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This paper introduces the contributions of Alan Sugarman (US), Rachel Blass (Israel), Paul Denis (France), Luisa Perez (Uruguay), Bernard Reith (Switzerland) and David Tuckett (UK) to a debate on the question of how we can enable productive discussion about our scientific differences and why historically it has been so difficult for the discipline of psychoanalysis to initiate and sustain such discussions. By way of introduction the historical example of the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytic Society is briefly reviewed and several possible factors contributing to the difficulties are provisionally identified, including over-reliance on authority and tradition, eagerness to supervise on the basis of our own theoretical models rather than trying to understand those of others, the lack of clarity and consensus in our definitions of terms, a lack of mutual curiosity resulting in theoretical silos, an experienced threat to identity when adjustments to our positions are called for, and the lack of a methodology for undesrstanding and / or resolving differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way that anthropologists understand the Oedipus complex, in particular, is a good example of how they understand psychoanalysis in general. Indeed, it has crystallized a set of reactions marked by ignorance, misunderstanding, distortion and screening out and at the same time has provoked suspicion among anthropologists as to psychoanalysis, according to the preconceptions of the various schools of thought and authors implied, and this from the very first contacts up to nowadays. In what way did the psychoanalysts contribute to this and what representation did they, in turn, elaborate of anthropology? The purpose of this paper is to expose the epistemological and historical conditions of the emergence of this debate, and then to develop it by following chronology up to the 1950s and 1960s, while differentiating three major cultural areas, Great Britain, the USA and France, in order to get a clearer picture. From that point on, we will try to diversify our inquiry and to formulate some interpretative hypotheses. In particular, we think that a traumatic event may have inaugurated and organized the history of the relationship between the two disciplines, producing a situation of acculturation with multiple impacts, if we identify them with two cultures coming into contact: what is at stake here is Totem and Taboo in which Freud carries through the first major psychoanalytical approach of the interpretation of ethnographic facts, that leads him to transplant the universality of the Oedipus complex to the very root of the first social institutions and to pinpoint the presence of unconscious processes in their genesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]