The Psychodynamics of Culture: Abram Kardiner and Neo-Freudian Anthropology (Contributions to the Study of Mass Media and Communications,)

While a number of anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s incorporated isolated elements of Freudian theory into their studies of the interplay of culture and personality, the psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner transcended disciplinary boundaries to forge a genuine psychocultural synthesis. Although the importance of Kardiner's pathbreaking The Individual and His Society is sometimes acknowledged, William Manson argues that Kardiner's work has often been overlooked or misinterpreted by social scientists and psychiatrists. In this first comprehensive study of Kardiner's theoretical contributions, Manson traces the development of Kardiners's psychodynamic formulations and evaluates the impact of his model on neo-Freudian culture-and-personality research and psychological anthropology in general. The author discusses Kardiner's extended collaboration with leading anthropologists, which resulted in the creation of a psychocultural model for personality formation in different societies. He examines Kardiner's theory of culturally conditioned "basic personality" and the psychocultural technique for studying the interrelationships of specific cultural practices, personality adaptation, and supernatural belief systems. Manson's analysis places Kardiner's theories in the wider context of concurrent neo-Freudian approaches in anthropology and parallel developments in "culturalist" psychoanalysis and interdisciplinary social science. A balanced and lucid assessment of a major figure in psychological anthropology, this work will be of interest for psychoanalytic studies, cultural and psychological anthropology, psychodynamics, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of the social/behavioral sciences.William Manson is the author of 'The Psychodynamics of Culture: Abram Kardiner and Neo-Freudian Anthropology (Contributions to the Study of Mass Media and Communications,)', published 1988 under ISBN 9780313262678 and ISBN 0313262675.