MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM: THE INTERFACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY by CARROLL BRODSKY. Comprehensive Psychiatry II,no. 5 (1970): 482-91. SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PSYCHI ATRY AND ANTHROPOLOGY by E. D. WITTKOWER and GUY DUBREUIL. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Psychiatrists,San Francisco,California,May 1970. Mimeograph. 13 pp

Abstract

Although cooperation between anthropologists and psychiatrists raises many difficulties, it is now certain that it has been and will continue to be positive. This is the general conclusion reached in two different papers jointly reviewed in the first part of this section. One is by C. BRODSKY, the other by E. D. WITTKOWER and G. DUBREUIL. After having described some basic differences between anthropology and psychiatry, these authors summarize the benefits gained by the interface of the two disciplines and propose new fields and methods for a more productive cooperation. O. VON MERING and L. KASDAN recently edited a book on the relationships between anthropology and other disciplines. Three chapters of this book relating to transcultural psychiatry are reviewed: they deal with the normal and the abnormal, with communi cation, and with medicine and psychiatry. H. H. WEIDMAN and J. N. SUSSEX discuss the so-called exotic psychoses and endeavor to show why projection and dissociation are the defence mechanisms most relied upon in such psychoses. The last part of this section provides new material relevant to an often-debated question: when a large group of people hold to views which are patently false, should that group be regarded as suffering a shared psychosis? This material is presented by B. G. BURTON-BRADLEY, who discusses a group of New Guinea prophets whom he discovered to be psychotic, and by Y. KUMASAKA and H. SAITO, who describe a Japanese immigrant group in Brazil who refused to accept the Japanese defeat in World War II.