You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Studies of the incidence of disturbed mental functioning in various cultures actually estimate malfunctioning or maladjustment in the specific culture and are epidemiological. Psychiatric research tends to retreat from epidemiological to etiological questions, and is concerned with one or a series of patients. For anthropology, man as a functioning, biological, social, and cultural unit is best represented in modern psychiatry. Social psychiatry is a new, multidisciplinary movement within psychiatry to study the person in the community and society, and should provide increasingly concrete data for preventive psychiatry and public mental health programs.
Neither psychiatry nor anthropology can afford to retreat to the notion of the single-individual representative of a culture. It is arduous to describe in detail how environmental experiences are stamped into physiological manifestation and emotional economy, but until this is done there can be neither social psychiatry nor a valid cross-cultural science of culture and personality. To anthropologists 'culture' is as concrete and ever-active a set of realities in the individual as the superego and ego ideal. Instead of insisting on a single theory of stages of mental