Self Alterations in Psychoanalysis: An anthropological encounter

Jean Paul Baldacchino 

The ‘self’ has been a topic of renewed interest in anthropology. Several studies have questioned the universality of the self with many anthropologists arguing that the ‘self’ as such tells us more about the development of Western culture than anything else. Social historians have debated the origins of the Western self in studies of ‘individualism’ while anthropologists have contrasted the Western self with differing understandings of the person across cultures. Rather than engaging once more with the ‘long-running onslaught on the sovereign individual’ (Humphrey 2008: 359) this paper takes as its starting point the notion of ‘self-alteration’ focusing on psychoanalysis as a mode of self-alteration.

The history of anthropological engagement with psychoanalysis is as long as the foundation of both disciplines in the early twentieth century. However as Crapanzano notes ‘anthropologists have been markedly ambivalent about psychoanalysis.’ (Crapanzano 1992: 137). Psychoanalysis has been dismissed as a product of Western individualism with limited utility outside Western contexts. On the other hand there also a number of anthropologists that have drawn upon psychoanalytic theory and methods in order to study ‘the other’.  That being said there are very few ‘ethnographic’ studies of psychoanalysis per se. Psychoanalysis is premised upon an encounter between an analyst and a patient within the intimate and confidential setting of the clinic, making conventional participant observation almost impossible unless one assumes the role of analyst or patient.

As an analyst and an anthropologist, in this paper I draw upon my own clinical ‘case studies’ but also a dose of autoethnographic ‘methodological individualism’ putting under examination my own experience as analyst and as analysand. While recognising that the possibilities and technologies of self-alteration are historically circumscribed and also subject to power dynamics, they can also provide us with a useful tool in the study of morality and ‘ordinary ethics’. In this paper I look at psychoanalysis from the perspective of moral and ethical dimensions of self-alteration while also drawing parallels with anthropology itself as a mode of self-alteration (See Houston, forthcoming).  Rather than reproducing Western ideas of the person, psychoanalysis serves to destabilise certain fundamental assumptions about the ‘individual’ moving towards an ethics of veracity in place of a morality of goods.