You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This study in ethno-psychiatry is concerned primarily with the particular form of folk psychiatry developed in connection with the Mexican-American group. The author first gives some sketchy historical facts followed by a socio-psychological description of this subculture. He attempts to demonstrate the existence of a polarization between the Mexican-Americans and their Anglo-American counterparts. He summarizes such polarization partly using the concept of Lyle Saunders: “The Mexican-American culture derived from a rural folk background that was little influenced by the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Industrial Revolution.” The Mexican-American has “a high regard for authority, adheres to tradition, a philosophy of acceptance and resignation and a sacred orientation. Americans, on the other hand, value achievement and success, activity and work, a pragmatic moral orientation, humanitarian ism (as opposed to form, pomp, role-playing), equality of opportunity (as opposed to the patron system), freedom (as opposed to bondage of children to parents), science (as opposed to magic), secular rationality (as opposed to traditionalism), democracy, nationalism, patriotism, and individual personality (as opposed to a group-centered orientation).”
These divergent values are held responsible in the genesis of some of the emotional disturbances encountered in the Mexican-American. Descriptions are given of some of the predicaments he suffers when attracted by the “Anglo culture” with its promise of material improvement at the cost of betraying some of his own cultural values. However, no particular illness or syndrome is described as typically originating from these cultural dilemmas.
The author indicates that the folk illnesses arise from the inner contradictions uncovered in his studies of family dynamics of the Mexican-American subculture. Relying heavily on orthodox psychoanalytic theory, he describes such dynamics in the following terms: Mexican-American mothers are rat