Ethnopsychiatry

Summary

Ethnopsychiatry is the study of mental illness in its cultural context — how each society defines sanity and madness, shapes the content and form of psychiatric disorders, and provides or withholds the cultural resources that determine whether distress becomes illness. It differs from standard psychiatry by treating the cultural framework not as background noise but as a primary cause of both disorder and recovery. Where clinical psychiatry asks what is wrong with this person, ethnopsychiatry also asks what is wrong with this person’s world, and whether the diagnostic tools being used to answer that question were built for a different world entirely. At its best the field prevents a double error: the error of dismissing non-Western suffering as mere superstition, and the equal error of projecting Western categories onto experiences they were never designed to describe.

Definition and Scope

The term ethnopsychiatry was developed by the French-American psychiatrist and anthropologist george-devereux, whose 1980 collection Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry remains the field’s foundational theoretical statement. Devereux defined the field’s central problem as the precise determination of the boundary between normal and abnormal — an apparently simple task that turns out to be psychiatry’s hardest, because that boundary is drawn differently in every society.(George Devereux, 1980)

Ethnopsychiatry is sometimes used interchangeably with “transcultural psychiatry” or “cross-cultural psychiatry,” but the terms carry different emphases. Transcultural psychiatry, as practiced by psychiatrists such as Ezra Vogel and later Arthur Kleinman, tends to ask whether Western diagnostic categories apply universally — whether depression, schizophrenia, or anxiety disorder exist across cultures in recognizable form. Ethnopsychiatry as Devereux conceived it goes further: it asks how culture actively produces specific forms of disorder, not merely whether it modifies their expression. The unit of analysis shifts from the individual patient to the culture-individual system.

Kleinman’s later framework converges with Devereux on several key points: that psychiatric diagnostic categories are not neutral scientific instruments but outcomes of historical development, cultural influence, and political negotiation,(Arthur Kleinman, 1988) and that applying one culture’s categories to another culture’s patients without establishing validity there constitutes what Kleinman named the “category fallacy.”(Arthur Kleinman, 1988) Both traditions agree that the course of schizophrenia is demonstrably better in less technologically complex societies — a finding that had no adequate biological explanation in 1988 and still does not.(Arthur Kleinman, 1988) Yet cross-cultural research remained, in Kleinman’s assessment, actively marginalized within mainstream psychiatry: treated as merely exotic, its findings regarded as peripheral to the field’s core concerns.(Arthur Kleinman, 1988) The anthropological perspective Kleinman was defending holds that mental illnesses, while genuinely real, emerge from a mediating dialectic between social structure and personal experience rather than from fixed natural givens.(Arthur Kleinman, 1988)

Historical Development

Devereux trained as both an anthropologist (under Alfred Kroeber at the University of California) and a psychoanalyst, positions that placed him at the intersection of the two disciplines he spent his career trying to unite. His foundational fieldwork was among the Mohave people of the American Southwest, and he returned repeatedly to Mohave case material throughout his career as a kind of controlled depth study. The ergodic principle he articulated — that a single culture studied in sufficient depth yields the same range of theoretical insight as a cross-sectional survey of many cultures — was both a methodological justification for that choice and a broader claim about the structure of human behavior.(George Devereux, 1980)

His intellectual debts were explicit and acknowledged. From Ralph Linton he took the concept of “patterns of misconduct” — the cultural directives that tell members of a society not only what is forbidden but, implicitly, how to transgress in the culturally expected way.(George Devereux, 1980) From Kroeber and Linton together he took a sober, anti-romantic assessment of the shaman: not a spiritual master whose madness is healthy on its own terms but a severe neurotic or psychotic in temporary remission, adjusted to a marginal role without having resolved the underlying conflicts that drove him to it.(George Devereux, 1980) This position placed him directly against Erwin Ackerknecht’s influential “autonormality” thesis, which held that the shaman was normal by the standards of his own society and therefore could not be considered pathological.

