Elementi di antropologia psicanalitica. L’ipotesi dell’orda primordiale alla luce della primatologia

Abstract

Elements of psychoanalytical anthropology.

The primordial horde hypothesis in light of primatology. This paper stems from a synthesis of a series of problems emerged during my three presentations (11th and 25th January and 22nd February 2025) within the OEdipus Reloaded seminar organised by Scuola di Psicanalisi Freudiana. The three sessions had a common thread, i.e., the problem of the relation between individual and collective psychic structures. In the first section, the legitimacy of the social drive is discussed from the standpoint of Sigmund Freud’s mass psychology. The elementary mechanisms that constitute the relation between individual and mass psychology operate already within the family and are hidden within the Freudian stratified hypothesis of the primordial horde. Freud acknowledges that he found such hypothesis in the work of Charles Darwin and for this reason some concepts are analysed, such as sympathy and social instincts, that the father of modern biology held to pertain to all living beings. The second section, the longest of the article, discusses Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of elementary structures of kinship. It is stressed how the anthropologist substantially represses the role of sexuality in the constitution of the elementary structures by means of an overestimation of the symbolic. In light of the limits of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist standpoint, elements for a psychoanalytical anthropology are suggested through a comparison between psychoanalysis and primatology. Thus, the diverse “elementary structures” in primates are explored and in particular by weighing the validity of some metapsychological hypothesis (incest and the latency period), the legitimacy of which Freud himself believed possible only with the empirical confirmation provided by observation on primates. Lastly, in the third section, a more rigorous articulation of the primordial horde hypothesis, which represents hence the context where not only castration was real, but also infanticide and cannibalism. This update of the primordial horde hypothesis has implications on the phylogenetic heritage within the psychic structure of mankind.