ABSTRACT
I have selected certain accounts from the 75 cases I collected from 1995–2008, to illustrate a distinctive phenomenology in the link between amaXhosa circumcision, cultural practice, and psychotic disorder. These men’s crises reflect those of adolescents transitioning to adulthood in other ethnic groups across the world, except in their case, their psychotic content and circumstance were culturally distinctive and had been repeated across a cohort of amaXhosa men who had gone for circumcision or were prevented from doing so. A link between circumcision and psychosis was conditional on two factors: an innate predisposition or vulnerability to a psychotic breakdown and a natal belonging within a circumcising culture such as the amaXhosa.
