Völkerpsychologie as a field science: José Miguel de Barandiarán and Basque ethnology.

José Miguel de Barandiarán considered the central figure of Basque anthropology, played a prominent role in the Basque people's cultural rescue (material and spiritual). His dual status as an ethnologist and priest prepared him to study collective mentalities and rural societies. However, the scientific approach of the Völkerpsychologie (roughly translated as ethnic psychology), as proposed by Wilhelm Wundt, greatly influenced him and aroused broad interests of ethnological and sociological-religious concerns. This essay examines the scope and depth of Wundt's influence on Barandiarán, and suggests that, by combining the techniques of folklore with those of ethnography, Barandiarán stamped Basque anthropology with a unique defining quality in Europe.

Culture and psychism: the ethnopsychoanalysis of Georges Devereux.

This paper introduces the significant theoretical contribution of Georges Devereux (1908-85) on the relationship between culture and psychism, which he developed in his work at the interface of anthropology, psychoanalysis and quantum epistemology during the mid-twentieth century. Devereux was one of the key early contributors to the field of transcultural psychiatry; he was in touch with its most important exponents, although he remained critical of many of the popular trends developed in this field of research in the USA, where Devereux conducted most of his research between 1932 and 1963. As a part of his critique, he founded a new epistemology: ethnopsychoanalysis, which was largely based on the concept of complementarity and countertransference.

Historicizing transcultural psychiatry: people, epistemic objects, networks, and practices.

The history of transcultural psychiatry has recently attracted much historical attention, including a workshop in March 2016 in which an international panel of scholars met at the Maison de Sciences de l'Homme Paris-Nord (MSH-PN). Papers from this workshop are presented here. By conceiving of transcultural psychiatry as a dynamic social field that frames its knowledge claims around epistemic objects that are specific to the field, and by focusing on the ways that concepts within this field are used to organize intellectual work, several themes are explored that draw this field into the historiography of psychiatry. Attention is paid to the organization of networks and publications, and to important actors within the field who brought about significant developments in the colonial and post-colonial conceptions of mental illness.

Introduction: Pow Meng Yap and the culture-bound syndromes.

PM Yap's most significant intellectual achievement was his development of the concept of the culture-bound syndrome, which synthesized years of research into transcultural psychiatry, and situated this work within this field by drawing on elaborated nosological schema that challenged some of the ethnocentric assumptions made by previous psychiatrists who had tried to understand mental illnesses that presented in non-western cultures. This introduction to Yap's 1951 paper emphasizes that Yap needs to be understood as working within the western tradition of transcultural psychiatry, and argues that his English training and his continual engagement with western psychiatric and philosophical frameworks is the best way to conceive of his contributions to this field. Yap's paper, republished below as the Classic Text, was his first foray into comparative transcultural psychiatry.

Henri Collomb and the emergence of a psychiatry open to otherness through interdisciplinary dialogue in post-independence Dakar.

During decolonization, Henri Collomb was appointed to the first Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Dakar. Using a neuropsychiatric approach, he quickly made significant advances in the field, despite the colonial era's poor legacy of assistance facilities for mentally ill people. Through alliances with professors and researchers from the university Departments of Psychology and Sociology, an original interdisciplinary dialogue was set up to build up a research team which would develop rich and varied activities in the fields of transcultural psychiatry, medical anthropology and psychoanalytic anthropology. The methodological and theoretical contributions of such an approach are well illustrated in the book Œdipe africain by M-C and E Ortigues and in the journal founded in 1965, Psychopathologie africaine.

Eric Wittkower and the foundation of Montréal's Transcultural Psychiatry Research Unit after World War II.

Eric Wittkower founded McGill University's Transcultural Psychiatry Unit in 1955. One year later, he started the first international newsletter in this academic field: Transcultural Psychiatry. However, at the beginning of his career Wittkower gave no signs that he would be interested in social sciences and psychiatry. This paper describes the historical context of the post-war period, when Wittkower founded the research unit in Montréal. I focus on the history of scientific networks and the circulation of knowledge, and particularly on the exchanges between the French- and English-speaking academic cultures in North America and Europe. Because the history of transcultural psychiatry is a transnational history par excellence, this leads necessarily to the question of the reception of this academic field abroad.

