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The paper opens with a consideration of culture as a uniquely human trait. Homo sapiens or genus homo (as differentiated from man as a human being) has four characteristics: differentiation, individualization, plasticity, and variability. These characteristics represent a unitary biological potentiality which results in the distinctively human psyche and culture characteristic of man as a human being. The culturalization of man is brought about by replacement of the direct and massive manifestation of biological impulses—especially aggression—by plastic, economical, and accurately adapted behavior. It is an illusion that culture constricts behavior.
Personality disorders are a partial dedifferentiation—a partial regression of man to homo sapiens. Psychoanalysis is concerned with what is distinctively human in the human psyche, whereas anthropology is concerned with what is uniquely human in culture and society. The insights of psychoanalysis and anthropology are complementary, not additive.
Devereux describes how the culture is experienced and manipulated by five groups of people: the mentally healthy, the immature, the neurotic, the psychotic, and the psychopathic. The way the individual manipulates his culture is of diagnostic significance. The author presents clinical data from the analyses of a Plains Indian woman and some 'culturally marginal' white patients and from psychotherapy with several American Indians.