Ritualization of roles in sickness and healing

Abstract

For the psychiatrist, the literature of recent research in ethology is at once fascinating and repellent. It is fascinating because it offers a technique by means of which objective observations, analyses of patterns and sequences of behaviour are kept strictly separate from conjectures as to the aim of such behaviour. We recognize here two trends in recent research on human abnormal psychology: the attempt to objectify our observations by focusing upon discrete items of behaviour, and the need, if not to eschew explanatory hypotheses altogether, then at least to distinguish clearly between verifiable observations and speculative interpretations of the significance of the behaviour in question. Since Freud, we have learned to recognize that an individual’s expressed intentions, his conscious motivations, may give only a very imperfect and incomplete account of his actual behaviour. The trouble is, of course, that here the observer belongs to the same species as the animal whose behaviour is being studied. The aspect of ethology which is at times repellent (though not necessarily less true for that) is its unflattering reminder that what we do is often at variance with what we think we are doing.