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In the following analysis of Sherpa* symbolic material I make a number of assumptions about the whole enterprise of symbolic interpretation. One assumption is that the natives' symbolic system addresses itself to panhuman existential problems with psychological equipment available to all of us. It is therefore possible for us to understand another system by expanding our awareness, since their problems are our problems, and their statements about them employ a symbolic language which we also know, if we choose to develop it.
On this basis, I feel perfectly justified in taking a Western theory, such as psychoanalysis, and using it to interpret other cultures. One often hears the disparaging remark in anthropological circles that Freud's ideas may have been good as ethnography of neurotic Viennese, but are hardly universally valid. I think, on the contrary, that if his ideas are valid for the Viennese, they are by that very token valid for everybody—mutatis mutandis. It is precisely in the area of the mutatis and the mutandis that the cultural anthropologist labors, since, in my view, cultures are systems of transformations or permutations of shared essential structural psychological principles.