I. Far East

Abstract

While admitting that no culture can be characterized exclusively in terms of guilt and shame, T. S. LEBRA attempts to delineate social mechanisms which conceptually differentiate these two concepts. Research conducted in central Japan tends to show that guilt arises from a breakdown of social reciprocity, whereas shame would be generated when a status occupant finds himself in a situation incongruous with his status. N. N. WAGNER and E.-S. TAN edited a book devoted to various problems of psychiatry in Malaysia, such as the historical background and current status of psychiatry, indigenous concepts and treatment of mental illness, and the future of psychiatric services in this country. P. C. Y. CHEN, after observations in a northern rural Malay commu nity, summarizes indigenous conceptions of illness and forms of psychotherapy. Following a recent trend in transcultural psychiatry, he suggests that the indig enous system may be more efficacious than Western psychiatry. This section ends with a review of two papers by K.-I. KIM, according to whom the decline of the use of narcotics in Korea correlates with an increase in the use of non- narcotic habit-forming drugs such as barbiturates and tranquilizers.