Ethnopsychiatry in Central Australia

Abstract

Psychiatrists who have written about the Australian Aborigines have been less concerned with the psychiatry of this people than with the significance of their practices and beliefs for psychological and psychoanalytic theory. (Freud, 1913; Roheim, 1945; Fry, 1953). This outlook is reflected in the subsidiary title of Freud'sTotem and Taboo: “Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics”. It was hoped that the analogies between “primitive” practices such as sub-incision or totemism and the repressed complexes of modern civilized peoples might shed light into the recesses of the modern mind.