The Cultural Psyche

As envisaged by Robert A. LeVine many years ago, the human development indicators have improved in many societies as income, healthcare and educational opportunities have been enlarged. Global transformations have led to significant decline in extreme poverty and an increase in working class and middle class families around the world in the emerging economies throughout Africa and Asia. As the technological and global influences continue to challenge the dominant narrative in academic psychology, conflated with WEIRD data assumptions, interdisciplinary research will continue to increase in value and scope, where LeVine’s classical approach in psychological anthropology, combined with psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, demography, language or area research and population studies, offers a path forward. The essays collected here in addition to honoring LeVine’s work, hold out the promise of a real convergence between psychology and anthropology or the development of a psychosocial science -- a confluence between positivism and relativism, empiricism and ethnography, and social sciences and human sciences. The scientific search for universal laws and the ever expanding search for cultural meanings in the diverse communities around the world must continue simultaneously and in conjunction with the transnational or global challenges we face today. Hybridity fostered by interdisciplinary researchers has stood the test of time as the social sciences have gradually outgrown the monolithic ways of looking at the world. The project of a psychosocial science represented by the work of Robert A. LeVine at the intersection of psychology, anthropology, demography, child development and psychoanalysis maps out some of the challenges of a hybrid discipline. Hybridity impacts not only the humanities and social sciences, but physical sciences in genetics and genomics, or applied disciplines like biotechnology and life sciences. Thus, it is important that we not lose sight of LeVine’s spirit of interdisciplinary research. Advocates for universalism, the psychologists or behavioral scientists pursuing universal laws of human nature, must collaborate with the growing number of relativistic scientists – anthropologists, sociologists, or cultural studies experts -- searching for local meanings in small-scale village communities. There will be a confluence of social and human sciences, or what C.P. Snow, the English literary critic called the ‘two cultures’ of the scientific revolution – the sciences and humanities. Praise for The Cultural Psyche "This edited collection by Dinesh Sharma of his mentor Robert LeVine's papers is uniquely positioned between psychology, anthropology and human development. As one surveys its wide-ranging and fascinating papers, one not only comes to understand the principal lines of work carried out over a half century by a remarkable scholar. At the same time, one gains a sense of the history of these lines of work, by a person who has lived through it, reflected on it, and contributed significantly to its advances. This exceptionally valuable volume not only surveys child and human development in depth and across cultures; it also points out ways in which these lines of work ought to be pursued in the years to come." Howard E. Gardner Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Human Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA "This book offers an overview of the wide-ranging contributions of one of the giants of thinking about human development, parenting, and culture of the last 50 years. ...By bringing together a large body of Bob’s writings, some of them entirely new, this volume represents only one important dimension of LeVine’s enormous influence on the thinking of today’s scholars, but in addition it should be noted how much his scholarship has shaped the work and the thinking of his many students and collaborators in ways that will persist through several academic generations." Catherine E. Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Based on Jung's theory of complexes, this book offers a new perspective on conflicts between groups and cultures, demonstrating how the effects of cultural complexes can be felt in the behaviour of disenfranchised groups across the world.

This book originates from a lecture series given on Psychology and Anthropology at Goldsmiths College London in 2018. It offers an introduction to psychological anthropology, and will be useful both for undergraduates and postgraduates. While providing a critical overview of topics commonly included in psychological anthropological texts, such as psychoanalysis, culture and personality, child development, personality, emotion, the self, memory and cognition, this book also offers a chapter on Darwin, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to emphasise that behaviour is not infinitely malleable, but, rather, culture impacts existent biological and psychological structures. As shown here, while culture impacts psychological processes, these processes are constrained by genetic, biological and evolutionary factors.

Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America explores many of the cultural complexes that comprise the collective psychic-filtering system of emotions, ideas, and beliefs that possess the United States today. With chapters by an international selection of leading authors, the book covers ideas both broad and specific, and presents unique insight into the current state of the nation. The voices included in this volume amplify contemporary concerns, linking them to themes which have existed in the American psyche for decades while also looking to the future. Part One examines meta themes, including history, purity, dominion, and democracy in the age of Trump. Part Two looks at key complexes including race, gender, the environment, immigration, national character, and medicine. The overall message is that it is in wrestling with these complexes that the soul of America is forged or undone. This highly relevant book will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, politics, sociology, and American studies. It will also be of great interest to Jungian analysts in practice and in training, and anyone interested in the current state of the US.

In these essays renowned psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar uses diverse sources, including case studies, Indian myths and legends, and fiction, to analyse various facets of Indian identity. He explores the Indian psyche through a cultural and psychoanalytical investigation of ideas concerning identity and sexuality. The second edition updates the role of culture in psychoanalytical thoughts, and includes discussions on culture and psychoanalysis, rumours and riots, and the psychology of Islamist terrorism. Culture and Psyche will appeal equally to scholars of social psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology, as well as general readers interested in the psychology of Indian imagination.

Based on Jung's theory of complexes, this book offers a new perspective on conflicts between groups and cultures, demonstrating how the effects of cultural complexes can be felt in the behaviour of disenfranchised groups across the world.

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug. But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

This book originates from a lecture series given on Psychology and Anthropology at Goldsmiths College London in 2018. It offers an introduction to psychological anthropology, and will be useful both for undergraduates and postgraduates. While providing a critical overview of topics commonly included in psychological anthropological texts, such as psychoanalysis, culture and personality, child development, personality, emotion, the self, memory and cognition, this book also offers a chapter on Darwin, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to emphasise that behaviour is not infinitely malleable, but, rather, culture impacts existent biological and psychological structures. As shown here, while culture impacts psychological processes, these processes are constrained by genetic, biological and evolutionary factors.