The Role of Cultural Factors in Paranoid Psychosis Among the Yoruba Tribe

Abstract

It is certainly noteworthy that, during the last few decades, whatever the contributory forces, more and more emphasis is being placed on the contention that man is a social being and that his individuality as a person is meaningful only in terms of his relations with others. Mead (1947) has shown that man as a social being is subjected “throughout his entire individual existence to systematic cultural pressures” which reinforce or intensify, elaborate or suppress his psycho-biological potentialities in a way which not only refutes the false belief in the uniformity of human behaviour but reveals also its most extreme types.