Evaluating the Aboriginal child's mind: assimilation and cross-cultural psychology in Australia.

This article examines two psychological interventions with Australian Aboriginal children in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first involved evaluating the cognitive maturation of Aboriginal adolescents using a series of Piagetian interviews. The second, a more extensive educational intervention, used a variety of quantitative tests to measure and intervene in the intellectual performance of Aboriginal preschoolers. In both of these interventions the viability of the psychological instruments in the cross-cultural encounter created ongoing ambiguity as to the value of the research outcomes. Ultimately, the resolution of this ambiguity in favour of notions of Aboriginal 'cultural deprivation' reflected the broader political context of debates over Aboriginal self-governance during this period.

The politics and practice of Thomas Adeoye Lambo: towards a post-colonial history of transcultural psychiatry.

This article traces the career of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, the first European-trained psychiatrist of indigenous Nigerian (Yoruba) background and one of the key contributors to the international development of transcultural psychiatry from the 1950s to the 1980s. The focus on Lambo provides some political, cultural and geographical balance to the broader history of transcultural psychiatry by emphasizing the contributions to transcultural psychiatric knowledge that have emerged from a particular non-western context. At the same time, an examination of Lambo's legacy allows historians to see the limitations of transcultural psychiatry's influence over time. Ultimately, this article concludes that the history of transcultural psychiatry might have more to tell us about the politics of the 'transcultural' than the practice of 'psychiatry' in post-colonial contexts.

Race, alcohol and general paralysis: Emil Kraepelin's comparative psychiatry and his trips to Java (1904) and North America (1925).

This article examines Emil Kraepelin's notion of comparative psychiatry and relates it to the clinical research he conducted at psychiatric hospitals in South-East Asia (1904) and the USA (1925). It argues that his research fits awkwardly within the common historiographic narratives of colonial psychiatry. It also disputes claims that his work can be interpreted meaningfully as the fons et origio of transcultural psychiatry. Instead, it argues that his comparative psychiatry was part of a larger neo-Lamarckian project of clinical epidemiology and was thus primarily a reflection of his own long-standing diagnostic practices and research agendas. However, the hospitals in Java and America exposed the institutional constraints and limitations of those practices and agendas.

[The politicization of narcissism: Reading Kohut with and through Morganthaler]. / Die Politisierung des Narzissmus: Kohut mit und durch Mogenthaler lessen.

While in the US in the 1970s, Heinz Kohut's work served as a major rescue operation for a psychoanalytic profession that was in deep crisis, the reception in the German-speaking lands was, for multiple reasons, ultimately marked by far more ambivalence. No one explicated and defended Kohut more vigorously to his professional peers as well as to a younger generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts than the charismatic Swiss psychoanalyst (and coinventor of ethnopsychoanalysis) Fritz Morgenthaler. It was, furthermore, specifically in engaged grappling with Kohut's creative clinical innovations as well as his blind spots that Morgenthaler--as a close reading of their correspondence and respective writings shows--developed his own distinctive perspectives on the enduring riddle of how best to theorize the interrelationships between "the sexual" and other realms of existence. It was also in this context that Morgenthaler became the first European analyst of any nationality to articulate an eloquent rebuttal to the homophobic consensus that had become consolidated across the psychoanalytic diaspora since Freud's death.

Emil Kraepelin's ideas on transcultural psychiatry.

