Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s Career as a Psychoanalyst: New Evidence and Lessons from a Significant Case History

From 1920 to 1923, the preeminent American anthropologist, Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960) of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an active practice as a lay psychoanalyst, with an office in San Francisco. His own published account of his psychoanalytic work appeared incidentally in introductory material in a collection of his papers that appeared in 1952. He was defending his authority to speak about the place of Freud’s thinking in anthropology: “I have undergone at least a brief control psychoanalysis; and from 1920 to 1923 I practiced psychoanalysis in San Francisco, part of the time under medical sponsorship in the neuropsychiatric clinic of a hospital, part of the time independently.” (Kroeber, 1952, p. 300)

This incident has not made sense to biographers. As one of the major shapers of the discipline of anthropology, Kroeber did not utilize Freud’s teachings in any obvious and major way. The architects of the culture and personality school, who were contemporaries of Kroeber, in contrast, for example, employed psychoanalytic thinking in a profound way. They formed a perhaps dominant school that involved many anthropologists as well as psychoanalysts and psychologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century.¹

In what follows, I use printed records, including biographical materials published by the family,² the now-printed correspondence of Kroeber with his close friend, Edward Sapir, documents from the Bancroft Library Kroeber Papers (from which very personal material was removed before it was deposited), and some personal material in the Elsie Clews Parsons biographies.³ To these sources I now add, for the first time, notes from an interview with Kroeber in his home in 1955. My purpose is to explore some of what actually happened and, more importantly, the significance of the incident.⁴ How did Kroeber come to practice psychoanalysis? And why did his work in psychoanalysis not transform his anthropology? I find the answer in the operation of Kroeber’s sense of disciplinarity. My evidence therefore turns this biographical inquiry into one that explores how Freud’s ideas spread in the early years.

Information about Kroeber’s Psychoanalytic Practice

Kroeber did open his office in the summer of 1920, after the end of the academic year 1918–1919. He continued at the same time to serve as a full-time faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was head of the Department of Anthropology. The official records show that he did not take leave between the second half of the 1917–1918 academic year and the second semester of 1923–1924.⁵ At some point, according to Theodora Kroeber, his second wife and biographer, he began doing some psychoanalyses at the Stanford medical school clinic in San Francisco, a facility that served the poor. According to Kroeber himself, in the interview, when he had determined that he wanted to try to practice psychoanalysis, he knew that he first needed experience. He therefore looked for a free clinic where he could take any patient referred to him. His friends advised him to avoid the University of California clinic, where the relevant specialist was a pure neurologist and antagonistic to a psychological approach. At the Stanford medical school, then located in San Francisco, however, the head was a brain surgeon but was “a good man.” Kroeber approached this surgeon, who said he didn’t know anything about it and needed to read up. He did, and he took Kroeber on. The neurosurgeon himself did not believe in psychoanalysis, Kroeber explained, but he had an open mind (A. L. Kroeber, personal interview, June 15, 1955).⁶

The head of the Stanford neurological clinic was in fact a neurologist doing spinal fluid studies, which could indeed have given the impression of doing surgery. His name was Henry G. Mehrtens (1885–1933), and he was also publishing at that time on infectious diseases of the nervous system.⁷

Kroeber went to the Stanford clinic three afternoons a week and was fed a range of patients. They included a wide variety of cases, and Kroeber...