ABSTRACT
A historical explanation is necessary in order to understand the change and the nascent socio-anthropological relativism's need to make claims and assert itself. Anthropologists, particularly those active in the historical debate, seemed to have reduced psychoanalysis to a purely speculative theory – aspiring to make universalist claims – and fundamentally ethnocentric. The contemporary relativist perspective of anthropologists contrasts with the universalist perspective of psychoanalysis. André Green maintained that in psychoanalysis there is not only a theory of the clinical, but a clinical thought, meaning a specific, original mode of rationality derived from practical experience. The epistemological foundations of Sigmund Freud's creation would be threefold in nature: monist, physicalist, and agnostic. Didier Anzieu and René Kaës made a considerable contribution to the development of group psychoanalysis, a discipline shedding invaluable light on the unconscious aspects of collective products and formations, which could considerably enrich psychoanalytical anthropology.