OBJECTIVE: Prevailing degeneration theory and an increasing number of people in inpatient mental treatment aroused the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin's (1856-1926) interest to investigate whether the mental illnesses typical for Europe were also characteristic for 'primitive peoples'. He thus dedicated a period spent in the Dutch East Indies (Java) in 1904 to transcultural psychiatric research. This paper endeavours to compile Kraepelin's key findings, aiming to make readers aware of what kind of transcultural research Kraepelin did and what conclusions he came up with. At the same time it provides some background for the question of whether Kraepelin can really be referred to as the founder of transcultural psychiatry. CONCLUSION: Kraepelin assumed that illnesses with exterior causes depended on the type of stimulants widely used in a given culture. Since he found little evidence for progressive paralysis, he concluded that European brains were particularly prone to sequelae of syphilis. For endogenous psychoses he postulated differences in both symptoms and courses, depressions being rarer and milder, and ceasing sooner. By contrast, he found dementia praecox (mainly covered by the concept of schizophrenias later) to be the most prevalent mental illness in Java, explicitly different in form from that in Europe.

[The transfer of psychiatry-narratives, termini and cross-cultural psychiatry in Japan]. / Zum Transfer von Psychiatrie: Narrative, Termini und transkulturelle Psychiatrie in Japan.

This article is based on German and Japanese sources and shows how around 1900 European psychiatric concepts and practices embedded themselves into emerging scientific Japanese discourses. The article argues that now forgotten German-Japanese exchanges in the field of psychiatric pathology, together with the historical development of psychiatric care, were central mechanisms for the establishment of a distinctly psychiatric discourse in Japan priot to its broad institutionalization. Three discursive strategies were key: Japanese and German experts from a range of medical fields reinvented a body of traditions loosely related to actual pre-modern cultural practices; they engaged in comparative evaluations of psychiatric conditions; and, through the simple but effective transformation of specific concepts and termini at the margins of European psychiatry, these experts contributed to the transfer not only of a psychiatric discourse but also affected the power relations on a national and international scale as European psychiatry permeated into new territory, namely the Japanese landscape of emerging modern scientific disciplines.

Psychiatry and Decolonization: Histories of Transcultural Psychiatry in the Twentieth Century.

This review essay explores recent historical and anthropological literature on the emergence and development of transcultural psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines how postcolonial psychiatry attempted to remove itself from its erstwhile colonial frameworks and strove to introduce new concepts and paradigms to make itself relevant in the context of decolonization and postwar reconstruction. The essay looks at both continuities and discontinuities between colonial and post-colonial transcultural psychiatry, asking how the recent surge of scholarly literature in this field engaged with these issues. It also aims to identify the most important avenues for future research.

Cultural psychiatry in the French-speaking world.

For the last five centuries, France's international influence has been constant. This has been particularly evident in the areas of general culture, history and science. In psychiatry, the role of Pinel during the French Revolution, and the discovery of the first psychotropic agent, chlorpromazine, by Delay and Deniker are two outstanding historical facts. This chapter examines the contributions of French social scientists in the understanding of the sequelae of colonial exploitation, racism and political oppression. The establishment of a multi-ethnic society in France and Francophile regions of the world has led to the gradual creation of a cultural psychiatry rich in terminological influences, clinical understanding, training programs and research. Closer connections between French psychiatric thought and Anglophile psychiatry is likely to produce beneficial effects.

Cross-cultural, transnational or interdisciplinary? Eric Wittkower's psychosomatic medicine and transcultural psychiatry in historical context.

This article traces the career, scientific achievements, and emigration of the Berlin-born physician, psychoanalyst, and psychosomatic researcher Eric Wittkower. Trained in Berlin and practicing internal medicine, he became persecuted by the Nazi regime and, after fleeing Germany via Switzerland, continued his professional career in the United Kingdom, where he turned to psychosomatic medicine and worked in the service of the British Army during World War II. After two decades of service in the UK, Wittkower joined McGill University in Canada. His increasingly interdisciplinary work contributed to the establishment of the new research field of transcultural psychiatry. Finally the paper provides a detailed history of the beginning of the section of transcultural psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute.

La lutte continue: Louis Mars and the genesis of ethnopsychiatry.