Devereux’s answer to Ackerknecht distinguished cultural adjustment from psychiatric normality. A person can be adjusted to a culturally recognized position — even an institutionalized one — while remaining clinically ill. The shaman’s conflicts are real; they differ from the private neurotic’s only in that they are located in what Devereux called the ethnic unconscious rather than the idiosyncratic unconscious, and are expressed through culturally provided channels rather than improvised symptoms.(George Devereux, 1980) This also means the shaman’s apparent “cure” is not genuine recovery but conventionalized repatterning. The patient who received shamanistic treatment, recovered, and became a shaman himself simply shifted from idiosyncratic to culturally conventional conflicts without gaining any real insight or developing the capacity for sublimation. When subjected to fresh strain, the shaman-patient does not evolve a new neurosis but experiences a new breakthrough of the same old conflicts.(George Devereux, 1980)

Behind Kroeber (and behind Linton’s concept of cultural patterns) stands the foundational figure of Franz Boas, whose 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man established the intellectual preconditions for the entire field. Boas demonstrated that the organization of mind is practically identical across all human groups, its manifestations shaped by social environment rather than racial endowment (Boas, Franz, 1911). Without this demonstration — that cultural categories cannot be ranked on a single evolutionary scale — cross-cultural psychiatry would have remained trapped within the Victorian assumption that non-Western mental phenomena were simply primitive versions of Western psychology. Kleinman’s category fallacy and Devereux’s metacultural framework are both intellectually downstream of Boas’s relativism.

The field also drew on a broader tradition of psychoanalytic anthropology associated with Géza Róheim and Bronisław Malinowski, and on the French sociological school of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, whose insistence that cultural categories are identical with the fundamental categories of human thought became the philosophical basis for Devereux’s concept of metacultural psychotherapy.(George Devereux, 1980)

Core Concepts

The Ethnic Unconscious

One of Devereux’s most original contributions is the distinction between two layers of the unconscious. The idiosyncratic unconscious is produced by individual trauma — the private psychodynamic material particular to one person’s history. The ethnic unconscious, by contrast, is the portion of the unconscious that an individual shares with most members of their cultural community: material that each generation is taught to repress in accordance with the prevailing culture’s demands, transmitted not biologically (as Jung’s “racial unconscious” was allegedly transmitted) but through cultural learning.(George Devereux, 1980) The ethnic unconscious changes as culture changes. This distinction explains why two people in the same society can have very different personal symptoms while sharing a common structural vulnerability, and why the diagnostic challenge is never simply individual but always simultaneously cultural.

The Four-Disorder Typology

Devereux proposed four ethnopsychiatric categories of personality disorder, organized by the source of their determining conditions: type disorders, ethnic disorders, sacred disorders, and idiosyncratic disorders.(George Devereux, 1980)

1. Type disorders — determined by the type of social structure; they establish the fundamental nosological range into which real psychiatric disorders will fall in a given kind of society.(George Devereux, 1980)
2. Ethnic disorders — determined by the specific culture pattern of a group; they give distinctive form to whichever type disorder prevails, so that an aggressive brief psychotic episode (bouffée délirante) becomes an amok attack among the Malay or a Crazy Dog syndrome among the Crow.(George Devereux, 1980) Devereux catalogued a range of such syndromes including amok, latah, berserk, imu, windigo, and the heartbreak syndrome of the Mohave.(George Devereux, 1980)
3. Sacred disorders — disorders of the shamanistic type, located in the ethnic unconscious and expressed through ritualized, conventionally available channels rather than improvised symptoms.(George Devereux, 1980)
4. Idiosyncratic disorders — disorders whose form and content are determined primarily by individual psychology rather than cultural patterning, and which are therefore predictable only through deep knowledge of the individual patient rather than through cultural expectation.(George Devereux, 1980)

Ethnic Disorder versus Type Disorder

The distinction between ethnic and type disorders allows Devereux to account simultaneously for cross-cultural universality and cultural specificity in psychopathology. Type disorders arise from universal features of social organization — every society has some version of neurosis and psychosis, some equivalent of acute and chronic breakdown — because the basic social conditions that produce conflict are universal. But the specific cultural pattern intervenes to give each society’s version its distinctive form, its named syndromes, its etiology theories, and its symptom progressions.(George Devereux, 1980) Culture, in Devereux’s phrase, tells its members not only “don’t go crazy” but also “if you do, go about it in this manner.”(George Devereux, 1980)

Cultural Patterning and Predictability

The chief consequence of cultural patterning is that ethnic disorders are predictable in cultural terms. Given knowledge of the society’s “patterns of misconduct,” a clinician can anticipate the direction of a patient’s breakdown before it occurs. This predictability is qualitatively different from the predictability of idiosyncratic disorders, which requires detailed knowledge of the individual. In the ethnic psychotic, the predictable segment of behavior is the segment shared by any ethnic psychotic of the same type; in the idiosyncratic case, there is no such template.(George Devereux, 1980)

An ethnic psychosis or neurosis, Devereux specifies, meets two criteria: the underlying conflict is shared by most normal people in the society, with the patient differing only in intensity; and the symptoms are not invented by the patient but furnished ready-made by the cultural milieu as patterns of misconduct.(George Devereux, 1980) The patient, in other words, is “like everyone — but more intensely so than anyone else.”

