Robert A. Paul

On “The Optimal Structure for Psychoanalytic Education”: Commentary On Wallerstein

I very much applaud Robert Wallerstein’s attempt to formulate the concept of a “psychoanalytic center” as a model for the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the contemporary American environment. His vision of how institutes ought to become more closely linked with other entities, including the public at large, the community of psychotherapists who are not analysts, and the university community, is very much one that I agree with and endorse. I think this sort of center would encourage the optimal flourishing of psychoanalysis in its administrative and training aspects, and also provide the healthiest environment for the intellectual growth and development of the field. Moreover, as Wallerstein can cite a number of institutions that already meet most or all of the criteria he lays out for his model (with Philadelphia as the exemplar), it is clearly feasible at some level. The question remains, however, whether this model could or should become the norm, and whether its feasibility is sustainable. The question of feasibility can be broken down into a number of component issues. The first would be whether the proposed structure is organizationally sound and coherent in principle. On that score, I think the answer is yes. More trouble comes with other dimensions of feasibility: for example, is the model realizable given the attitudes and convictions of the institutes and their would-be partners? It is clear that it is in one sense perfectly feasible for analysis to prosper in close connection with medical school departments of psychiatry, as ja p a

Cultural narratives and the succession scenario: Slumdog Millionaire and other popular films and fictions

An approach to the analysis of cultural narratives is proposed drawing inspiration from Lévi‐Strauss’s analysis of myths as fantasied resolutions of conflicts and contradictions in culture and of typical dilemmas of human life. An example of such an analysis revolves around contradictions in the Western cultural construction of the succession of generations. The logic of the structural analysis of cultural representations is explicated, the schema of the succession scenario is laid out, and the conflicts that generate it are identified. The movie Slumdog Millionaire is examined in some detail as an illustration of the succession scenario at work, and a comparative analysis shows how the same underlying schema accounts for otherwise obscure aspects of comparable contemporary popular narratives including Harry Potter, The Lion King and Star Wars.

Incest Avoidance: Oedipal and Preoedipal, Natural and Cultural

Why do most people experience a subjective aversion to the idea of incestuous sexual relations? To help answer this question, recent strands of thinking in both cultural and evolutionary anthropology are considered together with psychoanalytic theories regarding incest avoidance. Coevolutionary theories that propose ways to think about genetic and cultural inheritance as partially independent of each other, evolutionary arguments about the reproductive advantages of incest avoidance, structuralist theory arguing for a kind of incest aversion unrelated to any possible Darwinian selective advantage, and other trends in biosocial research into the origins of the incest avoidance are considered. Finally, a synthesis is proposed that seeks to expand our understanding of the oedipal and preoedipal dynamics of the aversion as these are conceptualized in psychoanalytic theory.

Constructing and deconstructing woman's power

Constructing and Deconstructing Womans Power explores power and gender issues from a variety of psychoanalytic, as well as social, cultural and philosophical perspectives. The first three papers examine the complex notion of external and internal glass ceiling brought to life by clear and illustrative clinical vignettes. The creation of life, a uniquely female power, is subsequently considered in two fascinating papers exploring motherhood and the conflicts it brings. The development and expression of feminine creativity more generally is further examined in two unique studies. The final three essays address mens relation to women and their power.

Sons or Sonnets

The contrast between nature and culture, decisively introduced into anthropological discourse by Lévi-Strauss half a century ago (1969[1949]), has suffered from a lack of clear and unambiguous definition and as a result has fallen into desuetude. My aim in this paper is to rectify the situation by offering a precise formulation that I think has far-reaching implications for the understanding of human social life. In this formulation, the excessively vague terms “nature” and “culture” are replaced by the two means by which human beings may surpass and reproduce themselves—the genetic channel and the cultural channel. These terms have the advantage that they can be distinguished quite precisely and their elementary unit can in turn be specified—in the one case the gene, in the other the sign or symbol. I will assert that it is a useful tactic to conceptualize the human world as the intersection of just three elementary components: people, genes, and signs, no one of which may be dispensed with or reduced to the status of epiphenomenon of another. My strategy will be to begin with a reading of the first 19 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. My choice is determined by the circumstance that these poems concern themselves almost exclusively with a debate about the relative merits of sexual reproduction and poetry—a symbolic, cultural production—as avenues to immortality. An analysis of this Shakespearean expression of the “nature/culture” dilemma leads me to a theoretical consideration of the intertwined destinies of people, genes, and signs. I shall argue that an anthropology that does justice to human life must pay equal attention to all three in producing what Bruno Latour refers to as networks, conceptual “hybrids” that seem to confuse the categories of natural science, cultural and social analysis, and individual agency. It will be recognized that many contemporary schools of thought try to privilege one of the fun-

Bettelheim’s Contribution to Anthropology

BETTELHEIM’S UNMASKING OF MALE’S WOMB ENVY is as fundamentally profound to our society as Freud’s presentation of female penis envy. Yet Bettelheim’s discovery has met with resounding silence in our psychoanalytic community, and a few tut-tuts or titters in the anthropological community. Paul sets the intellectual record straight by demonstrating that the ethnographic data following Bettelheim’s book confirms it—a rare opportunity in the social sciences.

The Oedipus complex in cultural anthropology today

Spiro, Melford E. Oedipus in the Trobriands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. xii + 200 pp. including references and index.

The Place of the Truth in Sherpa Law and Religion

8.00 paper.

Culture from the Perspective of Dual Inheritance

Concepts of guilt and conflict resolution differ in part because of different cultural conceptions about the ontological status of events. Within Sherpa culture there are several different systems at work, some of which view events of the world as objective facts and some of which define them as illusory ephemera. The article gives examples of these, and examines what happens when they come into conflict.

An evolutionary study of culture that is actually evolutionary

This chapter presents a brief outline of the version of Dual Inheritance Theory developed at greater length in the author’s 2015 book, Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Society. Accordingly, that which distinguishes humans from other social animals is a second form of trans-generational information transmission besides the genetic one, namely culture as it exists as symbolic codes external to the organisms who compose the society. While the genetic channel of inheritance is determined by the principles of inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism, which limit the capacity of most or possibly all other animals to form large and complex societies, the human symbolic channel serves to complement and also to override the selfishness inherent in the genetic program and to create rules for marital exchange that allow identifications to go beyond closely related others, enabling individuals to affiliate with unrelated others in a prosocial way. Cultural symbolic codes thus allow human societies to create a generalized public arena, which is distinctive of our species. Some ethnographic examples of this are provided. The chapter concludes with a formulation of how culture, society, and individuals interact in human life.