What is the relationship between culture and mental health? Is mental
illness universal? Are symptoms of mental disorders different across
social groups? In the late 1960s these questions gave rise to a
groundbreaking series of articles written by the psychiatrist Henri
Ellenberger, who would go on to publish The Discovery of the
Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970.
Fifty years later they are presented for the first time in English
translation, introduced by historian of science Emmanuel Delille.
Ethnopsychiatry explores one of the most controversial subjects in
psychiatric research: the role of culture in mental health. In his
articles Ellenberger addressed the complex clinical and theoretical
problems of cultural specificity in mental illness, collective
psychoses, differentiations within cultural groups, and biocultural
interactions. He was especially attuned to the correlations between
rapid cultural transformations in postwar society, urbanization, and the
frequency of mental illness. Ellenberger drew from a vast and varied
primary and secondary literature in several languages, as well as from
his own findings in clinical practice, which included work with
indigenous peoples. In analyzing Ellenberger's contributions Delille
unveils the transnational and interdisciplinary origins of transcultural
psychiatry, which grew out of knowledge networks that crisscrossed the
globe. The book has a rich selection of appendices, including
Ellenberger's lecture notes on a case of peyote addiction and his
correspondence with anthropologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux.
These original essays, and their masterful contextualization, provide a
compelling introduction to the foundations of transcultural psychiatry
and one of its most distinguished and prolific researchers.
