Psychoanalysis in India and Japan: Toward a Comparative Psychoanalysis

The influence of culture on psychoanalysis has rarely been explicitly considered in Freudian psychoanalysis. Important exceptions have been Indian and Japanese analysts who have trained in the West and have been struck by radically different psychological configurations from their own that are clearly related to civilizational differences in culture and social patterns (Doi, 1973, 1986; Kakar, 1978, 1980; Taketomo, 1982; Tatara, 1974, 1982; Ramanujam, 1979, 1986). Recently, the psychoanalytically informed sociologist Edith Kurweil (1989) has also used this comparative perspective in exploring significant variations in theoretical discourse among various Freudian groups as influenced by the cultures of different European societies and the United States.

In neo-Freudian circles at the Karen Homey Institute and the William Alanson White Institute, culture has played a far more explicit role in psychoanalytic thinking. There have even been some efforts to explore the influence of culture on psychoanalysis from a cross-civilizational perspective in some of the annual meetings of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.

I have endeavored to contribute to this same issue through clinical psychoanalytic research in India and Japan to ascertain how cultural and social patterns radically different from those of Western societies affect the whole psychoanalytic endeavor. (See In Search of Self in India and japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1988.) Similar to others, a cross-cultural comparative perspective emerges as central to exploring the influence of culture on psychoanalysis. It is only through such a comparative perspective