"Thus, it is particularly interesting to note Kardiner’s critique of Freud. Kardiner was well versed in Boas’s opposition to the cultural evolutionism that Freud endorsed. On a visit to Vienna, Kardiner shared his misgivings about Freud’s postulated theory of the origin of culture with his analyst. Freud reportedly replied: “Oh, don’t take that too seriously. That’s something I dreamed up on a rainy Sunday afternoon” (Kardiner, 1977, p. 75)." Always good to be reminded that Freud often knew, and said, that he was just spitballing. Nowhere is that better analyzed than in Derrida's analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Leaving us with the question: how serious is not too serious but just serious enough?
For Frie, reductionism or reducing (and reification, although I think that's different) are bad, and its always the Freudians or the neo-Freudians or someone else who is doing them, guilty of them, and the interpersonal and cultural are complex and have "primacy" and are done by anthropologists and Sullivan and Fromm. Sounds like splitting to me. As though Frie's entire article isn't replete with reductive statements, explicit or implict, starting with the notion that culturalists are never reductive. So "reductive" marks some kind of resistance, resistance to seeing oneself as implicated in your own critique? First thing to ask is: when, say, Freud was saying something reductive, what was he actually saying? Maybe the reducer only sounds reductive to someone who thinks they are doing something other than that or beyond that.
And isn't Marcuse's critique of Fromm is that he is being reductive? What kind of primate is always determined to find or ascribe "primacy"? Something has to be first, the most important, the biggest, and that just happens to be the thing that *I* do or champion. Bit of narcissism to add to the splitting.
Tangled up with this is a reductive view of biology and biological matter: biology is fixed and invariant, only culture has difference. Geertz is quoted: there's no such thing as human nature outside of culture. Yeah sure fine. But there *are* human babies, and they may not be outside of culture when they are born, or at six months, or at three years, but neither are they in it or is it in them. How does the baby "get" culture, by what mechanism (go ahead, call me reductionist) does culture come to occupy us and we it, in all our cultural difference? Lots of talk about being "embedded" in culture, but not a lot of curiosity about: what kind of creature can get embedded in culture, or have culture introjected into it? Most primates, probably, looks like elephants and giraffes too -- birds? Bees and the "social insects"? Not in the same way, for sure, but we don;t get space for that question here: culture is given and it is a thing (despite being said to be dynamic and in process) and it is human.
You can take that whole paragraph Geertz is quoted in --
As I stated previously, culture is not a static entity that can be reified. Rather, culture exists as a process; it is inherently dynamic, participatory, and interactive and includes language, tradition, and heritage that is passed down across generations. Although the individual person can never be separated out of culture, neither can he or she be reduced to a mere representation of culture. As psychoanalysts, in short, we need to find a way to account for the role and place of lived psychological experience within culture. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 49) famously states, “[t]here is no such thing as human nature independent of culture.” (p390)
and swap in "biology" for "culture" --
As I stated previously, biology is not a static entity that can be reified. Rather, biology exists as a process; it is inherently dynamic, participatory, and interactive and includes language, tradition, and heritage that is passed down across generations. Although the individual person can never be separated out of biology, neither can he or she be reduced to a mere representation of biology. As psychoanalysts, in short, we need to find a way to account for the role and place of lived psychological experience within biology. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 49) Darwin famously states, “[t]here is no such thing as human nature independent of biology.”
-- well, that reads just fine to me. And which kind of belies the statement in the next paragraph, that "the view point I am describing rejects persisting Cartesian dualisms..." Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
Gadamer: yeah, that tracks. There's the whiff of conventionalism hanging over the whole thing -- Marcuse seems to have smelled it too. Like it's been Fried.