Psychiatry could learn a great deal from social anthropology. Most English-speaking psychiatrists are trained and think largely in the languages of biology and pharmacology, and so do not find it easy to appreciate the complex influences of their patients' cultural backgrounds, assumptions and beliefs on the shifting ways in which they express their distress and their fears. As a result, we are often nonplussed by contemporary phenomena like myalgic encephalomyelitis and the Gulf War and total allergy syndromes. So there is plenty of scope for an anthropology text aimed at psychiatrists.

Sadly, this is not it. It is probably not written for psychiatrists, or even for doctors, and although Littlewood writes fluently it is heavy going. He writes sensibly enough about the cultural influences on the phenomena and the rising female incidence of parasuicide, agoraphobia, anorexia and obesity, but most of his comments are hardly original. Moreover, the bulk of the book is devoted to incest, military rape, domestic sieges and the links between late 19th-century French hysteria and late 20th-century American multiple personality disorder. His observations here are more interesting and, I would guess, more shrewd, but none of these phenomena is a key issue for busy National Health Service psychiatrists. If you are well-heeled and will not be put out by frequent references to instrumentality, mimesis and sub-dominance — and if you are familiar with symbolic inversions, transgressive arguments, reversal theory and contingent proximity — you might be fascinated to read this heavily referenced tome. But you will also be a fairly rare bird.