ABSTRACT
Contradictions became an important organizing idea for me when I was trying to understand Mormonism. Originally, I got the notion from Jean Paul Dumont, my friend of many years, who taught it to me from his understanding of Levi-Strauss. Oppositions are a necessary human conceptual tool, and within them, so is the ability to make a whole out of resolving contradictions by finding the mediating category used in a culture. However, in Freud, oppositions are seen with equal productivity when called contradictions, a term meaning opposites that produce a neurosis if not resolved. The idea is that there will inevitably be clashing desires, goals, even facts in a person or in a culture that can lead to opposites that must be resolved, or dysfunction or neurotic conflict will happen.
