Cultural anthropology and psychiatry.

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Abstract
Cultural anthropology has emphasized the group and its traditions in contradistinction to individual variations of behavior, which have been the field of the psychiatrist. As tangible problems of behavior rather than the selected problems set by recognized disciplines are followed, it is discovered that the field of social psychology, which is not more social than it is individual, is the mother science from which stem both the abstracted impersonal problems as phrased by the cultural anthropologist and the realistic explorations into behavior which are the province of the psychiatrist. Cultural anthropology is valuable not because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense, but because it is constantly rediscovering the normal, which is of the greatest importance to the psychiatrist. The so-called culture of a group of human beings, as it is ordinarily treated by the cultural anthropologist, is essentially a systematic list of all the socially inherited patterns of behavior which may be illustrated in the actual behavior of all or most of the individuals in the group. A personality is carved out by the subtle interaction of those systems of ideas which are characteristic of the culture as a whole, as well as of those systems of ideas which become established for the individual through special types of participation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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