Examines the conflicts experienced by the modern psychiatrist when faced with traditional Maghreb healing practices of mixed cultural and religious origin. Folk practices remain in evidence in contemporary Algeria that can interfere with caregiving and distort the clinical features of psychiatric disorders. Detachment is required for the psychiatric practitioner, trained in modern theory and method, to give appropriate weighting to some of the cultural forces at work in the lives of his/her patients. If treatment is to be effective, group beliefs must be understood objectively. Basic to them all is the high value placed on the group-society and important part played by the status held within the group by the folk healer. (English abstract)