Psychoanalysis across civilizations: a personal journey

Abstract

This journey started in 1950 at Antioch College when I wrote a required Life Aims paper to make a comparative study of East and West in philosophy, religion, art, literature, and the social sciences. In 1977 I went to India on a grant for clinical psychoanalytic research to assess the psychological effects of Westernization on Indians, to ascertain differences in configurations of the self from American patients, and to reexamine psychoanalysis. Realizing I had a tiger by the tail, I had to do just what I had envisaged and completely forgotten about in my Life Aims paper, only now to focus on psychoanalysis. I went to Japan in 1982 for an inter-Asian psychological comparison, which had never been done. Returning home necessitated two more journeys: to understand the encounter of Asian patients with the radically different American cultural/psychological world; and to explore the dialogue psychoanalysts have had with the cultural roots of psychoanalysis in modern Western individualism.