"In order to understand and treat the sick in a multicultural society and in societies for which psychiatry is a foreign practice, psychiatrists are confronting the gulf and considering issues which they formerly dismissed as ‘metapsychological.’
The most obvious danger of applying notions of psychological healing from one culture to suffering in another lies in the very meaning of these terms, since ‘suffering’ and ‘healing’ are culturally entrenched.
As early as 1929, Jung acknowledged this dilemma in terms of a dichotomy between the psychologies of ‘West’ and ‘East.’ He wrote, ‘Western consciousness is by no means consciousness in general. It is rather a historically conditioned and geographically confined dimension, which represents only a part of mankind’.
This awareness led him to cautiously qualify and contextualize his psychological commentaries on texts from India, China, Tibet and Japan. For instance, ‘I will remain silent on the subject of what yoga means for India, because I cannot presume to judge something I do not know from personal experience. I can, however, say something about what it means for the West.’"
A Cree Woman Reads Jung
Craig Stephenson
Transcultural Psychiatry 2003 40: 181
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
My high school senior. When she was born and breastfeeding every two hours, 24-7, and I couldn’t shower or read the Sunday paper anymor...
No comments:
Post a Comment