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THIS PAPER REPRESENTS an effort by a psychoanalyst and a cultural anthropologist to carry forward their thinking on transcultural aspects of the irrational. Webster defines irrational to mean, among other things, "lacking usual or normal mental clarity or coherence … not governed by or according to reason (Webster, 1970, p. 448). Reason on the other hand means, "a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense, the thing that makes some fact intelligible … the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking, in orderly, rational ways" (Webster, 1970, p. 713). Each of these definitions could relate as well to definitions of the "unconscious" and "consciousness, " respectively. The extent to which levels of awareness from conscious to unconscious may be linked with degree of rationality or irrationality is a complex issue with which we are not prepared to deal at this time. Nevertheless, as our discussion will show, it may be in precisely this theoretical realm that the transcultural aspects of the irrational in psychoanalysis