ABSTRACT
Claude Levi-Strauss—son of an artist and grandson of a rabbi—was born in Belgium in 1908. In 1939 he returned to France to serve in the army but left for New York after the fall of Paris. Here he taught at the New School for Social Research and, as a result of his friendship with Roman Jakobson, became interested in structural linguistics. He justifies the mixing of personal experience with intellectual interpretation by claiming geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism for his "three mistresses". Levi-Strauss' reading of Sigmund Freud leans toward the philosophical rather than the clinical. The Oedipus complex occupies a central position in Freudian theory, emerges as one of Levi-Strauss' universal structures. Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the first to attack Levi-Strauss. He considered Levi-Strauss' complex method of free association as a methodological tautology which demonstrated the truth of an idea simply by showing its connection to other ideas.
