The name Géza Raheim is not as well known as others in the world of psychoanalysis; however, he is one of the brightest representatives of this current, in fact Sigmund Freud himself stated that this researcher was one of the few who managed to push the boundaries of psychoanalysis and culture, in addition to what was raised in the great book Totem e Tabu.
Géza is considered the father of psychoanalytic anthropology, he is also admired for making rigorous recordings in his field work, made with ancestral communities in Australia and North America, it is this same rigor that, over time, has given him a privileged place in the history of psychoanalysis.
- “How many doors would have been closed to me if the eternal beings of sleep.
- The altjiranga mitjina.
- Had not given me the keys several times!?-Géza Róheim-.
Géza Raheim’s masterpiece is titled Psychanalysis and Antropology, which managed to apply Freudian principles to understanding culture, something many of his contemporaries considered a mistake, but the strength of approaches in The City has cleared all doubts about the hour.
Géza was born in Budapest, Hungary, in September 1891, unlike many other pioneers of psychoanalysis, had a very happy childhood, was the only child of a family of Jewish merchants, who surrounded him with love and affection, his grandfather lived for him and expressed an interest in popular myths and legends.
When Geza was only 8 years old he read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last Mohican, this approach to primitive cultures fascinated him from the very beginning, since then he has begun to read everything he could find on the subject and quickly became an expert.
He was a cheerful and dynamic person who divided his time between the books of mythology and ethnography and his taste for good table and sport. In 1914 he graduated as a geographer. He then continued his training in Leipzig and Berlin, where he came into contact with psychoanalysis through the work of Otto Rank.
Géza Raheim said the discovery of Freud’s work was absolutely revealing to him, he felt that all his knowledge was like separate and scattered pieces, psychoanalysis was the theoretical framework that allowed him to organize and make sense to many of his observations and knowledge.
He also did psychoanalysis, first with Sandor Ferenczi and then with Wilma Kovacks, he was initially heavily influenced by Melanie Klein’s work, however, he then went straight into Freud’s work and varied some of his concepts, akin to classical psychoanalysis. He met himself in 1918.
Since then, the work has focused on a psychoanalytic interpretation of cultural and social phenomena, his work was neither analytical nor theoretical, but was based on his coexistence with ancestral communities, with whom he acquired great empathy and affection.
Géza has published several large-format works, such as psychoanalysis and anthropology mentioned above, The Enigma of Sphinx, Magic and Schizophrenia, and The Doors of Dreams. His work was originally written in Hungarian and was quickly translated into English and French. a small part of his work is in Spanish.
He presented that the myths and legends of indigenous peoples have a similar structure to that of individual dreams; From this point of view, these cultural productions could also be analyzed as a dream; Likewise, he presented serious evidence that the Oedipus complex, postulated by Freud, is universal, that is, it is present in all times and cultures.
At the time, it was one of the great contradictions of famous anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, who questioned their interest in showing the particularities of each culture, making people believe that there were great differences between them. the opposite was true: universal elements far exceeded circumstantial specificities.
He died in the United States in 1953, two months after the death of his wife, which he loved very much.