The Normal-Abnormal Problem

Culture Defines Normality, But Not Without Limits

Devereux argues that every culture defines its own boundary between normal and abnormal, but insists that this cultural relativity does not extend to the criteria of psychiatric normality itself. The psychiatric criteria — emotional maturity, reality testing, rationality, and the capacity for sublimation — are in his view absolute and culturally nonrelative. They are independent of any particular society’s norms, identical instead with the criteria for Culture as a universal human phenomenon.(George Devereux, 1980) This position separates Devereux from cultural relativists who would judge sanity entirely by local standards.

What the cultural relativists miss, Devereux argues, is the difference between cultural belief and personal subjective experience. The shaman is not abnormal because he shares his tribe’s beliefs about spirits; he is abnormal because, in his case alone, those beliefs are transformed for neurotic reasons into subjective delusional experiences — a conversion that his fellow tribespeople who share the same beliefs do not undergo.(George Devereux, 1980)

The same culturally relativistic error appears in psychiatric assessments of trauma. Clinical thinking tends to evaluate traumatic impact by absolute intensity alone, ignoring whether the culture surrounding the event provides a “mass-produced” defense for buffering it. Stress becomes trauma only when it is atypical, or when the culture furnishes no ready-made resources for absorbing and redirecting the blow. Two individuals experiencing an identical event in different societies can therefore sustain categorically different psychiatric outcomes, not because of any difference in resilience but because of differences in what their respective cultures make available to them.(George Devereux, 1980)

Nuclear Schizophrenia and Intact Primitive Societies

One of Devereux’s most striking empirical claims, advanced as early as 1939, is that true or nuclear schizophrenia is practically absent among intact primitive societies that have not been subjected to brutal acculturation.(George Devereux, 1980) He further argued that what Occidental psychiatrists sometimes diagnose as schizophrenia in members of intact traditional cultures is often a misdiagnosis, supporting a sociological rather than purely organic etiology.(George Devereux, 1980)

The sociological theory of schizophrenia that follows holds that schizophrenia’s frequency is functionally related to cultural richness and structural complexity: modern civilization demands orientation in a social environment that no individual can comprehend as a whole, creating a structural gap between cultural complexity and individual capacity that primitive societies do not face.(George Devereux, 1980) The primitive knows all the trees of a sparsely wooded island; modern man knows, at most, all the trees of a small section of a densely wooded continent.(George Devereux, 1980) A 1979 addendum to that argument notes a clinical consequence: a laborer from an underdeveloped country who experiences a bouffée délirante at home — where it resolves in days — may, if hospitalized in an industrialized country, have that transient episode stabilize into chronic schizophrenia through institutional context alone.(George Devereux, 1980) The mechanism connecting cultural complexity to individual breakdown runs partly through paradox: modern society simultaneously demands incompatible ends (social success and sexual popularity) while prohibiting the means of achieving them, generating conditions that Devereux, writing in 1939, identified as schizophrenogenic, and which he noted anticipate by two decades what Bateson would later formalize as the double-bind.(George Devereux, 1980)

Kleinman’s independent cross-cultural research confirmed the empirical pattern: the course of schizophrenia is better in less technologically developed societies and worse in the most technologically advanced ones — a finding, he observed, still without adequate explanation in the biological literature.(Arthur Kleinman, 1988)

Schizophrenia as Western Ethnic Psychosis

Devereux’s most provocative extension of this argument, developed in a 1965 essay, holds that schizophrenia is not merely more common in modern Western civilization but is that civilization’s dominant ethnic psychosis — the culturally furnished pattern of misconduct through which conflicted Westerners express their distress, in the same way that hysteria was the dominant ethnic neurosis of the nineteenth century.(George Devereux, 1980) He identifies eight specific schizoid traits systematically encouraged by Occidental culture — withdrawal, affective absence in sexuality, segmentalism, dereism, blurring of reality and imagination, infantilism, fixation and regression, and depersonalization — and argues that these traits are culturally taught outside the psychiatric hospital and become overtly schizophrenic within it.(George Devereux, 1980)

