“Cultural Psychodynamics” refers to several recent efforts to theorize and legitimize a psychoanalytic dimension in psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, two fields that foreground the entanglement of cultural, social, and psychological processes. This presentation focuses on central features of Groark ‘s (2019) and Mageo’s (2015) Cultural Psychodynamics (see also Hollan, 2022), and it compares and contrasts them to Kirschner’s Sociocultural Psychodynamics (2020, 2025). First, it considers all of these approaches in terms of assumptions, commitments, and goals that they share. (It also briefly differentiates them from Psychosocial Studies). Then it focuses on a tension inherent in Cultural Psychodynamics, as well as between that approach and Sociocultural Psychodynamics. This is a tension between the emphasis on cultural particularity that these approaches highlight and claim to favor, and the intimations of psychological universality that are also present in their frameworks.

Cultural Psychodynamics is a term used by several psychological anthropologists during the past 15 years. Psychoanalytic approaches have always been present in psychological anthropology, but there has also been ambivalence. This is due, in part, to concerns about how psychoanalytic theories have been applied to “other” cultures in reductionist, quasi-evolutionist, and pathologizing (or sometimes idealizing) ways. Since the 1970s, and especially in recent decades, some anthropologists (several of whom have received psychoanalytic training) have broadened and revised the nature and methodologies of psychodynamic interpretation in anthropology. These theorists assert that a psychoanalytic dimension is necessary in psychological anthropology, because the often-dominant “cultural models” and cultural phenomenology approaches lack a dynamic dimension that only a psychoanalytic perspective can provide. That dimension includes a model of the mind as comprised of forces in conflict with each other, as well as a need to attend to motives and feelings that are “not known” (typically called “unconscious,” but conceived here as being on a continuum with consciousness) by virtue of repression, disavowal, or other defenses. Distancing themselves from Freudian drive theory, and capitalizing on pervasive, post-Freudian directions in theory and practice, these theories draw heavily on object relations, relational, intersubjective, and sometimes Kleinian or Lacanian theories. An important goal of these approaches is to redress the ethnocentrism, “coloniality of knowledge,” and epistemic violence enacted or abetted by psychoanalytic perspectives and practices.

Sociocultural Psychodynamics (Kirschner, 2020, 2025) shares the same goals, and draws on some of the same sources, as Cultural Psychodynamics. It is strongly influenced by the work of the original “person-centered” anthropologists LeVine, Levy, and Hollan. But Sociocultural Psychodynamics also bears the influence by some sociological theorists such as Dennis Wrong and late-career Durkheim, and by affective neuroscientists who theorize core, universal emotions, such as Panksepp. As a psychologist, Kirschner’s immediate target is “the sociocultural turn,” including discursive and hermeneutic psychologies. These approaches are deemed incomplete for reasons similar to those voiced by psychodynamic anthropologists regarding what cultural models and phenomenological approaches lack. (Kirschner also makes related criticisms of hegemonic, empiricist cultural psychologies such as those of Grossmann, Heinrich, and Kitayama.)

After a brief summary of the assumptions and commitments shared by all of these approaches, the main focus of the talk is on a tension that is present both within Cultural Psychodynamics and between it and Sociocultural Psychodynamics. This tension exists because psychoanalytic approaches, almost by definition, assume that there are ubiquitous structural and substantive elements of psychic and social life. Yet the approaches discussed here also take seriously the view these that all psychological theories must begin with cultural particularities so as not to impose ethnocentric and colonialist theories and practices. To explore this tension, the rhetoric of both Cultural and Sociocultural Psychodynamics will be examined and contrasted. This is done in order to explore whether their apparently differing ways of negotiating this tension are primarily a matter of emphasis, or signal more substantive differences involving their ontological, epistemological, and philosophy-of-mind assumptions. This issue is also interesting because it parallels a broader set of questions regarding the tension between emancipatory theories’ commitments to universalist philosophies (e.g., Kantianism, critical theory, communicative rationality), on one hand, and calls for decolonization, indigeneity, or radical versions of the ontological turn, on the other.

The final section of the talk will consider these psychodynamic theories’ implications for critical praxis and sociopolitical engagement. Might they not suggest limitations when it comes to implementing some of our hopes for amelioration of these dark times? It will be argued that (even though they are decidedly anti-utopian) they might prove quite helpful for illuminating and addressing some aspects of our present situation(s), including polarization, resentment, the erosion of liberal-democratic institutions, and increasing inequities.