ABSTRACT
The reactions and misunderstandings running through Rivers' relationship with psychoanalysis would prefigure the future problems in the debate, and might be seen as constituting a sort of "primal paradigm" of it. This chapter explores the Jacques Lacan's relationship to the social sciences based on two books by Markos Zafiropoulos, his Lacan et les sciences sociales and his Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, or the Return to Freud. Charles Gabriel Seligman played a major role in establishing dialogue between anthropologists and psychoanalysts, especially in a context hostile to psychoanalysis. Seligman was one of the very first to draw the question of the field into the anthropology/psychoanalysis debate. Sigmund Freud was both enticed by the distinction between latent and manifest content and sceptical about certain points, such as the role accorded to infantile sexuality. In Geza Roheim's view, people always remained as anxious children; thus the link is established with the Kleinian conception of children's anxiety.
