Culture on the Couch. Dialogues of Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

Nowadays, when all of humanity, faced with the ever-growing COVID-19 pandemic, has isolated itself in their houses awaiting the development of a vaccine, the importance of culture cannot be ignored or downplayed. After strong interest and many works of Freud on the analysis of culture there was a rich period of researches on the collective dimension of the unconscious, which enriched psychoanalysis and social sciences in general with new ideas, methods and directions. After Freud, his followers concentrated mainly on the intrapsychic processes of human development and existence, gradually ceasing to pay attention to the sociocultural context. This area of the unconscious became an object of study of new disciplines, such as cultural psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic anthropology, ethnopsychoanalysis, etc., born from the interest in each other - psychoanalysis and anthropology. This study explores the prerequisites, causes and effects of the impossibility of using the collective pole of the unconscious in psychoanalytic, anthropological and many other scientific studies, along with the intrapsychic pole. The paper also discusses possible ways of returning, introduced by Freud in the work “Totem and Taboo” of the collective dimension of the unconscious into psychoanalytic and scientific discourse, and in addition, into the field of researches, which is the purpose of this study. The object of this study is a human, his intrapsychic and sociocultural existence. The subject of the study is culture in the changing ideas and concepts of psychoanalysis and anthropology, as well as in the interaction and dialogues of these two corps of human knowledge. The work explores the interdisciplinary relations of psychoanalysis and anthropology, as an example and grounding of each other's theses on the development of human and society. The objective of this work is an attempt to find a way of cooperation and mutual enrichment, that needed by modern science, in which Freud believed, but also by psychoanalysis in particular and the entire human society, constantly balancing on the verge of military, environmental and humanitarian disasters.