Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar (1884-1942)

Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski, a British anthropologist, was born on April 7, 1884, in Krakow, Poland, and died on May 16, 1942, in New Haven, Connecticut. The only son of a Slavic professor of philology, Malinowski completed a doctorate in the philosophy of science at the University of Krakow in 1908. After reading the work of James G. Frazer, he turned to anthropology. In 1910 he settled in Great Britain, where he studied with Charles G. Seligman and Edvard Westermarck at the London School of Economics.

During the First World War, although the Australian authorities considered him an enemy alien, he was still allowed to conduct ethnographic research and worked for a period of twenty months in the Trobriand Islands (Melanesia, to the east of New Guinea). At Seligman's request, he studied the Oedipus complex and other manifestations of the unconscious in a community based on maternal law.

In a series of articles, some of which appeared in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1951) and The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia (1962), he claimed that for the Trobriand people, "sex, in and of itself, was not subject to any form of restriction." There was no period of what Freud referred to as pregenital or anal-erotic interest. "Any idea of consanguinity or paternal parenthood, conceived as a physical relation between father and child, is completely foreign to the indigenous mind." "The desire is to marry the sister and kill the maternal uncle." On the basis of these findings, Malinowski contested the universal validity of Freudian claims and denounced "the failure, even the explicit aversion, of psychoanalysts to seriously consider social organization."

As Ernest Jones and Géza Róheim were quick to point out, Malinowski's claims were not supported by a close examination of his own ethnographic data: A number of taboos, especially that of speech, influenced the sexuality of the Trobriand Islanders. Several convergent indices led to the conclusion that they understood physiological parenthood. A conventional Oedipal triangle seemed to be present: the son was the first to be suspected of killing the father through witchcraft. Malinowski himself acknowledged that he was unfamiliar with the psychoanalysis he relativized and criticized. He was unaware of the distinction between the latent and the manifest, and directly questioned the native population about the incestuous content of their dreams. Moreover, his writing can be questioned in terms of his peculiar mental equations, which the posthumous publication of his Diary in the strict sense of the term (1967) allows us partially to reconstruct.

The head of the so-called functionalist school, Malinowski benefited from his considerable fame: He held the first chair of anthropology at the University of London, which was created for him in 1927. Even in the early twenty-first century, his Trobriand Island work is presented by anthropologists as a key moment in intensive ethnography (prolonged residence, knowledge of the language). His theoretical perspectives have largely been abandoned, but a number of anthropologists continue to refer to his work to refute the universality of the Oedipus complex and the ability of psychoanalysis to account for the workings of the psyche in variable social contexts.

BERTRAND PULMAN

See also: Ethnopsychoanalysis.