Ambivalence and Anxiety in the Psychiatric Systems of the United States and Japan.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder and the Japanese condition known as taijin kyofusho are classified as 'anxiety disorders' by US and Japanese psychiatrists. While members of the biomedical community might prefer to see this as evidence of a human universal, the similarity between the two is not primarily biological, but cultural and developmental. Both disorders develop out of a conflict between or within cultural significant values, values that refer to and develop from the dynamics of emotional attachment.