Oedipus without mommy–daddy: How anthropologists pushed psychiatrists to go beyond the Oedipus Complex

Abstract

The contemporary psychiatric landscape's overreliance on diagnostic classifications and the reliance of psychodynamic approaches on kinship caricatures to treat mental illnesses neglect lived realities and relational experiences of trauma. This makes it necessary to return to the anthropological critique of 20th century psychoanalysis as anthropologists pushed to consider the plurality of ways in which people experience the reverberations of traumas in wider kinship networks. These engagements played a central role in making the case for the “de-familiarization” of the family by throwing light on lateral kinship formations and fragmentation beyond the nuclear family. Given the rise in biological theories and psychoanalytic explanations for transgenerational trauma, returning to anthropological engagement with early 20th century psychoanalytic theory can enable psychiatrists and mental health professionals to become more aware of the relational experiences of kinship structures and the psychological impacts of their assimilation or fragmentation, without entirely biologizing trauma, nor relying on caricatures of what interpersonal relations ought to be like for psychological well-being.