ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the collaboration between U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis and Mexican psychoanalysts. Based on archival research of files containing typed transcriptions of Oscar Lewis’s weekly consultative meetings with the founding members of the Asociación Mexicana de Psicoanálisis available at the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign, among other sources, this chapter traces the influence of Mexican psychoanalysis in shaping Lewis’s views on anthropology and on the controversial concept of the culture of poverty. The collaboration between Lewis and Mexican analysts calls attention to mainstream psychoanalysis’s inattention to the psychological dimensions of poverty, points to potential theoretical and methodological innovations in exploring the impact of social context on psychological identity, and alludes to the dynamic connections between psychoanalysis and anthropology–as well as between the United States and Mexico.
