoanalysis beyond reading,
now make as a routine matter certain observations and enquiries in
field work that earlier were made but seldom or much less intensively.
Boas (on non-psychoanalytic grounds) had emphasized the propriety of
taking the individual as a subject of anthropological investigation. But
detailed studies of the behavior of children, careful recording of dreams
and free associations to them, the use of projective instruments-all these
and other procedures came into anthropology directly or indirectly
from psychoanalysis.
Third, there have been important collaborations in empirical and
theoretical research. One may instance the Kardiner-Linton and Kardi-
ner-DuBois undertakings. Fourth-and possibly in the long run the most

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 THE IMPACT OF FREUD ON ANTHROPOLOGY 9 07

significant of all-psychoanalysis has redirected the attention of anthro-

pologists to the universals in culture and away from exclusive concen-
tration upon cultural differences. Freud saw with beautiful clarity the
consequences of such universals as the helplessness and dependency of
infants, the influence of both* parents upon super-ego formation, the
similarities in human anatomy and physiology the world over, and other
inescapable "givens" of human life, regardless of culture. Situations
making for the affection of one or both parents, for sibling rivalry, can
to some extent be channeled this way or that by a culture, but they
cannot be eliminated since the nuclear family is in one form or another
a pan-human universal. A specific case of cultural universals upon which
some of the British psychoanalysts (Fluegel, Money-Kyrle, Dicks) have
written interestingly in late years is that of universal values or ethical
norms.
Permit me to conclude with a slight paraphrase from Kroeber's
Totem and Taboo in Retrospect (1939):
We anthropologists, though by no means completely con-
verted to Freudian orthodoxy in every detail, nevertheless have
met Freud, recognize the encounter as memorable, and herewith
re-salute him.

One might add that bi-parental reproduction of the super-ego is as useful in promoting adaptive
variability as is bi-sexual biological reproduction.

December 1956, Vol. 32, No. 12