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THIS PAPER IS BASED ON the assumption that all theories, psychoanalytic theory included, are products of their time and culture. To quote Levenson:
We, our patients, their complaints, our very concepts of treatment and cure, are all manifestations of the particular epoch in which we live, and ultimately of each other. We are as embedded in our time and place as bugs in amber (Levenson, 1972).
Likewise Thomas Kuhn writes about the influence of previous conceptualization on current theory:
Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e. for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition (Kuhn, 1971).
Thus culture and its product, scientific theory, form a matrix, in and around our work, which we mostly take for granted. Can this matrix ever really be examined, so that its effect on an operational dyadic field may be objectively assessed?
The examination of different cultures has traditionally belonged to the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, and despite cross fertilization between these disciplines and psychoanalysis, work with individual patients seldom includes anthropological, sociological or other ethnically relevant data. As analysts we are primarily concerned with interactions and transactions within the psychoanalytic dyad; i.e. transference-countertransference issues, and interpersonal processes. In this context, what is meant by culture is only