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To the Editor:
Recent issues of this journal have called attention to problems of cross-cultural analysis (Zaphiropoulos, 1987) ; (Davidson, 1987) and in my opinion, more papers on that subject are in order even if they appear to be too exotic and specialized to merit general attention. The fact is that trans-cultural considerations are germane to every practice. And that is a point too often neglected in discussions of these matters.
My conviction arises not merely from the obvious fact that in our shrinking world any analyst may encounter a patient from some other part of the globe. Less obvious, and therefore more troublesome, is the frequency with which we are tempted to ethnocentrism without even recognizing the hazard. The temptation occurs in just about every analysis, whenever the patient's identity differs from that of the therapist in some significant affiliation—say age group or social status, gender or religion, let alone mother tongue or ethnicity. Any discernible differences in social background and role also involve differences in the experience of self and others. Moreover, it is a common human inclination to regard one's own side of that difference as superior in some way. According to the Random House dictionary (1968) ethnocentrism is "the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own culture." Ethnocentrism, then, is a more apparent instance of the difficulties associated with social differences.
Ethnocentric bias is not news. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes