Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996); How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy, by Maurice E. F. Bloch (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, by Ian Hacking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Extract

The title of this essay is inspired by Melford Spiro's “Whatever Happened to the Id?” (1979), in which he critiqued structural and symbolic theories of culture that denied Freudian universals such as sexuality and aggression. In some ways, there might be no connections between the Id and the Soul. The Id is associated with the writings of Freud while the history of the concept of the Soul links us to classical Greek philosophy and early Christian philosophers.