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INTRAPSYCHIC AND INTERSUBJECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL REALITY 113

Commentary: The Complementarity of

Intrapsychic and Intersubjective Dimensions

of Social Reality

Michael D. Jackson

Abstract This comment revisits the pioneering work of George Devereux in arguing for a reintegration of

ethnographic and psychological perspectives in anthropology. The focus is not on an epistemological fusion

of these different perspectives but on methodological strategies whose measure of value may be practical,

aesthetic, or interpretive, depending on the researchers interests and the research subjects own concerns.

[George Devereux, psychoanalytic anthropology, phenomenological anthropology]

Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledgenot be-cause they have established the foundations of their positivity better than any otherhuman science, and at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific; but ratherbecause, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they forman undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and aboveall a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and con-

testation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1973, p. 373

Phenomenological and psychoanalytical anthropology are sites of a similar struggleto

resist and overcome a division, dating from the late 19th century, between the psychological

and social sciences. This division echoed an older separation of subjectivity and objectivity,

the latter associated with the private domain of individual minds, the former associated

with the public domain of collective life and encompassing politicoeconomic, moral, and

legal modalities of normative social behavior. It is not insignificant, therefore, that several

of the contributors to this special issue of Ethos cite William James, for whom inner andouter dimensions of existencethe intrapsychic and the intersubjectiveare dialectically

connected, though this dialect is, in Adornos terms, negative, since the former never

entirely determines or encompasses the latter, and vice versa (Adorno 1973). Nor was the

separation of the psychic and the social endorsed by Freud, whose model of the mind posited

a dynamic interaction between subjective and social spheres. And Levi-Strauss, invoking

Mauss, sought a rapprochement between ethnology and other sciences of man that had

at times been unwisely severed, notably history, biology, and psychology (Levi-Strauss

1967:1213).1

ETHOS, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 113118, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C 2012 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01235.x

Journal of the Society for

Psychological Anthropology

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114 ETHOS

Csordas, Good, Hollan, and Throop in this issue share a similar commitment to broaden

the horizons of sociocultural anthropology,2 opening up dimensions of human reality that

Geertzian hermeneutics declared off limits. Csordas argues that phenomenology and psycho-

analysis, in tandem, can offer insights into the human condition that classical socioculturalanalysis alone cannot. For Good, the value of psychoanalysis lies in its capacity to uncover

phenomena that are hidden, masked or marginalized in orthodox or superficial represen-

tations of social reality. While more critical of the concept of the unconscious, Hollan is

concerned with empirical phenomena that are often left out of anthropological accounts

either because they are allegedly not cultural (and therefore lie within the province of psy-

chology, biology, or philosophy), or because they are too difficult to grasp within current

vocabulary and methods. Finally, Throop reminds us of the value of hermeneutics and re-

flexivity in expanding awareness of the vague, inarticulate and ambiguous forces at play

in the flux of subjective life and in any intersubjective encounter, including the encounterbetween ethnographer and informant.

Rather than seek to reconcile or integrate different models of human experience and human

behavior, it may be more useful to explore methodological guidelines that help scholars

and clinicians see how, in any given empirical situation, they might best arrive at a thera-

peutically useful, analytically productive, or intellectually satisfying understanding. Binding

ourselves to specific theoretical models is not only unwise because disciplinary fields like

phenomenology and psychoanalysis are, as Csordas and Hollan indicate, irreducible and

disparate; it is because any analysis that is not empirically driven and contextually locatedtends to perpetuate prior assumptions. Following Devereux, whose name is strangely absent

from these articles, I suggest that we treat all explanatory models operationally or prag-

matically, as part of a toolkit from which we may draw, depending on the exigencies of the

situation we are trying to understand and the kind of outcomes we are trying to achieve. The

methodological value of the phenomenological epoche is to remind the researcher of the

necessity of suspending a priori assumptions in order to judge which tools offer explanatory

