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The difficult pursuit of a comparison between anthropology and psychology, undertaken by Ernesto de Martino, raised many perplexities in the Italian cultural landscape of the 1960s. In this paper, first the obstacles he encountered during his research project on cultural apocalypses and end-of-the-world delusions are discussed. Subsequently, the new cultural setting of the 1980s, witnessing the emergence of new paradigms of thought favourable to rethinking the relationship between the individual psyche and the cultural sphere, is described. In this perspective, de Martino's pioneering thought, aimed at understanding how the human presence is intrinsically linked to cultural institutions, paved the way to the development of a complex psychology. The specific contribution of de Martino was to usher, with no prejudice whatsoever, and actually with stringent rigor and in-depth intuition, in an area in which methods of investigation and different types of knowledge about human existence are often undefined, contaminated, and undifferentiated. This is an area that today we can better approach through the various complexity theories, but at that time it was pioneered in Italy by de Martino. This led him to develop an unconventional and original intellectual trajectory, totally unlinked to the prevailing culture, a trajectory that in fact some authors have compared to that of Michel Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]