Projective and identificatory illnesses among ex-hunter-gatherers: a seven-year survey of a remote Australian...

THIS article attempts to provide answers from a psychiatric viewpoint to the question posed by Tindale (1974) in the opening paragraph of his Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: "What happens when a few small groups of people of family size are wresting a living from a given area of land by searching for food, over whose presence or growth they have no direct control?" Such very small-scale societies were a necessity in the Australian environment, where the Aboriginals were obliged to live by hunting and gathering. Indeed, the life-style of all manking was similar to this through most of the time span of human existence. The survey on which this article is based examined a community not long removed from that life-style, and found the defense mechanisms of projection and identification, which apparently persist because of their ancient function in assisting the adjustment of the individual and the group in these very small-scale societies. Some clans in this area have been in continuous contact with whites for only 25 years, and the others for about 60 years, so it is unlikely that the modal defenses of the people have changed. The child-rearing patterns that contributed to the defenses, appropriate to a society organized into clans, probably also have not changed significantly. Intensified by stresses of modern origin, these defenses shape the psychiatric illnesses of today.