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Ari Kiev. Transcultural Psychiatry.
New York: The Free Press. 1972. 223 pages.
MODERN TECHNOLOGY—the ease of travel and mass media—has brought psychiatrists in technologically advanced countries face to face with mental disorders in developing countries. Differences noted, perhaps in frequency and certainly in symptomatology aroused their interest and resulted in the development of a new subfield of psychiatry labelled transcultural psychiatry. This subfield concerns itself with the relevance of cultural factors to differences in the frequency and nature of mental disorders and to their treatment on comparison of at least two cultures. Psychiatrists, cultural anthropologists and epidemiologists have played an active part in the development of this field.
Concurrently as cultural anthropology emerged from its initial descriptive phase and the number of remote, isolated, primitive cultures dwindled, a rapprochement between cultural anthropologists and psychoanalysts took place, attempts were made to bridge cultural anthropological and psychoanalytical concepts and psychoanalytic theory was increasingly employed to understand and to interpret sociocultural processes. As I have stated somewhere else: None of the disciplines involved in transcultural psychiatry—cultural anthropology, descriptive psychiatry and epidemiology—can adequately explain the phenomena observed in terms of their own discipline alone but a combined approach based on social science theory and psychoanalytic theory is required.
Transcultural psychiatry has flourished during the last decade