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While Psychology and Anthropology share certain overlapping interests, there is no agreed schema or paradigm for this area. Rejecting both psychoanalysis and the biopsychosocial model as insufficient, this collection brings together studies on Hasidic concepts of illness, the religious origins of schizophrenia, Christian stigmata, the “third sex” in Albania, jinn possession among European immigrants, and reincarnation among the Druze. The volume argues for plural models integrating biological, psychodynamic, and sociocultural perspectives. It highlights the enduring tension between Psychiatry’s naturalistic explanations and Anthropology’s personalistic approach, suggesting that both offer partial yet essential insights into human experience.
“Littlewood and Dein (are) two scholars of medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry who have influenced and inspired generations of anthropologists and mental health students, researchers and practitioners.” • Erminia Colucci, Middlesex University London
“Few people capable (or brave enough) to address anthropology, psychiatry and cultures of monotheism in the critical and sometimes controversial way in which the authors have. The volume represents, fieldwork included, three decades of exploration into a topic that otherwise sits latently under the very structures of Western society and its medical institutions. These papers should be read by any student in social sciences and medicine (separately and combined), even if to question them.” • Aaron Parkhurst, University College London
Roland Littlewood is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College, London. Former President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a founding chair of the RAI’s Medical Committee and of the Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre. His clinical work included fifteen years with a homeless mentally ill project in North London.
Introduction: Monotheism and Mental Order
Chapter 1. The Effectiveness of Words: Letters to the Rebbe
Chapter 2. Cultural Performance – Lubavitch Messianism
Chapter 3. Did Christianity Lead to Schizophrenia?
Chapter 4. Religious Stigmata, Magnetic Fluids and Conversion Hysteria: One Survival of ‘Vital Force’ Theories in Scientific Medicine?
Chapter 5. Jinn, Psychiatry and Contested Notions of Misfortune
Chapter 6. The Use of Traditional Healing in South Asian Psychiatric Patients in the UK: Interactions between Professional and Folk Psychiatries
Chapter 7. Trauma and the Kanun: Two Responses to Loss in Albania and Kosova
Chapter 8. Druze Reincarnation as a Therapeutic Resource
Chapter 9. Apocalyptic Suicide
Chapter 10. The Advent of the Adversary
Chapter 11. Religion and Psychosis
Chapter 12. Neglect as Project: How Two Societies Forget
Chapter 13. Against Belief: The Usefulness of Explanatory Model Research in Medical Anthropology
Conclusion: Paracletes, Pathologists
Index