49 - Culture and Psychiatric Theories

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the various sociocultural factors, which influenced the development of psychiatric theories. Political ideologies can influence the formulation of psychiatric theories, which was evident in autocratic regimes in the USSR, China or Nazi Germany. To comply with the demands of the political administration and ideology of the USSR, the psychiatric diagnoses of antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders were removed from the official classification system of psychiatric diseases. In communist China, from the establishment of the regime to the end of the Cultural Revolution, psychoanalytic theories and practices were politically forbidden, the excuse for which was that psychoanalysis was the product of capitalism. By comparing and including clinical information and findings from cross-cultural investigations of populations of other ethnic groups in other cultural settings around the world, the existing knowledge and hypotheses have been revised, corrected, or expanded for scientific accuracy and proper application to humankind as a whole. Among the various contributions of culturally interested scholars are the socioculturally based, fundamental concepts that a person cannot be understood merely in terms of individual psychological aspects and that a society cannot be comprehended simply as an extension or multiplication of personal behavior. A person, in addition to his or her individual psychology, is constantly under the influence of society and culture, while a society or a culture functions as a uniqueentity of its own character and nature beyond the collective input of its members.