The scientific contributions of Western mental health professionals have been lauded and leveraged for global mental health responses to varying degrees of success. In recent years, the necessity of recognizing the inefficiencies of solely etic and Western-based psychological intervention has been reflected in certain decolonial scholars like Frantz Fanon gaining more recognition. Despite this urgent focus on decolonial psychology, there are still others whose work has historically and contemporarily not received a great deal of attention. There is no better example of such a scholar than Dr. Louis Mars, Haiti's first psychiatrist. Mars made a lasting impact on the communities of Haiti by shifting the conversation around Haitian culture and the practice of how people living with a mental illness were treated. Further, he influenced the global practice of psychiatry by coining "ethnopsychiatry" and asserting that non-Western culture should be intimately considered, rather than stigmatized, in treating people around the world. Unfortunately, the significance of his contributions to ethnopsychiatry, ethnodrama, and the subsequent field of psychology has effectively been erased from the disciplinary canon. Indeed, the weight of Mars' psychiatric and political work deserves focus. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

HK Fry: an early contributor to Australian psychiatry.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the contribution of HK Fry to early Australian psychiatry. METHOD: A brief biographical review and an examination of Fry's published work. RESULTS: Fry provided not only insightful research in to what he described as 'Aboriginal mentality', but he also promoted a consideration of psychological factors in general medical therapeutics. CONCLUSION: HK Fry warrants recognition as a significant contributor in the history of Australian psychiatry.

Making up koro: multiplicity, psychiatry, culture, and penis-shrinking anxieties.

Koro is a syndrome in which the penis (or sometimes the nipples or vulva) is retracting, with deleterious effects for the sufferer. In modern psychiatry, it is considered a culture-bound syndrome (CBS). This paper considers the formation and development of psychiatric conceptions of koro and related genital retraction syndromes from the 1890s to the present. It does so by examining the different explanations of koro based on shifting conceptions of mental illness, and considers the increased recognition of the role culture has to play in psychiatric concepts. Conceptions of culture (deriving from colonial psychiatry as well as from anthropology) actively shaped the ways in which psychiatrists conceptualized koro. Cases under consideration, additional to the first Dutch descriptions of koro, include the ways in which koro was identified in white western cases, and the 1967 Singaporean koro epidemic. Following a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have addressed the same material, attention is also paid to the recent genital-theft panics in sub-Saharan Africa, considering the implications of the differences between koro and other genital-theft panics. Finally, the paper addresses the role played by koro in the development of the concept of CBSs, which was first presented in the DSM IV in 1994. This is explored against the backdrop of emerging ideas about culture and psychiatry from the late colonial period, especially in Africa, which are central to modern ideas about transcultural psychiatry.

Itineraries and specificities of Italian medical anthropology.

This paper describes the birth (or rebirth) of Italian medical anthropology around the middle of the 1950s, and its subsequent complex development up to the present. During this fairly long process, the author played a role that was probably of some importance, that of both a direct witness and active participant. Here these developments are briefly reviewed, in an attempt to single out some of the stimuli and the most significant occasions that have happened, their theoretical and methodological reference points, the main lines of research that have been tackled along the way, as well as the 'social demand' and the 'social use' that have integrated and oriented the practice of the new discipline within the horizon of some of the more general problems of Italian society. In outlining here the profile of and the various events in Italian medical anthropology, this paper takes into account the fact that, although a medical anthropology with that name and the disciplinary set-up that are now internationally attributed to it began in Italy only in the mid-1950s, important lines of research to which we would today attach that name had been undertaken long ago.

A look at cultural psychiatry in the 21st century.

Cultural psychiatry, as a subspecialty of psychiatry and thus medicine, has grown steadily and extensively in the 20th century, especially during the second part of this century. In this article, we look at the origins of cultural psychiatry; at its history through the centuries; at its role in the clinical, educational, and research domains; at its significance in today's conceptualization of the fields of psychiatry and mental health; and at its future perspectives within the realms of both medicine and psychiatry.