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RoseMarie Perez-Foster is clear and blunt when she tells us “Our hidden shame is that psychoanalysis has a very defined view of life and how it should be lived, and it is this perspective that determines who is to be treated, who is analyzable, who has adequate ego strength, who can meaningfully relate to objects, and who is capable of exploring his or her deep inner self” (p. 3).
Her message may not be warmly received by mainstream psychoanalysis. The question of analyzability has long been a thorny one. Analysts have been inclined to put the responsibility for failures on the ego deficits of the patient and have paid scant attention to cultural and class biases within the treatment situation which may impede the analytic process. There has been discussion of “the widening scope of psychoanalysis” but for the most part this has focused on the psychopathology of the patient and has not included careful scrutiny of the values and cultural blind spots embedded within the person of the analyst, and ultimately within psychoanalytic metapsychology.
The knowledge gleaned by sociologists and anthropologists from cross cultural studies, has for the most part not found its way into psychoanalytic thinking about intrapsychic structures and how they are formed. A yearning for recognition of psychoanalysis by other disciplines, has led to some defensive isolation and, on occasion, to defensive disdain about data that are not analytically derived, with an unfortunate arrogance toward colleagues (and patients) who question analytic authority on the inner workings of the mind. For example, Margaret Mahler's early writing about separation individuation was rejected by the prestigious Psychoanalytic Study of the Child because her data, derived from the observation of the mother-child dyad, were not considered “psychoanalytic.” African American and foreign-born, American trained analysts have only just begun to bring us data from the analytic situation about the impact of culture, (Meh