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Luhrmann (1998) provides a comparative piece on the overlaps and divergences between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Both fields look at an underlying human essence and the human experience. However, Luhrmann argues that the morals and underlying orientations of the two fields are different, therefore producing different academic cultures of research and discourse. Below were some helpful quotes for understanding this piece: 449 - “Anthropology and psychoanalysis are not unalike. The task of each is to understand other human lives. Their practitioners have trained for years.

“The struggle that anthropologists and psychoanalysts have in common, then, is the struggle to come to terms with a sense of partial failure.”“Anthropologists and analysts are usually interested in the experience of the chess-playing, and yet it is not clear that an analyst/anthropologist of mediocre chess ability can ever understand the experience of a profoundly skilled player”-exactly; the patient will only be treated as good as the analyst, but what makes a good analyst, and what are the constant limitations?“The authors of Writing Culture ask how the fact that anthropologists write eth

"the paradox of human knowing: that the more we understand a person, the more acutely we become aware of the ways in which we do not know him or her. The struggle that anthropologists and psychoanalysts have in common, then, is the struggle to come to terms with a sense of partial failure" (450)"Analysts and anthropologists want to know what it is like to think like the other person, to assume that person's analogies, play in her/his idioms, anticipate her/his startlement" (450)"The analysts, of course, have also a therapeutic aim, which the anthropologists, at least explicitly, do not.