You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic therapies reach a disproportionately small number of poor patients and ones from minority ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This leads to a widespread perception that in the West psychoanalysis - like much of the establishment - has a systematic, if unconscious, bias against members of such groups. Rose-Marie Pérez Foster, one of the editors of this volume, puts it succinctly:
As psychoanalytically trained clinicians, we carry a secret shame. While being members of a field that prizes the value of all human life, and people's efforts to realize their fullest potentials, analysts also know that they, in fact, touch a very narrow range of people… 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… The bold fact is that we work best with those people who are most like us, the middle class and educated who basically think and live the way we do. (p. 3)
This important and timely book tries to address directly the widespread view that, contrary to its claim to have found ways to access universal mental phenomena, psychoanalytic theory and clinical technique in fact do not apply seamlessly across the boundaries of culture and class. While others have dismissed psychoanalysis as