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.

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.

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).

Picturing ethnopsychology: A colonial psychiatrist's struggles to examine Javanese minds, 1910-1925

This article explores C. F. Engelhard's struggles to construct psychometric devices for the Netherlands Indies between 1910 and 1925. A young Dutch psychiatrist, Engelhard moved to the Netherlands Indies in 1916, where he applied his clinical experience to subject Javanese individuals to mental assessment devices. He imagined that basic picture tests and one's orientation in time provided apt solutions to the cross-cultural challenges facing him. To turn his prototypes into actual tests, Engelhard had to leave his daily work environment and move into the surrounding villages. Aided by local chiefs and his assistant, Soekirman, he managed to set up temporary testing sites, where he examined hundreds of Javanese individuals. Yet despite his attempts to transform Javanese farmers into subjects capable of taking a psychological test, the Javanese remained free to make-or fail to make-meaning out of Engelhard's images. Even though the psychiatrist went to great lengths in taking into account the particular social and cultural features of psychological practice in a colonial context, a vast chasm remained to exist between him and his test takers. This article examines Engelhard's practices against the backdrop of his training as a Western psychiatrist, colonial ideology in the Netherlands Indies, and the reception of his research by other colonial scientists with a wide range of attitudes about "the native mind." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Historical time in the age of big data: Cultural psychology, historical change, and the Google Books Ngram Viewer

Launched in 2010, the Google Books Ngram Viewer offers a novel means of tracing cultural change over time. This digital tool offers exciting possibilities for cultural psychology by rendering questions about variation across historical time more quantitative. Psychologists have begun to use the viewer to bolster theories about a historical shift in the United States from a more collectivist to individualist form of selfhood and society. I raise 4 methodological cautions about the Ngram Viewer's use among psychologists: (a) the extent to which print culture can be taken to represent culture as a whole, (b) the difference between viewing the past in terms of trends versus events, (c) assumptions about the stability of a word's meaning over time, and (d) inconsistencies in the scales and ranges used to measure change over time. The aim is to foster discussion about the standards of evidence needed for incorporating historical big data into empirical research.

[The politicization of narcissism: Reading Kohut with and through Morganthaler]

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.

[The transfer of psychiatry-narratives, termini and cross-cultural psychiatry 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.

Main topics in transcultural psychiatric research in the Netherlands during the past decade

The population of the Netherlands has become increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity and religion, and anti-immigrant attitudes have become more apparent. At the same time, interest in issues linked to transcultural psychiatry has grown steadily. The purpose of this article is to describe the most important results in Dutch transcultural psychiatric research in the last decade and to discuss their relationship with relevant social and political developments in the Netherlands. All relevant PhD theses (N = 27) between 2000 and 2011 were selected. Screening of Dutch journals in the field of transcultural psychiatry and medical anthropology and a PubMed query yielded additional publications. Forensic and addiction psychiatry were excluded from this review. The results of the review indicate three main topics: (a) the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and their relation to migration issues as social defeat and ethnic density, showing considerable intra- and interethnic differences in predictors and prevalence rates, (b) the social position of refugees and asylum seekers, and its effect on mental health, showing especially high risk among asylum seekers, and (c) the patterns of health-seeking behaviour and use of mental health services, showing a differentiated picture among various migrant groups. Anthropological research brought additional knowledge on all the above topics. The overall conclusion is that transcultural psychiatric research in the Netherlands has made a giant leap since the turn of the century. The results are of international importance and invite redefinition of the relationship between migration and mental health, and reconsideration of its underlying mechanisms in multiethnic societies.

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.

