Dorothea C. Leighton

Elements of Psychotherapy in Navaho Religion

Psychiatry has its place in the ranks of social disciplines and the goal is scientific humanism. Success in this promises something new and something stable as a nation, as a hemisphere, perhaps as a world. Failure leaves two archaic alternatives: either to fall apart and become a decadent civilization, or to concentrate on some focal point of fanaticism, radical or religious, rising on fabricated emotions with artificial wings like Icarus until they melt and then come tumbling down, leaving science like Daedalus to mourn. At the present time there is a flow of stimulating ideas between anthropology and psychiatry. Each of these two disciplines is growing more and more interested in the material of the other. Anthropology offers psychiatry a wide range of data valuable for comparison and control, much as comparative anatomy offers material to human anatomy. The whole panorama of overlapping interests, and a summary of the principal themes, will be considered here before the topic, psychotherapy in Navaho religion, which is only one small item in a cavalcade.