Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America

Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues that this has occurred as Western psychiatry obscured the political origin of its own disturbing cultural patterns -- hysteria, parasuicide, agoraphobia, eating disorders, shoplifting, male sexual violence, the response to traumatic stress, and multiple personality disorder. He proposes that the medical emphasis on individual and biological differences in such "psychopathologies" is less a sort of bad science than it is fundamental to their very success as patterns of individual adjustment of personal dislocations. He contends that Western psychiatric illnesses are themselves "possession states" -- patterns by which individual agency is displaced through an idiom of alien intrusion whether of a spirit or a disease.Pathologies of the West is simultaneously an original approach to psychiatric illness in its international perspective and an introduction to recent developments in the social anthropology of medicine. It examines critically the relevance of phenomenological, structural and ethological approaches to understanding extreme personal experience. Professor Littlewood argues that anthropology must not simply provida a "cultural" alternative to sociological critiques of medicine, whilst psychiatry itself has to take into account the personal embodiment of cultural values.