ABSTRACT
Over the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, the authoritarian tendencies of the traditional structures of psychoanalysis, like the colonial influences of early anthropology with which they are linked, have increasingly come under question, and alternative forms of conceiving both the analytic encounter and the knowledge it generates have been taking shape. Contemporary anthropology now distances itself not only from its colonial ancestry but from the positivism of earlier social science approaches—attempts to ground knowledge of social worlds in the observation, measurement and quantification of elements of human behavior. Current anthropology requires that its practitioners "place their own reality in jeopardy" in their intercultural encounters; psychoanalysis now looks for "a willingness on the part of the analyst continually to question his or her own participation, an openness to criticism and self-reflection".