This framing carries a clinical implication: schizophrenia is almost incurable not because it has an organic basis but because its principal symptoms are encouraged by some of modern civilization’s most powerful, if dysfunctional, cultural values — and because the psychiatrists charged with treating it share those same cultural values, giving them blind spots that are just as limiting as their idiosyncratic countertransference reactions.(George Devereux, 1980) A comparative datum sharpens the argument: the bouffée délirante that occurs in a primitive social setting resolves rapidly precisely because the schizophrenic pattern is not recognized there as a “pattern of misconduct.” Without a culturally furnished mold to stabilize the episode, it cannot become chronic. It is the availability of the schizophrenic model as a socially recognized form of breakdown — not the underlying idiosyncratic conflict — that enables the disorder to persist.(George Devereux, 1980)

Methodological Principles

Complementarity

The central methodological principle of ethnopsychiatry is what Devereux calls complementarity, borrowing from Niels Bohr’s principle in quantum physics. Psychoanalysis and anthropology yield complementary, not additive, insights into human behavior: there is a Heisenberg-type indeterminacy relationship between them, such that the deeper one analyzes in psychoanalytic terms, the less one can simultaneously analyze in ethnological terms, and vice versa.(George Devereux, 1980) This is not a failure but a structural feature of any science of distinctively human phenomena. The two frameworks study the same person from two irreducible angles, neither of which reduces to the other. “Psychoanalysis and anthropology must hang together lest they hang separately,” Devereux concludes; together they constitute the last bulwark of the concept of man as an end in himself.(George Devereux, 1980) Underlying this unity is a distinction Devereux draws between humanization and ethnicization: the infant’s acquisition of Culture per se — the transformation from an immature specimen of the genus Homo into a human being — occurs simultaneously with but must be distinguished from the acquisition of a specific culture such as Sioux or Eskimo, and only psychoanalysis, which studies the distinctively human psyche rather than particular cultural content, is adequate as an anthropological foundation.(George Devereux, 1980)

The complementarity principle also applies within cultural research itself. Devereux argues that studying a single culture in depth yields the same theoretical range and typology as cross-sectional study of many cultures — that the elements eliminated from the breadth of observable behavior inevitably reappear when remaining elements are studied in depth.(George Devereux, 1980) This ergodic claim justifies his lifelong intensive focus on Mohave material while making claims about universal human psychology.

Countertransference as Data

A distinctive methodological contribution of ethnopsychiatry is the insistence that the observer’s emotional reactions to fieldwork material — what psychoanalysis calls countertransference — are not obstacles to be suppressed but primary data about the culture under study. Devereux formalized this in his book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967), arguing that behavioral scientists routinely distort their data not through personal pathology but through the anxiety produced by the subject matter’s proximity to their own unconscious conflicts. Managing that anxiety productively, by using it as a signal rather than suppressing it, is a core ethnopsychiatric research skill.

The practical consequence for cross-cultural therapy is that the analyst must resolve not only personal emotional conflicts but cultural ones.(George Devereux, 1980) No analyst is fully analyzed, Devereux argues, until she is aware not only of her idiosyncratic oedipal problems but also of the ways her specific culture structures and encourages particular dynamics.(George Devereux, 1980)

The Diagnostic Process

In a 1963 essay on primitive psychiatric diagnosis, Devereux proposes a general theory of how any society — primitive or modern — determines that someone is mentally ill. The key move is from negative determination (“Mr. X is non-normal”) to positive attribution (“Mr. X is yes-insane”): madness is not merely a statistical deviation but an achieved social status, granted to an individual by society after he exhibits certain defined behaviors.(George Devereux, 1980) The first step in any diagnostic process is the recognition of a “singularity” — something objectively or subjectively different, either on the temporal curve of the individual’s own history (change from a baseline) or on the spatial curve of the society’s behavioral norms.(George Devereux, 1980)

Within that singularity-recognition step, Devereux draws a distinction with direct clinical weight: whether the recognition originates as self-diagnosis (“something is wrong with me”) or as social attribution (“something is wrong with you”). This difference, largely overlooked in fieldwork, maps onto the classical neurosis-psychosis boundary by insight — the neurotic retains some capacity for self-diagnosis; the psychotic typically does not.(George Devereux, 1980)

This analysis anticipates later sociological work on labeling and stigma: once a patient is granted the status of madman, her behavior is interpreted differently — behaviors that would be unremarked in another person become confirmations of madness.(George Devereux, 1980) Psychiatric symptoms, Devereux observes, must be conspicuously at variance with the mores if they are to gratify the patient’s socially negativistic needs; the psychiatric patient is therefore a “social trouble unit” who acquires a social mass — a power to attract attention and compel responses — that he lacked before the onset of illness.(George Devereux, 1980)

