Social Anthropology in Relation to Psychiatry

Abstract

The relationship between psychopathology and culture remains a vexed question. Whilst organic reactions (and by extension the ‘functional’ psychoses) can be conveniently coded in terms of an invariate biologically determinedformand a culturally variablecontent,the same is not true of those reactions which we might feel are characteristic of Western society: agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa, self-poisoning, Briquet's syndrome or the chronic pain syndromes. When cultural explanations are offered, however, they usually employ naive and implicit anthropological assumptions, and it is perhaps only the phenomenon of conversion hysteria in the nineteenth century which has been adequately related to its social context (Ellenberger, 1970).