The Use of Culture in Psychiatry

Besides the biological determinants of personality which Freud considered central in the psycho-sexual development of men and women, Karen Horney emphasized the cultural conditions which are formative forces in any life history. Dr. Horney's antecedents were German and she may be considered a close student of Freud's work and later the scholar and clinician who first challenged Freud's system with this remarkable and general extension including culture. By culture, I shall simply denote my own most general definition: “What men live by.” As a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I used to go to meetings of this Association as well as to those of the Institute of Psychoanalysis of New York City, and in the former I much enjoyed the alert mind and incisive logic of Karen Horney herself. Moreover, at Columbia, one of my professors was Ruth Benedict. If I had failed to recognize Dr. Horney's brilliance, I am sure that Ruth Benedict would have alerted me to this omission, since she herself greatly admired Horney's work. In fact, if one groups leading anthropologists with the leading psychiatrists whom they influenced, one would put down Edward Sapir of Yale as influencing Harry Stack Sullivan or Clyde Kluckhohn of Harvard as influencing Henry Murray.^{1, 2} For Ruth Benedict and Karen Horney, I have no hesitation in linking their names as humanistic giants of intellect who mutually influenced each other.

Ruth Benedict was originally a teacher of literature and an exceptional poet. Anyone who has read Benedict's Patterns of Culture will realize that she had a fantastic knack for epitomizing and describing cultures.³ As a matter of fact she is charged by some critics with exaggerating the unitary pattern or thrust of a culture. I must agree with some of these criticisms because I feel that the historical explanations and changes within cultures are often omitted, as in Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword concerning Japanese society.⁴ Granting that there