Sexuality and psychoanalytic aggrandisement: Freud's 1908 theory of cultural history

In 1908, in his article "'Civilized" sexual morality and modern nervous illness', Freud presented neuroses as the consequence of a restrictive state of cultural development and its 'civilized morality'. He found the inspiration for this idea by expanding upon previous formulations in this area by his predecessors (notably Christian von Ehrenfels) that focused on a cultural process earlier introduced by Kant, while also integrating in his analysis the principles of Haeckel's evolutionism (history of development, recapitulation) which eventually re-defined the psychoanalytic theory of neuroses. These new theoretical elements became the basis of psychoanalytic theory and thereby influenced subsequent thinking in the cultural process itself and in human sciences. This transformation of underlying theory provided a unique historical and analytical framework for psychoanalysis which allowed Freud to claim for it a pre-eminent position among the human sciences.

Research into witchcraft in psychoanalysis and history

Witchcraft and witch-hunting have been a topic for numerous historical and psychoanalytical research projects. But until now, most of these projects have remained rather isolated from one from the other, each in their own context. In this article I shall attempt to set up a dialogue between psychoanalysis and history by way of the example of research into witchcraft. However, I make no claim to covering the different psychoanalytical and historical approaches in full. As a historical 'layman', my interest lies in picking out some of the approaches that seem to me particularly well suited to contribute to reciprocal enhancement.

Forgotten paths: culture and ethnicity in Catalan mental health policies (1900-39)

Between 1900 and 1939 the regional government in Catalonia discussed a complete reform of the psychiatric institutions inherited from the nineteenth century. The debate was centred on the Spanish government's lack of interest in mental health policies and the growing demand for services. The projects developed between 1900 and 1939 opened a wide-ranging discussion on the role of ethnic and cultural factors in shaping mental illness, and the need to adapt the new facilities to the ethnic features of Catalonia. This study explores the production of Catalan psychiatric discourses and their ideological roots, and the development of public policies up to the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The paper concludes with a discussion of the influence of pre-war Catalan mental health policies on the wartime practice of psychiatry and, later, on the development of the French psychothérapie institutionnelle after World War II.

Westernalization in the mirror: on the cultural reception of western psychology

Miki Takasuna's paper on "Proliferation of Western Methodological Thought in Psychology in Japan: Ways of Objectification" offers many significant clues for reconsidering the history and unity of psychology. Its treatment of the reception of psychology in Japan hints at the relevance of the models of the subject for psychology--including the allegedly "official" psychology. The aim of this paper is to suggest such reconsideration, on the basis of a distinction between psychology-importing and psychology-exporting countries, and provide a reflection on the cultural problems of assimilation by the latter of a discipline advanced by the former. This perspective leads us to acknowledge the existence of a variety of psychological programs corresponding to the transformation and modernization of different social realities. Also, an indication is offered of several possible levels of analysis of such programs, which are seen to be related with the emergence of psychology as the science of modernity.

Ribot, Binet, and the emergence from the anthropological shadow

In the drive to establish a naturalistic psychology in France, anthropological assumptions about a hierarchy of physically determined racial groups with inherent psychological characteristics and about the nearly insurmountable retardation of primitive cultures permeated the work of the founder of French empirical psychology, Théodule Ribot. Assumptions about the correlation of brain mass and head size with intelligence affected Alfred Binet. The rise of sociology and challenges to existing theories of inheritance led Ribot to surrender fitfully some hereditarian assumptions. Binet's experimental caution and contemporary critiques of anthropometry tempered, but did not fully extinguish, his enthusiasm for psychophysical correlations.

[Outline of Nahua ethnopsychiatry]

In this paper we will show some historical and cultural aspects of the Aztec's medicine and cosmology at the XVI century. The Aztecs or Nahuas used to believe in different kinds of anemic entities, the most important ones being the tonalli, the ihiyotl and the teyolia. At the time the word tonalli meant, simultaneously, the particular "genius" of everyone, good fortune and the "star" or destiny. The tonalli's loss was a cause of illness and dead and it could be provoked by some physical violent acts or by sudden feelings of fright. The most frequent expression of this sickness was named tetonalcahualiztli. The hispanic designation of this problem is susto. The Nahuas used many kind of psychological proceedings in order to alleviate anguish and to treat mental troubles. Illness was considered by nahuas practitioners as the balance's loss of the organism, not only of its own components but also of its relationship with the world.