Cross-cultural, transnational or interdisciplinary? Eric Wittkower’s psychosomatic medicine and transcultural psychiatry in historical context

Abstract

This article traces the career, scientific achievements, and emigration of the Berlin-born physician, psychoanalyst, and psychosomatic researcher Eric Wittkower. Trained in Berlin and practicing internal medicine, he became persecuted by the Nazi regime and, after fleeing Germany via Switzerland, continued his professional career in the United Kingdom, where he turned to psychosomatic medicine and worked in the service of the British Army during World War II. After two decades of service in the UK, Wittkower joined McGill University in Canada. His increasingly interdisciplinary work contributed to the establishment of the new research field of transcultural psychiatry. Finally the paper provides a detailed history of the beginning of the section of transcultural psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute.

Child development, film evidence, and epidemiological sciences: Elwyn James Anthony and the 1957 Zurich International Congress of Psychiatry

“…Aubrey Lewis, Anthony’s mentor, had always considered social psychiatry as a way to study different cultures and their impact on the development of psychiatric conditions, basing it loosely on William McDougall’s theory of ‘social psychology’ in which he argued that psychology should form ‘the basis for all social sciences’ (McDougall, 1908: 2). In the 1950s, transcultural psychiatry was in many ways a subfield of social psychiatry, because both had similar objectives (Antić, 2022; Delille, 2018; Hennig, Delille and Müller, 2023). In the 1950s, the concept of culture was also beginning to be used to understand ‘subcultures’ in the West, in particular by the Birmingham School which built on the work of the Chicago School from the 1920s (Hoggart, 1957).…”