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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 27
realisation. This potential contribution has remained just that, partly because of its
invisibility in the face of previous and powerful paradigms. Although it faces major
challenges, this contribution can enable forms of exploration that are significantly
different compared to non-psychoanalytic methodologies.
This project draws on a range of related fields, as it is deliberately located where they
intersect. The study is an anthropological perspective on aspects of the practice of
training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This training takes place in a group context.
This research is, therefore, built on knowledge in psychoanalytic anthropology;
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy; group psychotherapy and group
work; and psychotherapy training.
What has been understood previously, about how to
investigate, and about how clinical practice, and therefore
training for it, work? A review of previous literature and
research
I will now proceed to review the literature in each of the fields that I outlined above.
Taking psychoanalytic anthropology first, Spain notes that,
The first scholarly works in psychoanalytic anthropology – i.e. the first attempts
to use psychoanalysis in the study of culture and the first attempts to use
ethnographic data and anthropological theory to foster the development of
psychoanalytic theory – were not undertaken by an anthropologist. They were
carried out by a psychoanalyst who used his knowledge of myth and other forms
of expressive culture (e.g. sexual beliefs and behaviour, jokes, folktales, beliefs
about the dead) to inform nascent theoretical developments in psychoanalysis:
he also used that newly developed theory in his study of culture. The person who
did this was Sigmund Freud (see in this regard, his ‘The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life’(1901/1960); ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’
(1905b/1960); ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905a/1960); and,
of course, ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913/1950)). (1992, p.4)
Spain highlights something of the multidirectional flow of ideas between
psychoanalysis and anthropology. Notable successors to Freud include Roheim (1925),