ABSTRACT
A potential link between cultural background and mental health was receiving some official recognition, and along with that the term 'transcultural psychiatry' for the whole field. With the emphasis on exploring the psychiatric needs of societies with cultures very different from those in which psychiatry developed, and with the further desire to help adapt psychiatric teaching to the needs of these societies, it was natural that transcultural psychiatry came to be recognised as concerned mainly with the Developing World. The 1970s opened impressively for us with the publication of Henri Ellenberger’s massive and important text, The Discovery of the Unconscious, and it closed with a flurry of activity in almost all expected directions, but with the development of somewhat divergent trends in different parts of the world. One of the trends, most obvious in Europe, was a shift from theory towards action, but also a blurring of what the term 'transcultural' was intended to mean.
