THE WAILBRI THROUGH THEIR OWN EYES

Elementary systems of medicine

The beliefs about causes of disease, orientations to medical problems, and the treatment practices of relatively small and elementary societies are reviewed and analyzed. Selected published reports of this problem area of ethnomedicine serve as source material. An attempt is made to induce generalizations which will serve as a possible baseline for studies dealing with related material pertaining to more advanced societies.

Ethnopsychiatry in Central Australia. II. The evolution of illness in a Walbiri lineage

Psychiatrists who have written about the Australian Aborigines have been less concerned with the psychiatry of this people than with the significance of their practices and beliefs for psychological and psychoanalytic theory. (Freud, 1913; Roheim, 1945; Fry, 1953). This outlook is reflected in the subsidiary title of Freud'sTotem and Taboo: “Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics”. It was hoped that the analogies between “primitive” practices such as sub-incision or totemism and the repressed complexes of modern civilized peoples might shed light into the recesses of the modern mind.