My wife and I came to feel that the cultural dimension of
“well-ness” lay at the core of our work as psychiatrists. We collected
artifacts from other societies because they are beautiful, but also
because they contain clues to the workings of the human heart, the
eternal mystery. — Dr. Theodore Lidz
In the spirit
of a lifelong interest in the cultural sources of personality and a
desire to spur comparative cultural studies, in 1999 Dr. Theodore Lidz,
Sterling Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, made a generous gift to the
Yale Peabody Museum. The Theodore and Ruth Wilmanns Lidz Endowment Fund
for Excellence in Scholarly Publications is dedicated to the
dissemination of scholarly research and the study of world cultures.
The fund will secure the future of the Yale University Publications in Anthropology
series, and also enable the Peabody Museum to publish other scholarly
work in anthropology and the natural sciences. In recognition of the
Lidz’s pioneering research and clinical work in schizophrenia and other
areas of psychiatry, particular emphasis will be given to publications
addressing mental disorders and cross-cultural studies.
The Peabody’s 1997–1998 exhibition Spirit Images: The Lidz Collection of Southwest Pacific Art
was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ruth Wilmanns Lidz, herself a
distinguished professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, widely known
for her treatment of schizophrenic and other profoundly disturbed
patients.The couple collected from a variety of cultures and, in 1986,
gave one collection of 120 artifacts from Melanesia, assembled in the early 1970s, to the Peabody.
The collection documents the culture of Fiji, Vanuatu and remote parts
of Papua New Guinea just as those areas were beginning to experience
extensive contact with other cultures. Many of the artifacts they
acquired had been used in male initiation rituals and it was the Lidz’s
study of this aspect of Melanesian culture that led them to write Oedipus in the Stone Age: A Psychoanalytic Study of Masculinization in Papua New Guinea,
their 1989 book that revised Freudian interpretations of masculinity
and femininity. The genesis of both the book and the collection date to
Theodore Lidz’s service in the South Pacific during World War II, when
he treated psychiatric casualties from the Solomon Island campaign.
Ruth Wilmanns Lidz, who died in October 1995, shared her husband’s
fascination with the region; an accomplished sculptor, she early became
interested in primitive art.
Both Dr. Theodore Lidz and
his wife were innovative and nondoctrinaire in their approach to
profound mental illness. Central to their work was the concept of “the
person.” They sought to treat their patients in the larger context of
the family and societal backgrounds and believed that the concepts and
beliefs embedded in a culture are part of the reality into which
members of that society are socialized.
Ted Lidz once wrote:
The peoples of Papua New Guinea fascinate us because their societies
often depend on ways and belief, centuries, perhaps millennia old, that
are antipodal to ours. Central to many, for example, is the belief that
illness, death, and bad luck are brought about by sorcery. A number of
observers have been struck by the apparent paradox that sorcery, which
seems disintegrative, can be a major integrative force in these
societies; as a tribesman put it,“you have police and guns, we have
sorcery.”
It is toward the promotion of greater understanding of such differences
and what they reveal about the human condition that the Yale Peabody
Museum dedicates the Theodore and Ruth Wilmanns Lidz Endowment Fund.
For information on Yale Peabody Museum publications, contact the Publications Office.
Photograph courtesy of the Lidz family.
