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Dr Henry is an anthropologist experienced both in fieldwork and in teaching; and Culture against Man is based on observations made by himself and by workers trained by him, of American society. "Pathways to Madness", Chapter 9, is for psycho-analysts the most interesting chapter of the book. It is a record of a week which Henry himself spent in each of two families (the "Portmans" and the "Rosses") at a time when a psychotic child of
the family was away in hospital. Henry notes the impact of each parent on the other children and also of the father-mother relationship. This is unique material, on which we can apply and retest our theories about the genesis of personality disorder and of madness. The sort of questions implicit in the chapter are: What is the impact on a 15-month child of being regarded by the mother as a faecal monster; or on a four-year-old of being felt to need minimal food? It seems to me that the mother in the Ross family unconsciously felt her child to be still within her and that her husband shared this fantasy. This is a conceptualization which the author himself does not make, and it leads to a further question: How do we conceptualize such impacts? It is clear from Henry's study that there must be big components in the child's self image that are taken over unconsciously from the parents' unconscious fantasies of him. The sort of work that the chapter embodies will surely play a major part in the development of object-relations theory and in future psychopathography.
The book is, however, much more than Chapter 9. It is "a major argument … that culture is a unified whole, even unto psychosis and death"; and although it is American culture with which Henry is concerned, there is much in the book which is valid for all modern societies. Henry shows how explicit American cultural rules have become. In Part I he quotes these rules from contemporary documents, such as "Create more Desire!" (from an advertisement in the New York Times