Psychoanalytic Anthropology

Geza Roheim provides a concise and usable approach to build an anthropology from the psychoanalytic perspective in his The Origin and Function of Culture 1943 and Psychoanalysis and Anthropology 1950. His psychoanalysis isn't quite the same as Freud though. He is in the tradition of the "English school" of object relations of Melanie Klein, who he cites extensively. Object relations focuses on the relationship with the mother early in life as most fundamental to developing people's relationships to others in life, allowing each of us to internalize for ourselves aspects of the world to identify with to meet our needs prior to the development of the Oedipal Complex.

The fundamental assumption of a psychoanalytic anthropology is that the meaning of culture is universal due to the nature of primary psychological processes. Although the manifest content of cultures differ, the reality of our common descent via evolution and necessity of managing psychic energy (id) subject to thermodynamic laws give the same unconscious latent meaning to our actions. Symbols are used and expressed in different ways but can be universally understood because of a shared primary process. Additional assumptions are that biology is relevant to human nature and society though this relationship is dynamic and not a binary opposition of nature and nurture, human nature/society is different from the nature and lives of other animals and so a direct translation of biological explanations is not sufficient, there are differences in gender identity due to our bisexual reproductive biological constitution between males and females though each have aspects of the other, and this sexual difference is within family life the most important source of identity.

Freud if you recall had his own book on anthropology, Totem and Taboo 1913. In that book he laid out his famous "primal horde" theory of the development of the Oedipus Complex. Freud argued that the Oedipal conflict actually happened back in human evolutionary history when humans lived in polygamous groups with an ape-like alpha male who either kicked out, killed, or castrated the other males out of sexual jealousy. One day the male brothers united and castrated, killed, and ate their father to end his tyrannical frustration of their sexual desires. But the brothers felt guilty about murdering their father and substituted the father with religion, originally in the form of totem animals. Only by uniting together for a common purpose and identifying with one another could culture begin, first with a group ego ideal and then a negative superego fueled by aggressive id (guilt). Religion is fundamentally tied to culture by institutionalizing the new identity in a not all-too-human symbolic form. Culture is a formalization, repetition, of human mental processes applied to other people and later to non-human objects. Members of the tribe under the totem creature would be forbidden from killing their totem animal, unless it was a ceremonial collective action, just like the original transgression where by eating the animal they could identify with the father in a cannibalistic way, originating our social practices by a means of collective repetition. In childhood we all recapitulate this historical moment in the Oedipal phase with inherited memory, and learn to resolution in the socially acceptable way. The chapter in which the primal horde is elaborated is called "The Return of Totemism in Childhood."

Essential to the psychoanalytic theory of culture and civilization is the superego. The development of the superego is synonymous with civilization. An important assumption is that humans enter the world as fundamentally narcissists, aware of only their own needs. There is in the womb no distinction between our needs and the needs of the mother. When born we are cared for by others and learn to manipulate at first by our cries to fulfill our needs, while not having to help anybody else. The superego develops from childhood experience with our caregivers, where the ego identifies with some aspects of the caregivers. The superego as it is unique is negative in character.  The superego is different from the ego ideal, self-identity with the parents which is largely positive for us. The superego's power is from an instinctual anxiety and fear of loss, a negative means of preventing deviation of behavior from the ego ideal. The superego gets its power from the id against the ego by channeling aggressive feelings against it, which is what makes its character negative toward the ego. The need to identify with others is because of our separation yet continuing need for them. We have taken others in as a self ideal, but our social existence maintains a conflict to keep us in line. This happens in two major moments; at birth from the mother, and later in the Oedipal stage of sexual differentiation from the opposite sex parent. The first identification is with the now external object, the mother, the latter identification in the Oedipal stage is erotic love of the object in a realistic form of a different person and sexual identification with the same sex to gain the object. Freud asserted the latter as the decisive moment of culture using his primal horde evolutionary explanation. The murder of the father is the greatest crime of human history which can only be resolved by collective rather than individual identification with the father due to an actual phylogenetic event.

Roheim accepts the Oedipal Complex as universal and formative of social identity but disagrees with Freud's reasoning of how it came to be universal. Freud's primal horde was formulated partially with Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics and Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory, the development of the embryo repeats past evolutionary stages, which were already in Freud's time already coming into disuse. For Haeckel, traits shared with earlier stages of evolution are developed earlier in life, in the womb, to allow for traits unique to the species to develop from natural selection, a process called terminal addition. It is true that early characteristics are shared in the development of all embryos, emerging at different times depending on how closely related they are. But natural selection can act on any stage of development and Haeckel's original formulation was that adult traits are recapitulated, whereas the gill pouches in human embryos never develop into functioning gills like they do for fish. We repeat the early shared traits of ancestors but not their entire stage of evolutionary history. Still there is a parallel relationship between the development of the individual and the species in which the past is preserved. We can escape the past, as well as maintain the past at later stages of life in the reverse of strict recapitulation called neoteny which I'll talk about.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck theorized that traits that were inherited were acquired during the life of the individual organism, the famous example being the giraffe's long neck evolving by the stretching of ancestors to higher and higher tree branches. Body parts used more become stronger and are selected for progeny. Lamarck's theory was discredited as knowledge of genetics improved, demonstrating that genetic information in the cell is only changed by copying errors, mutations, not muscular or hormonal activity, though recent research in epigenetics indicates expression of genes may be changed by life experience of the parent. Freud thought he could utilize acquired characteristics for primitive memory traces accompanying our genetic endowment. Reactions to internal psychological needs, not just environmental challenges, could be inherited.

