The Origin and Function of Culture

by Géza Róheim

Genres: Philosophy

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Géza Róheim (Hungarian: Róheim Géza) was a psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and ethnologist. His writings about Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara people were used to support Ernest Jones in his debate with Bronisław Malinowski over the existence of the Oedipus complex in matrilineal societies, though his methodology and conclusions were disputed by Wilhelm Reich.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very slim volume, easy to read. Roheim writes in a clinical/scientific way, though not as straightforward as Freud. Nonetheless he provides a concise and useable approach to anthropology from the psychoanalytic perspective. His psychoanalysis isn't quite the same as Freud though. He is in the tradition of the "English school" of object relations of Melanie Klein, who he cites extensively. Object relations focuses on the relationship with the mother early in life as most fundamental to developing people's relationships to others in life, allowing each of us to internalize for ourselves aspects of the world to identify with to meet our needs.

Utilizing object relations theory, Roheim bypasses the Oedipal struggle against the father as the basis of society of Freud and points to early childhood after birth and the mother. It is our prolonged dependency on the mother due to our helplessness at birth that makes human beings unique and enables society. Following more modern biological opinion than strict recapitulation of ancestral traits as defining childhood development, Roheim uses neoteny, the retention of youthful traits into adulthood, as the factor for social development. Our retardation of development such as being born relatively prematurely and long childhood makes the influence of others very powerful on us. We never get over the infantile fear of being alone and helpless, and so we learn to identify with others and narcissistically express the same desires and fears with others to get over this trauma.

Neoteny is a powerful explanation for what makes humans unique from other apes. Our flatter faces and big heads are more similar to baby chimps than to adult chimps. Mentally youth is associated with more brain plasticity and curiosity, a greater ability to learn more things. The retardation of development allows our big heads to come out of the mother's womb without burdening her bipedalism, but this means we have to develop prematurely outside of the womb. The cost of intelligence is helplessness, the solution to which is dependency.

The development of human culture repeats the early dyadic child-mother maternally driven relationship first and later on starts repeating the Oedipal triadic son-mother-father paternally driven relationship. We only ‘progress’ as societies when we get over our long period of dependency and express later relationships in our culture. The early maternal relationship remains very powerful for us humans. Humans have managed to reverse this process when it comes to infancy and have difficulty growing beyond it to become more specialized, as other species do in their environments under natural selection. We are spared the reality principle for a long period. This is the cost of our intelligence and sociality, our dynamism.

This explanation seems to distance Freud's Oedipal theory where the father plays the leading role. The title of the book is The Origin and Function of Culture, and it would seem the Oedipal moment occurs later in life and phallic gods occur later in human development, after we mature from our prolonged infancy. In the majority of mammals paternal investment is very little compared to the mother, and males often engage in infanticide against children that aren't theirs. A major achievement of the human race is getting males to invest in their children and the mother, and eventually to non-kin, society as a whole. This seems more of a result of culture than the origin of it. However the father is present from the beginning in Lacan’s words as the limit of desire, in the primal horde that precedes the Oedipal structure.

Roheim is to my knowledge the first psychoanalytic anthropologist, as in not just engaging in anthropological speculation but specializing in it. The perspective he gives with some updating can be useful especially when guided by current theories of evolutionary biology. Roheim's conception of anthropology seems more contemporary than Freud's early attempts which were rooted in 19th century evolutionary thinking and western patriarchal legends.