Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and sorcery

Abstract

The relations linking cultural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss to psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan have not yet been properly criticized in the anthropological literature. Whereas published in 1949 works of psychoanalytically informed Lévi-Strauss played a key part in Lacan's "return to Freud" in the spirit of structural linguistics. A closer examination of these texts as well as central concepts of structural anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, taking into account not only the historical development of the latter, but also their ethnographic and clinical sources, raises fundamental questions about falsifiability, consistency, explanatory power and plausibility of structuralist hypotheses. The direction of inspiration was defined and always led from anthropological to psychoanalytic structuralism, although the former was often built on the basis of unjustified analogies, factual inaccuracies and excessive generalizations, and the latter additionally on the basis of manipulations present in both Freud's and Lacan's writings.