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THE WORDS "STRANGE, " "STRANGER, " AND "strangeness" have no currency in psychoanalytic usage. They are strange to our vocabulary. Strange to say, this omission is itself peculiar because we are ordinarily as concerned with the opposite side of the coin—with intimacy and all that is involved in loving, bonding, and attachment. The coin that I am referring to is called "interpersonal relations." But, with the exception of fleeting references to "the stranger response" among infants and young children, the concept of strangeness has remained largely unexamined.
Although it is difficult to take up an unexamined topic, it may help if we realize that we are dealing with a process, signified by the verb form, "to estrange, " and especially the past participle, "estranged." Clearly, there must be several different ways of coming to be, or to feel, estranged. These pathways would surely differ both psychologically and culturally, as would the psychotherapeutic methods of overcoming estrangement, whenever it is presented as a problem by a patient. I am especially intrigued by this problem since it affords us a new entré to the influence of cultural variables on the techniques of psychoanalysis, and I view my effort in this paper as parallel to Leah Davidson's recent publications in this area (Davidson, 1987), (1980).
It may be helpful to approach the difficulties of the subject matter by trying to define our terms more specifically. What is meant by the word "strangeness?" One approach to this question is by means of a search for word origins, not only for "strange, " but also for related terms. For example, "strange" and "stranger" are derived from the French word "étranger, " which itself is descended from the Latin past participle, "extraneus." Here, the determining