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To introduce the review of these two books I should like to present some pertinent observations by Karen Horney. In 1937, in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, she observed that “neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experiences, but also by the specific cultural conditions under which we live.” In her chapter, “Cultural and Psychological Implications of Neurosis,” she further commented that “the conception of what is normal not only varies with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.” Thus she believed that a certain group, imposing standards of behavior and feeling on its members, determined what was considered normal. Each culture then clung to the belief that its own feelings and drives were the correctly “normal” ones. In order to be clearer about what was considered normal or neurotic in any given culture we must understand the influences of that particular culture on an individual. Horney recognized a difference between “normal” cultural fears common to all within that culture and neurotic fears that deviated from the cultural pattern. The former, caused by external dangers, certain social relationships, and cultural traditions, were warded off by a variety of protective devices. The taboos of one group might even be the accepted practices of another. The latter fears, deviating both in degree and quality from the cultural pattern, are caused both by interpersonal clashes and intra-psychic difficulties and entail much more suffering. At that time Horney defined a neurosis as a psychic disturbance brought about by fears and defenses against these fears and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies. She considered the disturbance a neurosis when it deviated from the common cultural pattern.
Marvin K. Opler, an anthropologist with a vast knowledge of cultural anthropology and a considerable understanding of psychodynamics, from many frames of reference, has written Culture, Psychiatry, a