explanations: individual behavior, Ruth Benedict ( 1934) eloquently
argued, passively replicated the "patterns of culture." Although Sapir
( 1934) insightfully questioned the reification of "culture," his eminent
colleague Alfred Kroeber ( 1917) had already recast the Durkheimian
notion of the phenomenological autonomy of social tradition as the
"superorganic."

While several anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s selectively
incorporated elements of Freudian theory into their studies of the
interplay of "culture" and "personality," the psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner
( 1891- 1981) innovatively transcended disciplinary boundaries,
striving to forge a genuine psychocultural synthesis. Analysand of
Sigmund Freud and a member of A. A. Brill's circle of American
analysts in the 1920s, Kardiner had also briefly studied cultural theory
under Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology. This
dual training in psychoanalysis and anthropology later facilitated
productive collaborations with Ralph Linton, Ruth Benedict, and other
anthropologists interested in culture-and-personality studies. Beginning
in 1933, Kardiner organized an interdisciplinary seminar, initially at the
New York Psychoanalytic Institute and later at Columbia University, in
which he worked closely with influential anthropologists for over a
decade, developing a psychocultural model for personality formation in
different societies. His interdisciplinary schema -- perhaps "the best
formulated of several convergent neo-Freudian approaches which were
being tried during the thirties and forties" ( Harris 1968:442) -- pioneered
the incorporation of psychoanalytic concepts into anthropology in terms
of ego psychology ( Fine 1979:107). While analyzing Linton's classic
ethnographic studies in the late 1930s, Kardiner was simultaneously
developing an adaptational theory of psychodynamics, which drew upon
his research on the traumatic neuroses as well as his discussions with
Sandor Rado and other analysts dissatisfied with the libido theory (see
Kardiner 1941, Rado 1956a). Indeed, Kardiner's formulation in 1938 of
"basic personality structure" -- the substratum of basic ego constellations
conditioned by culture-specific ontogenesis -- stemmed directly from his
concurrent thinking on the integrative development of the ego.

Two decades after its publication in 1939, Kardiner The Individual
and His Society was increasingly acknowledged as "the crystallizing
event" in the emergence of neo-Freudian anthropology in the 1940s
( Gladwin 1961:158; see also Bradburn 1963:353, Honigmann 1961:
104-105, La Barre 1961:16, Singer 1961:29). The interdisciplinary
collaboration, which became known as the Kardiner-Linton Seminar, had
produced both an ontogenetic theory of culturally conditioned "basic
personality" and a psychocultural technique for the investigation of

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