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.

Today, a widening range of historical phenomena are being examined through the psychoanalytic lens, while the psychoanalytic tradition itself is coming in for unprecedented historical scrutiny. This collection of essays showcases the innovative, and sometimes contentious, encounters between psychoanalysis and history.

Screen, Culture, Psyche illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer’s own psyche. Seeking to go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung’s ideas? Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies. This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer.

A collection of essays on cultural psychology, which analyses various facets of Indian identity and sexuality through sources as diverse as case studies, Indian myths and legends, and popular cinema. This edition features three additional essays which explore issues like riots, the psychology of Islamist terrorism, among others.

This book Beyond the Mind: Cultural Dynamics of the Psyche is unusual in the content and it the format. That’s why it requires an unusual look. It has to do with a man, an intellectual journey and with uncountable travels across the world over the last two decades. This man is Jaan Valsiner and here you will read of his restless effort of elaborating ideas while going in different places as invited keynote. This book is mainly about his intellectual trajectory, which touches several places and several and interconnected topics. This book is about the “minutes” of his “bigger” and well organize works and also it is a collection of only apparently fragmented texts (mainly keynote lectures, unpublished or rejected papers) where the readers will see the “step- by-step” elaboration over the years of new ideas, theories, models and even schemas (which Jaan likes very much—maybe especially as he claims basic inability to draw anything).

Originally published in 1985, this distinguished and constructive critique of modern culture introduced into our language a brand-new term, �PN�, standing for �psychic nutrition�, which at the time promised to become a household expression. Drawing on his first-hand knowledge of oriental civilizations; on discoveries of Jung, especially his concept of psychic energy; on the ideas of the cultural anthropologists; and not least on the New Science implicit in microphysics and microbiology, E.W.F. Tomlin, whose philosophical books have been translated into several languages, shows how the human psyche requires its own kind of nourishment just as urgently as the body needs food. In the industrial societies of the West, this need has often been ignored. Reformers, in their earnest though sometimes inept endeavours to create a better world, have too often exposed us to the dangers of psychic starvation and the noxious effects of what may be called �neg-PN�. Here lie the roots of violence and the lack of direction so conspicuously afflicting modern man and woman. Examples of PN, positive and negative, are given, lending the book an immediacy and practical character often lacking in studies of this kind. In the new scientific approach here adopted, the divisions between matter and life, and life and mind, are discarded, and the old conflict between science and religion shown to belong to an out-of-date world view. The result is a radical reappraisal of the nature and function of religion and art, the two great psychic forces in history. Indeed, the present crisis is shown to originate in the psychic sphere rather than in the political and economic order. Deeply felt and elegantly written, yet not lacking in wit and humour, the book ends with some concrete ideas on how a more balanced culture may be achieved.