Kardiner, Abram (1891–1981)

Abram Kardiner was a psychiatrist and pioneering psychoanalyst who made major contributions to psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology as well as to his own professions. He was particularly interested in the psychological adaptation of the ego to war, society, oppression, and culture. Kardiner is best known in anthropology for his concepts of basic personality structure and projective systems.

Kardiner was born in 1891 in New York City. He received a BA from City College (New York) in 1912, then completed a year of medical school at Cornell University. He entered the PhD program in anthropology at Columbia University, studying under Franz Boas and Alexander Goldenweiser for a year before returning to finish his MD at Cornell in1914. Kardiner completed his internship and residency in psychiatry in New York City and joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In 1921 he went to Vienna for a six-month training analysis with Sigmund Freud, and also took the opportunity to attend lectures by Geza Roheim on psychoanalysis and anthropology. On his return to New York, Kardiner worked for a veterans hospital in the Bronx from 1922–1925,studying victims of “war neuroses” from World War I. He published The Traumatic Neuroses of War in 1941 and an updated version, War Stress and Neurotic Illness, in 1947. Kardiner is now credited with defining posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Kardiner co-founded the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1931, the first such training institute in the U.S. In 1933, the director, Sandor Rado, asked Kardiner to develop a course on the application of psychoanalysis to the study of culture. The first session had only two students, but the seminar eventually grew to a hundred and included many distinguished anthropologists. The standard practice was for an anthropologist to describe a culture; Kardiner would then analyze it in terms of his neo-Freudian ego psychology.

Ralph Linton came to Columbia in 1937 to replace Boas as chair of the anthropology department. Linton was introduced to Kardiner by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was a participant in the seminar and a former student of Linton. Linton joined the seminar and presented his studies of the Marquesans of the South Pacific and the Tanala and Betsileo of Madagascar for Kardiner's analysis.

Kardiner published his major contribution to anthropology, The Individual and His Society in 1939, with Linton as a contributor. This comprehensive, causal theory of the relationship between culture and personality is regarded by some as the seminal work in the “culture and personality” movement that eventually gave rise to the field of psychological anthropology, providing the theoretical basis for much cross-cultural research in the postwar years, beginning with Child Training and Personality by Whiting & Child (1953).

Kardiner postulated the existence of a basic personality structure (BPS)personality traits shared by members of a society as a result of common early experiences. This BPS included unconscious conflicts and anxieties that motivated behavior. He divided culture into primary institutions, which generated the BPS, and secondary institutions, which were expressions of the BPS. The primary institutions included older, more stable elements of a culture such as technology, economics, family structure, and child-training practices, while the secondary institutions included religion, ritual, folklore, mythology, taboos, and art. Secondary institutions were based on the psychological process of projection and served to satisfy unmet needs symbolically. Basically,Kardiner posited a congruence between childhood experiences and expressive culture, mediated by the BPS, the same kind of congruity that Freud identified between parents and gods in The Future of an Illusion.

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