leverage in the task at hand, much as a psychotherapist borrows eclectically, and changes

tack constantly, in seeking the best course of action for treating a client. However, as De-

vereux pointed out in 1961, one cannot deploy sociologistic and psychologistic models atthe same time. For example, Freudian and folk explanations of any symbolic complex may

differ radically. This does not mean that we must choose between them on the grounds

that only one can be epistemologically or logically true; rather, both yield different insights,

some of which may be more relevant to our research interests than others. In Devereuxs

terms, the models are complementary. They cannot be integrated and deployed simulta-

neously; they must be applied serially in the light of specific explanatory or therapeutic

goals.

The epoche implies an even more radical assumption: that we suspend prejudgments as towhether our scholarly models are scientific or nonscientific. Whether they mirror the nature

of the world or measure up to an Aristotelian test for logical coherence is less important than

the question as to whether the intellectual labor engaged is productive or destructive of life.

In this vein, Devereux cites Bohrs principle of destruction (Abtotungsprinzip) in addressing

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the way that any study of the phenomenon life which is carried too fardestroys precisely

that which it seeks to define precisely: Life (Devereux 1978a:9). Applied to anthropology,

this means avoiding reification (the reduction of lived experience to interpretive schemata)

and remembering that all interpretations of the world are tied to specific existential interests,including the quest for certainty and authority.

Consider George Devereuxs fieldwork among the Mohave in the 1930s. One of his objec-

tives was to collect data on mental disorders in Mohave society and to interpret them in

terms of Mohave culture and society (Devereux 1969:1). During his first two field trips De-

vereuxs bias was antianalytic and non-Freudian, but on his third field trip in 1938 he realized

there were many arresting affinities between Mohave folk models of psychopathology and

Freudian psychoanalysis. These affinities persuaded him to undertake systematic psychoana-

lytic training (Devereux 1969:3, 1978a:372). As he put it, I remained an anti-Freudian until,in 1938, my Mohave informant taught me psychoanalysis, as Freuds patients had taught it

to him (Devereux 1978b:366; cf. 1967:ch. 10).

Scholars do not, therefore, make epistemological claims for interpretative models, but opera-

tional claims based on the demands of the situations they encounter. As Good observes, what

works in health may not work in sickness, and unless biomedical models are complemented

by illness narratives (Kleinman 1988) one cannot hope to do full justice to the situations one

is trying to understand or the suffering one hopes to alleviate.

This call for methodological judgment underlies Hollans caveat against an uncritical use

of the Freudian notion unconscious, with its undue emphasis on intrapsychic rather than

intersubjective processes. In my work on Mande hero myths, I found that identical defense

mechanisms appear in individual fantasies, narrative stratagems and social institutions, and

that a dynamic understanding of these Oedipal-type myths required an elucidation of the

dialectical interplay between the psychic and the social (Jackson 1979). In fieldwork among

the Warlpiri, however, I elected to follow indigenous usage by speaking of the unknown

rather than the unconscious, and remarking the curious parallelism between Warlpiri con-

ceptualizations and Foucaults argument that we think of the unconscious as an obscurespace, an element of darkness that lies both inside and outside thought. The unthought

(whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shriveled up nature or a stratified

history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin,

born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness,

in an unavoidable duality (Foucault 1970:326). Again, in Paths Toward a Clearing, I took

Robin Horton, Meyer Fortes, and Victor Turner to task for embracing Freudian concepts

of the unconscious and the Oedipal complex in their African ethnographies, arguing that

while classical psychoanalytic thought tends to define the unconscious as a deep recess

of interior being where external reality is replaced by psychical reality (Freud 1957:187),traditional African thought tends to construe the unconscious as a forcefield exterior to a

persons immediate awareness. It is not so much a region of the mind as a region in space, the

inscrutable realm of night and of the wilderness, filled with bush spirits, witches, sorcerers

and enemies (Jackson 1989:45).