A boundary condition for Devereux’s methodology is that societies and cultures cannot themselves be “diagnosed” in psychiatric terms.(George Devereux, 1980) However, certain social processes can be interpreted psychodynamically, particularly mass eruptions that defy cultural tradition and cannot be channeled into existing patterns of activity.(George Devereux, 1980)

Metacultural Psychotherapy

Underlying Devereux’s clinical theory is a model of behavior organized along four axes: biological, experiential (habitual), cultural, and neurotic. Neurosis and psychosis are not disintegrations but “frantic and inappropriate reorganizations,” compromises among these four systems that seek to maintain the emotional status quo at the expense of ego-function. The external world is kept coherent, but only by sacrificing the ego’s own structure to the task.(George Devereux, 1980)

Devereux’s practical therapeutic goal is a “metacultural” or “culturally neutral” psychotherapy based not on the content of any particular culture but on an understanding of the nature of Culture per se — on insight into what cultural categories are and how they function in any human psyche.(George Devereux, 1980) Such a therapy would enable a psychiatrist to work with patients from radically different cultural backgrounds by engaging with the cultural level of their experience without being limited to the specific content of any one tradition. This is, he acknowledges, still a work in progress. The foundational requirement is that the therapist recognize the supplementary cultural meaning of a patient’s symbolic acts, not ignoring it in favor of depth interpretations that may be technically “truer” but therapeutically premature.(George Devereux, 1980)

Culture is, in Devereux’s framework, primarily a standardized system of defenses linked chiefly to ego functions.(George Devereux, 1980) It does not constrict behavior but expands it, substituting massive impulse-driven responses with specific, goal-adapted ones.(George Devereux, 1980) A healthy society promotes individualization and differentiation; a sick society suppresses them in favor of dedifferentiation and conformity.(George Devereux, 1980)

The psychotic case presents a special problem for this framework. What the schizophrenic “word salad” represents, in Devereux’s analysis, is not complexity but its opposite: discourse that has ceased to be interpersonal communication and become private self-expression. Words are used as emotional vocalizations for drives organized along non-cultural and therefore non-verbal axes, instinctual content that cannot be put into culturally shared language precisely because it has been stripped of the social context that gives language meaning.(George Devereux, 1980) The implication for treatment is that reenculturation of the psychotic cannot begin at the cultural level. First a rudimentary object relationship must be established by entering the patient’s psychotic world, a controlled folie à deux that deprives the psychosis of its purely private character, before any resocialization can occur, and only after that does genuine reenculturation become possible.(George Devereux, 1980)

Relationship to Japanese Therapies

The methodological challenge of ethnopsychiatry — how to study cultural phenomena from inside rather than outside — appears in a different form in David Reynolds’s The Quiet Therapies (1985), a comparative study of five Japanese psychotherapies including Morita therapy and naikan. Reynolds adopted what he called a triple-role methodology: observer, patient, and therapist. By undergoing the therapies himself as well as studying and administering them, he attempted to counterbalance the biases inherent in any single perspective.(Reynolds, 1985)

The epistemological justification for this method is a concept Reynolds found in Japanese therapeutic culture: taiken, or fundamental body-based experience.(Reynolds, 1985) Japanese practitioners, Reynolds reports, distrust intellectual knowledge of their methods when it is not supported by direct lived experience.(Reynolds, 1985) [GAP: claim about resonance with Devereux is not supported by cited cards.]

Reynolds further articulates what he calls “phenomenological operationalism”: the Japanese therapists define therapeutic experiences operationally — by specifying exactly how to arrive at them — rather than through abstract categorical definitions. The naikan therapist tells the client: meditate in this particular way, reflecting on how much others have done for you and how little you have returned, and the result will be a specific mixed experience of guilt and gratitude.(Reynolds, 1985) This methodology stands in contrast to what Reynolds identifies as a characteristically Western tendency toward analytic categorization, or the breaking of experience into either-or categories that cannot capture the mixture, flux, and multiplicity of actual human states.(Reynolds, 1985)

The relevance to ethnopsychiatry is methodological: Reynolds’s taiken and phenomenological operationalism represent an alternative epistemology for cross-cultural psychiatric research — one in which embodied knowledge, not detached observation, is the primary credential, and in which therapeutic outcomes are defined operationally rather than categorically. This approach sidesteps the category fallacy that Kleinman identifies as the central danger of cross-cultural psychiatric research, while also providing a model of comparative study that is genuinely participant rather than extractive.

