Abstract
This section is ushered in by a review of an important book written by the French anthropologist, BASTIDE. The author tackles many fundamental problems of definition, methodology, and theory concerning psychopathology in relation to the social sciences. New distinctions are made between different branches of sociology and ethnology in relation to psychopathology and to social and cultural psychiatry. Subtle conceptions on the nature of the normal and of the abnormal are presented together with an original study of the place and functions of psychopathology within different cultural frames. Abstracts of two articles by the SLATERS follow. The first article discusses the relationships between maternal ambivalence and narcissism on the basis of a crosscultural study. It contains a discussion of the reasons why a narcissistic modal personality tends to prevail where social institutions weaken the marriage bond through the medium of maternal ambivalence. The second article carries this discussion further by studying crossculturally the relationships between narcissism, sexual restrictions, and cultural complexity. DOHRENWEND casts some doubt on the validity of the symptom inventory developed at Cornell. Dohrenwend's arguments are based on the study of four minority groups in New York: Jewish, Irish, Negro, and Puerto-Rican. Finally, a short crosscultural study of murder and suicide by PALMER is reported.
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