| This dissertation seeks to investigate the present-day relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Using as organizing themes the concepts of self and multiplicity, four in-depth, ethnographic interviews were conducted with prominent anthropologists (Dorinne Kondo, Kathleen Stewart, Vincent Crapanzano, Paul Williams) whose works reflect the general state of anthropology's conflictual engagement with psychoanalysis today.;The interviews address issues of anthropological theory and practice as these relate to contemporary psychoanalysis--particularly on matters concerning subjectivity and contemporary conceptions of the self. Underlying my research was the assumption that synchronous developments are underway in both fields that warrant a renewal of the kind of cross-fertilization efforts that had long characterized interdisciplinary research in anthropology and psychoanalysis. Moreover, as a practicing psychoanalyst, I have sought to express through my research the dual sensibilities of the fieldworker and the clinician. These sensibilities will be evidenced in my aim to generate, through the genre of the interview, a text at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and ethnography. It is, in fact, through my transposition to anthropology of this literary and self-reflexive device (to which psychoanalysts often resort), that I hope to have enhanced the interview's ethnographic value. The relative novelty of such an exercise is a form of ethnographic inquiry which places the anthropologist in the peculiar role of "informant.".;Finally, to the extent that the interviews stand as dialogical exercises intended to: (1) promote a broader dialogue between anthropology and psychoanalysis; and (2) imagine new conceptual spaces in which to discuss and invite alternative visions and versions of selfhood, I have interspersed and revisited the conversations with a hypertextual commentary in which multiple voices of my own are deployed. Thus, in a polyphonic but unorchestrated ensemble of aphorisms, clinical vignettes, theoretical reflections, diary entries and more-or-less free associations, I hope to have provided for a mode of representation that might serve as a model for the kind of "agonistic" dialogue that Vincent Crapanzano invokes for the two disciplines. |