The Globalization of American Diagnostic Categories

Devereux’s theoretical framework — which predicted that specific forms of mental illness are culturally furnished, that type disorders will assume different ethnic forms in different societies, and that acculturation destroys indigenous illness categories — received dramatic empirical confirmation in the decades following his death. Ethan Watters’s Crazy Like Us (2010) documents four case studies of American psychiatric categories displacing local illness models in Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, and Japan.

The mechanism Watters identifies is not simply cultural diffusion but active export: “Over the past thirty years, we Americans have been industriously exporting our ideas about mental illness. Our definitions and treatments have become the international standard.”(Watters, Ethan, 2010) The DSM has become a worldwide standard, giving American cultural assumptions about the mind global authority through professional training programs, prestigious journals, and pharmaceutical marketing.(Watters, Ethan, 2010) This process carries implicit cultural assumptions about human nature — including beliefs about emotional fragility, the superiority of verbal expression over stoic silence, and the primacy of biomedical treatment — that are presented as universal scientific truths rather than culturally situated values.(Watters, Ethan, 2010)

Watters’s evidence supports one of Devereux’s most contested claims: that all mental illnesses, including apparently obvious categories like depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia, are shaped by cultural beliefs and expectations as much as the so-called exotic culture-bound syndromes — the amok, koro, and zar that the DSM-IV relegates to a back-page appendix as if they were psychiatric curiosities.(Watters, Ethan, 2010)(Watters, Ethan, 2010) The practical consequence is the destruction of indigenous illness diversity. Watters compares cross-cultural psychiatrists to “psychology’s version of botanists in the rain forest, desperate to document the diversity while staying only a few steps ahead of the bulldozers.”(Watters, Ethan, 2010)

The four case studies document different mechanisms of category displacement. In Hong Kong, Sing Lee found that Chinese anorexia had taken a distinctive non-fat-phobic form until media coverage of a patient’s death in 1994 imported the Western symptom template; within years, the local variant disappeared.(Watters, Ethan, 2010) In Sri Lanka, Western PTSD frameworks were imposed on tsunami survivors by well-meaning international aid organizations, overriding local Buddhist idioms of distress. In Zanzibar, biomedical models of schizophrenia displaced spirit-possession frameworks that had produced better social outcomes. In Japan, GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing campaign created the category kokoro no kaze (“cold of the soul”) to sell antidepressants in a society that had no equivalent of the Western concept of mild depression as a medical condition.

See Also

• george-devereux — psychiatrist-anthropologist who founded the field
• culture-bound-syndromes — the ethnic disorders Devereux classified
• morita-therapy — Japanese psychotherapy and Reynolds’s taiken methodology
• naikan-therapy — Japanese reflective therapy and phenomenological operationalism
• medical-anthropology — broader field from which ethnopsychiatry draws
• psychoanalysis — theoretical framework Devereux combines with anthropology
• normal-and-pathological — the philosophical problem at the center of the field
• illness-disease-distinction — Kleinman’s framework for cultural variation in diagnosis
• shamanism — Devereux’s case study for the sacred disorder category

Sources

Primary Sources Cited

• Devereux, George. Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry. Translated by Basia Miller Gulati and George Devereux. University of Chicago Press, 1980. [devereux-basicproblemsethnopsychiatry-1980]

  • Chapter 1, “Normal and Abnormal” (1956)
  • Chapter 2, “Ethnopsychiatry as a Frame of Reference in Clinical Research and Practice” (1952)
  • Chapter 9, “A Sociological Theory of Schizophrenia” (1939)
  • Chapter 10, “Schizophrenia: An Ethnic Psychosis” (1965)
  • Chapter 12, “Masochistic Blackmail” (1964)
  • Chapter 13, “Primitive Psychiatric Diagnosis” (1963)
  • Chapter 14, “Pathogenic Dreams in Non-Western Societies” (1966)
  • Chapter 15, “Cultural Factors in Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1953)
  • Chapter 16, “Psychoanalysis as Anthropological Field Work” (1957)

• Reynolds, David K. The Quiet Therapies: Japanese Pathways to Personal Growth. University of Hawaii Press, 1985. [reynolds-quiettherapies-1985]

  • Preface and Introduction

• Kleinman, Arthur. Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience. Free Press, 1988. [kleinman-rethinkingpsychiatry-1988]

  • Preface / Prologue; Chapter 1, “What Is a Psychiatric Diagnosis”