These evolutionary theories are not needed for psychoanalysis which deals with fantasy, but would tie it to biology the way Freud learned it in the 1870s.

Utilizing object relations theory, Roheim bypasses the Oedipal struggle against the father as the basis of society, the superego, and points to early childhood after birth and the mother. It is our prolonged dependency on the mother due to our helplessness at birth that makes human beings unique and enables society. This relationship is the same for both male and female. Following more modern biological opinion than strict recapitulation of ancestral traits or memory as defining childhood development, Roheim uses neoteny, the retention of youthful traits into adulthood, as the factor for social development. Our retardation of development such as being born relatively prematurely and long childhood makes the influence of others very powerful on us. We never get over the infantile fear of being alone and helpless, and so we learn to identify with others and narcissistically express the same desires and fears with others in acceptable ways, to not be ostracized, to get over this trauma.

Neoteny is a powerful explanation for what makes humans unique from other apes. Our flatter faces and big heads are more similar to baby chimps than to adult chimps. Mentally youth is associated with more brain plasticity and curiosity, a greater ability to learn more things. The retardation of development allows our big heads to come out of the mother's womb without burdening her bipedalism, but this means we have to develop prematurely outside of the womb. We only learn to walk after a year whereas horses can get up and go within hours of being born. It takes us nearly twenty years to become adults, and even then we do not escape the influence of our parents.The cost of intelligence is helplessness, the solution to which is dependency.

Humans forever want to relive their infancy as adults. A major conflict for humans is that we develop sexually while still under parental influence before we can live on our own. From infancy we express sexual behavior such as tumescence, pelvic thrusts, and muscular orgasm without ejaculation. Our minds develop under conditions of parental dependency past the time of physical dependency, as do our sexual desires. Sexual expression is frustrated and is molded by our social dependency on others into acceptable outlets, until a later age when reproduction and pair formation are possible. We eventually learn to separate ourselves from the parent for the fulfillment of our needs, and trouble in this leads to neurosis where we continue to relive the past mentally while we mature physically (sexually). Neurosis is a failure of identification with others from our past which precludes us from providing our current needs.

Roheim talks about the body destruction fantasy, a fear of annihilation from helplessness, which is resolved by substituting our own body for the mother as the source of satisfaction of our needs and developing proper social skills to elicit help from other people. This is in effect an earlier occurrence of castration anxiety for males in the Oedipus complex and the beginning of the formation of the superego, identification of the self with aspects of the mother to avoid anxiety. The primal scene which begins the Oedipal stage is a scene of unification of the mother with somebody else, the father. The father remains with the mother because of a similar infantile attachment from his own mother, which is what the Oedipus complex universal. The triad replaces the dyad. Being weaker than the father, the male learns to identify with the father to have his own mother to unite with, to recreate the child-mother dyad by joining the triad as the father. This is when the formation of the superego takes hold for Freud, but the early strong dependent relationship with the mother is what originally fuels this need and engenders hurt feelings from exclusion from the primal scene. A fundamental part of ourselves is being excluded.

Culture originates from all of this via sublimation. Culture is itself a defense against infantile anxiety, a neurosis which brings us together. The difference between "normal" people and neurotics in society is that neurotics isolate themselves from others by not adopting socially accepted forms of wish fulfillment. Society allows us to share our narcissistic desires with the same external expressions.

Examples of Roheim's: The soldier reenacts body destruction and Oedipal conflict, the lawyer engages in struggle between id ego and superego, a scientist is a voyeur of mother nature's secrets, a painter continues to play with feces, and the writer of fiction never renounces daydreams. All sublimation of infantile desires with the comfort of society's approval and protection in place of the parent.

Economics is imbued with the erotic worship of objects by a process of indentification. The first true occupation unique to society is that of the medicine man or shaman. The shaman doesn't have to hunt or gather food all the time and can live out neurotic fantasies more than others who work, and do it for them too. From the medicine man comes the trader who attributes a fetishistic value to objects apart from their original use (Marx commodity fetishism?). The shaman is the first to substitute care of the spirits of others for himself and rend services for others. Agriculture and domestication of animals is itself a repetition of infancy, learning to care for the seedlings and younglings of plants and other animals. This is where we originally get the totemic animals, from a love relationship patterned after our own emotional relationship with the mother.