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116 ETHOS

This is not to say that psychoanalytic models or philosophical traditions originating in the

Western world have no value in helping understand non-Western lifeworlds; rather it is to

urge judgment in working out which models will do greatest justice to the empirical situation

in question.

My final remarks echo Hollans comments on the need for a subject-centered approach in

anthropology, and Throops similar insistence on taking the subjects registering of expe-

rience as a significant basis for grounding inquiry and analysis. Despite my own preference

for prioritizing relations over relata (setting aside the notion of an autonomous subject in

order to explore subjective and intersubjective processes), I argue that we cannot, iron-

ically, apprehend either intrapsychic or sociocultural realities except through work with

individuals. As Goods account of Mas Anton makes clear, individual life stories disclose

the indeterminate relationship between general principles and particular persons, situa-tions or events. Accordingly, the challenge is to explore the interplay among eigenwelt(the

sphere of individual subjectivity), mitwelt (the sphere of interpersonal relationships), and

umwelt(the cultural, historical, and physical environment that permeates all lives and social

relations).

One way of overcoming the false separation of the personal, interpersonal, and transper-

sonal is to explore what Sartre refers to as the singular universal 3 and Michael Herzfeld

(1997) calls ethnographic biographyin which individual, cultural, and historical modes

of identification are neither ontologized nor polarized, but seen as mutually arising andcontrapuntal aspects of continually shifting senses of ourselves as being both uniquely a

you or a me and members of a class or a culture, as in We, the Tikopia. The ques-

tion is then one, not of designating ontologically discrete domainssuch as the per-

sonal and the culturalbut of identifying the conditions under which these different

modes of identification emerge, the different interests they serve, the different effects they

produce.

Bypassing both the individual subject and culture as sui generis phenomena, we seek to

explore the space of appearanceswhere that which is in potentia becomes in presentiadisclosed, drawn out, brought forth, given presence, or embodied. Object-relations theory

is particularly helpful in making critical events central to ethnographic analysis. Culture,

writes D. W. Winnicott, is in fact neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter

of external reality (1974:113). Comparing culture with transitional phenomena and play,

Winnicott goes on to argue that culture is a common pool . . . into which individuals and

groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put

what we find (Winnicot 1974:116). This means, for Winnicott, that culture is not some kind

of ready-made, omnipresent composite of habits, meanings and practices that are located

within the individual or within the environment, but a potentiality, aspects of which will berealized and experienced variously in the course of our interactions with others, as well as

our relationships to the everyday environments and events in which we find ourselves. What

is foregrounded one moment, will be backgrounded the next, while what is focal for one

person may be peripheral for another. It is impossible to see how this project can be realized

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unless one begins in media res, with concrete human situations, deploying theories as tools

rather than symbolic capital.

MICHAEL D. JACKSON is Distinguished Visiting Professor in World Religions, HarvardDivinity School.

Notes1. It should also be noted that Franz Boas and the American configurationist school pioneered the study of the

relationship between culture and personality, yet the works of such seminar figures as A. I. Hallowell, Ruth Benedict,

Margaret Mead, Abraham Kardiner, Morris Opler, Florence Kluckholn, and Eric Ericson are seldom referenced

in contemporary sociocultural anthropology.

2. Peter Hadreas has recently noted that the notion of the world as horizon or field is basic to Husserlianphenomenology, and paves the way for an integration of psychological and socio-cultural points of view (2007:6).

3. A man is never an individual. It would be better to call him a singular universal; totalized and thereby

universalized by his period, he retotalizes it by reproducing himself in it as a singularity. Universal by the singular

universality of human history, singular by the universalizing singularity of his projects, he demands to be studied

from both sides (Sartre 1971:78).

References Cited

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Levi-Strauss, Claude1967 The Scope of Anthropology. Sherry Ortner and Robert A. Paul, trans. London: Jonathan Cape.

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