The circulation of psychoanalytical knowledge and practice in the social sciences

A concise but broad-based review is presented of the circulation of knowledge and practices from psychoanalysis in the social sciences, especially anthropology. The different contexts in which the concepts and conceptions of psychoanalysis have been read, refuted, or appropriated by different national schools of thought and intellectual traditions and the ways psychoanalysis itself has interacted with anthropological knowledge and its incorporations of psychoanalytical knowledge are explored. The interpretations of these two major groups of knowledge are referred to as participating in a common cultural horizon with a common epistemological orientation, and the sources of the frequent mistaken beliefs occurring in this interplay are also addressed.