Background
Geza Roheim was born in Budapest, Hungary, the only child of prosperous and indulgent bourgeois parents.
( The only Freudian to have been originally trained in fo...)
The only Freudian to have been originally trained in folklore and the first psychoanalytic anthropologist to carry out fieldwork, Gza Rcheim (1891-1953) contributed substantially to the worldwide study of cultures. Combining a global perspective with encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic sources, this Hungarian analyst demonstrates the validity of Freudian theory in both Western and non-Western settings. These seventeen essays, written between 1922 and 1953, are among Rcheim's most significant published writings and are collected here for the first time to introduce a new generation of readers to his unique interpretations of myths, folktales, and legends. From Australian aboriginal mythology to Native American trickster tales, from the Grimm folktale canon to Hungarian folk belief, Rcheim explores a wide range of issues, such as the relationship of dreams to folklore and the primacy of infantile conditioning in the formation of adult fantasy. An introduction by folklorist Alan Dundes describes Rcheim's career, and each essay is prefaced by a brief consideration of its intellectual and bibliographical context.
https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Other-Psychoanalytic-Essays-Folklore/dp/0691028680?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0691028680
anthropologist Psychoanalyst training analyst author
Geza Roheim was born in Budapest, Hungary, the only child of prosperous and indulgent bourgeois parents.
He was educated in Budapest, and while still at the Gymnasium was asked to give his first lecture to the Hungarian Ethnological Society.
Roheim received the Ph. D. in 1914 from the University of Budapest with a major in geography and a minor in anthropology; there was no chair in anthropology at Budapest, however, so he had to study for a time at Leipzig and Berlin.
He never received the M. D. but did obtain clinical training at the Budapest Institute of Psychoanalysis, became a training analyst there, and joined the Budapest Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918.
In 1911 his first paper, "Dragons and Dragon Slayers, " which was published in the society's Journal, began a series of works presenting the psychoanalytic interpretation of folklore and mythic material.
He worked for some years as an anthropologist on the staff of the Hungarian Museum, and when the Bola Kun government established a chair of anthropology in 1919 at the University of Budapest he was its first occupant. At Leipzig and Berlin, Roheim became interested in psychoanalysis; on his return Sandor Ferenczi encouraged him to continue his psychoanalytic studies, and analyzed him in 1915-1916. He never received the M. D. but did obtain clinical training at the Budapest Institute of Psychoanalysis, became a training analyst there, and joined the Budapest Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918. From then until 1938 he presented papers almost every year at various psychoanalytic congresses.
Roheim underwent a second analysis, with Vilma Kovacs, in preparation for the trip. Roheim's work, which reflects his expansive temperament and range of interest and ideas, falls into two major periods, divided by fieldwork. His earliest efforts were concerned with folkloric material. In 1925 he produced his first major study, Australian Totemism, in which he analyzed totemism in terms of the Atkinson-Darwin primal horde theory on which Freud had based Totem and Taboo. This won the Freud Prize as the best work in applied psychoanalysis in 1921. Roheim's earlier work had already caught Freud's attention; and in 1929-1931 - spurred on by Freud and Ferenczi - Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece financed Roheim's field trips to Somaliland, central Australia, Normanby Island in Melanesia, and among the Yuma Indians in Arizona. These trips rank as the first efforts not only to describe the way of life of a particular culture, but also to analyze the unconscious of the people through a study of myth, ritual, and individual dreams. Roheim spoke three modern and two primitive languages; he was also an accomplished competitive sportsman, a gourmet and gourmand and the possessor of an encyclopedic knowledge of folklore, religion, ancient history, and literature. A prolific author, he wrote twenty books and several hundred articles. Roheim left Hungary for America in 1938 only at the insistence of his wife. It is hard to say whether the fascists or the communists in Hungary were more hostile to him. He worked as a clinician at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts until the early 1940's when he moved to New York City. He spent the rest of his life there. Roheim's literary style was dense and complicated; he appeared to register everything and omit nothing, piling fact on fact in mind-boggling detail. Yet intermittently the vivid use of symbol, ritual, or myth unforgettably illuminated a connection between the buried life experience of the tribe he was studying and a psychoanalytic position. Psychoanalysts saw Roheim's work as an application of their theories; they were not disturbed by any innovative or critical material in his "Talmudic" Freudian view. His anthropology, however, was radical--or at least out of pattern--and both his methodology and his beliefs came under attack as such. As an anthropologist Roheim based his early work primarily on the nineteenth-century approach of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer, who believed that all cultures passed through similar evolutionary phases and that "human nature" was a constant. This basic conviction paralleled Roheim's psychoanalytic emphasis on the core unity of the psychic experience underlying cultural diversity which he called "ontogenetic anthropology. " His position evoked opposition from many anthropological camps: the Durkheim school (Marcel Mauss, Lucien Luvy-Bruhl, Alfred Radcliffe Brown), which rejected efforts to explain culture through the study of the individual; the cultural diffusionists (Elliot Smith); and the functionalists whose most prominent member was Malinowski. Even anthropologists sympathetic to psychoanalysis, such as Margaret Mead, criticized his rejection of the significant role of culture. Roheim's first important work after his immigration to the United States was The Origin and Function of Culture (1943), in which he addressed himself to the problem of social aggression which he viewed as arising out of the projection on society of the conflict inherent in the dual unity of mother and child. The psychological and sexual significan of duality, man's prolonged infancy, the trauma of the separation from the mother and its pervasive ramifications are dominant themes in Roheim's writings and are further explored in The Eternal Ones of the Dream (1945). Civilization is a complex defense by the child/man against object loss. This central role of separation anxiety was elaborated in the posthumous Magic and Schizophrenia (1955), both of which were interpreted as defenses against separation. Roheim's field methodology and theoretical findings remained tied to his conviction of the unity of the human unconscious, which he studied in rituals of transition (birth, male and female puberty rites, marriage, and death) and in song, story, play, and individual dreams. Each book is a thicket of fact, theory, erudite allusion, speculation, and wild conjecture. He stimulates even when he does not convince. Roheim survives less as the author of specific works than as a controversial pioneer in the convergence of psychoanalysis and anthropology. His heritage lies in the pervasive acceptance of many psychoanalytic concepts and mechanisms by contemporary anthropologists in their work, no matter what their residual professional disagreements.
( The only Freudian to have been originally trained in fo...)
(The Western Tribes of Central Australia)
(paperback)
Roheim and his wife Ilonka, whom he married in 1918, were a disputatious but mutually dependent couple. Both were analyzed and both learned to speak Aranda and Pitchentara to prepare for their anthropological fieldwork. She was responsible for much of their work with women and children.