This maternal explanation seems a far cry away from Freud's Oedipal primal horde where the father plays the leading role. The title of the book is The Origin and Function of Culture, and it would seem the Oedipal moment occurs later in life and phallic gods occur later in human development, after we mature from our prolonged infancy. 

Mother Nature seems more primal and immediate than God the father. Maybe Freud focused too much on Greek myth and the Abrahamic God? The Abrahamic religions do condemn infanticide pretty strongly with an all good male personal deity, whereas the Greek gods are involved in human affairs but not always in beneficial ways. The Greek gods can be seen as a transition to the rule of the patriarchal male who we all are supposed to identify with after we get over our extended infancy. The superego develops more gradually and begins earlier in life with the mother for both sexes.

The Cro Magnons of Europe tens of thousands of years ago did their art deep inside of Mother Earth

Venus of Willendorf, a prehistoric female figurine which is speculated to represent fertility and maybe prehistoric matriarchal religion

The reason for the universality of the Oedipus complex is the continuation of the mother-infant relationship influence into adulthood. It is because the father sticks with the mother. In the vast majority of mammals paternal investment is very little compared to the mother, and males of other species often engage in infanticide against children that aren't theirs, acting selfishly for the propagation of their genes. Adopted children are even today far more likely to be abused than if they lived with their biological parents. A major achievement of the human race is getting males to invest in their children and the mother, and eventually to non-kin, society as a whole. Getting males to fork over their wealth to the state in taxes. Taking care of children is costly and the male only invests their sperm toward reproduction, giving less of an incentive to care for the child compared to the mother.

Greater paternal investment had to begin with object love, but not initially for the children. Males stay with the mother after the birth of the child because of their own infantile attachment developed from their own mother, but in this case capable of erotic expression with someone else. This seems more of a result of culture than the origin of it. Paternal care is a reaction formation; instead of killing the offspring the father in some way identifies with them as wanting the mother's love, which would include not killing her babies. The lingering result of delayed development and dependency. On the child's part sexual feelings develop under dependency, and in the adult infantile feelings remain after dependency. Not only are hurt feelings in the child, but also from the adult male's past which would encourage paternal involvement. The primal scene, the triadic sexual union of mother and father, is the reason for the push for monogamy for most humans over history. If the father didn't hang around due to a strong emotional attachment, there wouldn't be an Oedipal conflict. The moral superego wouldn't develop further into phallic sky-God religion, creating a moral revolution, without this male influence on identification.

Phylogeny seems to recapitulate ontogeny, to reverse Haeckel's phrase. The development of human culture repeats the early dyadic child-mother maternally driven relationship first and later on starts repeating the Oedipal triadic son-mother-father paternally driven relationship. We only "progress" as societies when we get over our long period of dependency and express later relationships in our culture. The early maternal relationship remains very powerful for us humans. For Haeckel, as mentioned earlier, traits shared with earlier stages of evolution are developed earlier in life, in the womb, to allow for traits unique to the species to develop, via terminal addition. Humans have managed to reverse this process when it comes to infancy and have difficulty growing beyond it to become more specialized, as other species do in their environments under natural selection. We are spared the reality principle, the struggle for survival, for a long period. This is the cost of our intelligence and sociality, our dynamism.

The Oedipal moment in history if it did happen the way Freud described was prompted by a love for the mother as much as a hatred of the father for frustrating sexual desires at the end of a process of neotenization. The attachment early in life from a long period of dependency is possibly what helped humans to move away from the polygamous social structure of ape society. The father's exclusive sexual access would've engendered more hurt feelings with the growth of this attachment, and encourage monogamy with future mates. This explanation works with the "hunter hypothesis" of Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, that the transition from ape to man occurred because males had to learn to cooperate to hunt big game once we left the security and sustenance provided by the trees. Having an alpha male with an exclusive harem of females would create hurt feelings amongst the hunter men who developed an attachment to their own mothers during prolonged infancy, which also enabled them to have the brain to develop tools and communicate. Any male who brought back this deep anxiety would be met with the force of cooperating males with weapons, all enabled by maternal dependency relationship. A more monogamous society would guarantee a payoff for the renunciation of aggressive instinct by the males that cooperation requires. That is what brought an end to the primal horde.

Unique aspects of human culture such as paternal investment, monogamous pair bonds, social cooperation and condemnation, shared phantasy life, and religion all begin with the prolonged dependency of the child and the mother. The universal Oedipal Complex occurs later in human development when the father relationship becomes more important, itself due to mother-infant tie, to individual development and conflict for males. This pushes superego development further with aspects of the father, and eventually becomes projected onto non-human animals, objects, and eventually nature itself due to various resolutions of the Oedipal Complex. It is after all this that economic/technological explanations such as those of Friedrich Engels become important (after the control of fire).