500 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



teristics of the "psychiatric thought" of true primitives, for the good 

 and sufficient reason that very little is known about this matter. 

 Anthropological literature is so barren on tliis topic that, to take an 

 example at random, Wisse's (1933) tremendous monograph on primi- 

 tive suicide hardly even mentions native ideas on that subject, so that 

 his work is simply a study of primitive behavior, but not of primitive 

 psychiatric thought, as it pertains to suicide. Little wonder then 

 that histories of psychiatry either ignore primitive psychiatry alto- 

 gether, or else contain only a sketchy first chapter on this topic, 

 which is often "more poetry than truth." 



Mohave psychiatry, which is substantively psychological, but 

 methodologically still supernaturalistic, appears to represent a second 

 step in the development of psycliiatry. 



The third step appears to be represented by certain early attempts 

 to think naturalistically about the problem of mental disorder. An 

 early representative of this new methodology was Hippocrates (n.d.) , 

 who insisted, e.g., that there was nothing "sacred" about the "sacred 

 disease" (epilepsy) and therefore advocated treating it like any other 

 illness. Unfortunately, though quite understandably, the lack of any 

 effective method for dealing with the irrational rationally, caused 

 Hippocrates to model his rationalistic conception of mental disease 

 upon that branch of Greek medicine which already dealt fairly ra- 

 tionally with organic illness. In so doing, he initiated an "organi- 

 cistic" trend, which remained associated with every rationalistic type 

 of psychiatry up to and including even Freud, who felt impelled to 

 postulate the existence of "Aktualneurosen" ^^ and to hint that bio- 

 chemistry may, in the end, provide the definitive answer to the 

 problem of mental disorders. 



Side by side with this methodologically scientific but substantively 

 unpsychological (organicistic) conception of mental disorder there 

 existed a second school of thought which was substantively more or 

 less "psychological" but remained methodologically bound to super- 

 naturalism. This point of view was represented by the aesculapian 

 (nonhippocratic) healing priest, by the medieval exorcist, and by a 

 number of medical and philosophical mavericks, who advanced psy- 

 chiatry by stubbornly clinging to the position that mental disease 

 had an implicit and inherent "meaning," but, at the same time, also 

 retarded its progress by clinging to a variety of supernaturalistic 

 methodological positions. 



As for the few who did adhere to a more or less psychologistic 

 position and, at the same time, also groped for a naturalistic method- 

 ology, their many misadventures with their contemporaries (Zilboorg 

 and Henry, 1941) indicate that neither Western society nor Western 



" One "Aktualneuroae" ia supposed to be caused by a kind of autointoxication of the 

 sexually inactive organism. 



