Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change

Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana by Leith Mullings examines how therapeutic systems both reflect and reproduce the social relations and ideologies of their settings. Focusing on Ghana, Mullings situates indigenous psychotherapies within broader debates on the authority of Western biomedicine and the reassertion of traditional practices. She notes that all medical systems—whether biomedical or indigenous—are cultural processes that structure the meaning of illness and health. Psychotherapy is especially revealing because it directly addresses deviant behavior and is therefore grounded in specific moral and ideological assumptions. The book places Ghana within the context of World Health Organization initiatives to integrate traditional and biomedical systems, critiques of colonial legacies in health care, and the persistent inequalities that shape access to medical resources in postcolonial societies.

Mullings advances the argument that therapeutic systems cannot be understood apart from infrastructural conditions and class relations, both domestic and international. She critiques approaches in medical anthropology that treat medicine primarily as cultural expression, emphasizing instead how therapies serve social formations and reproduce ideological systems. The study contrasts two main forms of indigenous psychotherapy in Ghana—traditional religious healing and spiritualist Christianity—demonstrating both their shared symbolic processes, such as dramatic healing rituals, and their divergent goals, especially in relation to Western psychiatry’s emphasis on “ego strengthening.” By grounding analysis in urban Accra, particularly the community of Labadi, Mullings shows how local practices intersect with national health planning, postcolonial state policies, and international debates. Ultimately, the book links healing to broader processes of social change, arguing that therapies both respond to and shape Ghana’s evolving political economy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.