Haim Bresheeth is Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. A filmmaker, photographer and a film studies scholar, he was on the Editorial Board of the Journal Khamsin for many years until its demise in 1991. He has published widely in Hebrew and English on Palestinian and Israeli film, and is currently working on the representation of the other and stranger i…

As a way of responding to the ongoing, pervasive critiques of Freudian theory that issue forth from the neuro- and cognitive sciences, the author revisits excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams to insist, to the contrary, on the undying relevance of Freud. He makes the case that, in a hedonistic and permissive society such as our own, the value of psychoanalysis lies precisely in its emphasis on the notion of limit: on the fact that pleasure can ultimately and authentically only be secured through acts of transgression and disobedience that defy a prohibition. Moreover, in exploring famed dreams like that of Irma’s injection, he argues against a simplistic understanding of wish-fulfillment by contrasting elements of the Real with others pertaining to external or social “reality”. This exercise allows him to conclude: “what appears in the guise of dreaming… is sometimes the hidden truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.”

This special issue of JEP, edited by Anthony Molino and myself, is dedicated to current relationships between psychoanalysis and culture, understood in its broadest possible sense. We have collected important contributions by authors who, from different perspectives, have taken on the suggestive but not easy task of articulating relations of a new kind between anthropological research and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Other essays address the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture, again from the kind of broad perspective that makes room for the study of those human forms of expressions we call cinema, religion, and social behavior.

Summary: A Parintintin Indian who has succeeded in melding himself into interior Brazilian society working as a boatman, falls ill. Terrified of his illness and of the hospital, he is immobilized in his hammock in his mother’s simple house in Humaitá. In conversation with the anthropologist, he encounters the death of his father, years before, which he had repressed. Confronting t…

Inspired by the work of anthropologists Michael Fischer and Waud Kracke, the author argues that modern-day ethnography and its representational strategies can be enriched by knowledge of a literary genre of transnational importance: namely, of fiction that deploys psychoanalysis as a means of revisiting and assessing crucial moments in the history of a culture or country. In this study of five novels from countries as diverse as Italy, Argentina, Spain, England and the United States, dis/located understandings of the unconscious (Bollas, Lacan) are explored and offered as potential ethnographic tools, in ways that are compatible with anthropology's own critique of the Western Ôego' or self.

Through a series of meetings with children belonging to the so-called Òsecond generation of migrants,Ó the specific difficulties encountered by people trying to construct identities on the border between two cultures are examined. Two fundamental determinants of identity, derivation and body, become bones of contention between origins (country of emigration) and daily fabric (host country), and manifest themselves as mechanisms of intense conflict, both intra-psychic and relational

This article examines narratives of some recent Science Fiction cinematic texts, focusing on the less-than-usual movement into the past, rather than the future, and its connections to psychoanalytic theory. The return to the past, with its obvious echoes of psychoanalytical praxis and theorization, proves to be redolent with usage of Freudian concepts: in fact, references abound to Freud's 'family romance' article, as well as to Oedipal fantasies of the 'Primal Scene'. In examining these connections, the article also probes the nature of cinema as a 'time machine', a mental procedure which allows us the visualization of a fantastic journey into the past, giving it physical features and historical contours. To this end, references are cited to the work of Arlow and Fraser, among others, on the nature of the perception of time.

This article examines narratives of some recent Science Fiction cinematic texts, focusing on the less-than-usual movement into the past, rather than the future, and its connections to psychoanalytic theory. The return to the past, with its obvious echoes of psychoanalytical praxis and theorization, proves to be redolent with usage of Freudian concepts: in fact, references abound to Freud's 'family romance' article, as well as to Oedipal fantasies of the 'Primal Scene'. In examining these connections, the article also probes the nature of cinema as a 'time machine', a mental procedure which allows us the visualization of a fantastic journey into the past, giving it physical features and historical contours. To this end, references are cited to the work of Arlow and Fraser, among others, on the nature of the perception of time.

Prior to any theory or practice, and even prior to engaging in therapeutic work, no field of knowledge other than psychoanalysis is willing not to abandon the question of psychic cruelty to religion or metaphysics. A primal cruelty, phylogenetic and therefore anthropological in nature, nurtured by primal fantasies—of seduction, of the primal scene, of castration—can only be defined as a drive to power: a drive that draws on erotic as well as destructive impulses. It is in desisting from this power that analysis is practiced

This paper argues that not only "evidence" or "observation" is essential for the discipline of Anthropology. More fundamentally still, it is imagination that is indispensable. Inasmuch as this is so, there are epistemological consequences to such a position. The author turns to the distinction made by Giambattista Vico between "il vero' and "il certo" to point up epistemological divides between the Humanities and Social Sciences, on the one hand, and the Natural Sciences, on the other.

This essay, which first appeared over thirty years ago in "The Psychoanalytic Review," looks to abstract from the controversial works of self-styled anthropologist Carlos Castaneda implications for the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Taking as the basis of her study a framework for understanding cultural systems first posited by sociologist Benjamin Nelson, the author establishes a set of correspondences between Nelson's six general classes of directive cues (relating to sign, symbol, object, event, person, situation) and the directive models deployed by Castaneda's tutor, the sorcerer Don Juan. These illustrative correspondences are then seen to replicate crucial aspects of the analytic relationship, as well to evoke certain dialectical techniques employed by the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Over the past two decades, Vincent Crapanzano has, perhaps more than any other scholar, refocused attention within anthropology on its problematic relationship with psychoanalysis. Employing what he calls an agonistic approac— that is to say, interdisciplinary, but with a critical edge that looks to fathom each respective discipline's theoretical shortcomings and methodological blind spots—Crapanzano has paid particular attention to how different cultures construct and articulate self-experience. In the conversation that follows, Crapanzano speaks of this defining research interest of his, emphasizing how the locus of selfhood and subjectivity is not everywhere oriented and determined in ways familiar to the West

(New York: Other Press, 2003)