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Psychoanalysis as a cross-cultural discipline and internationally wide practice and discourse has always had to deal with the tension between the ‘universality’ of the basic psychic organisation and the ‘diversity’ of its culturally, linguistically and socio-historically determined constituents. Ever since its birth, psychoanalysis has developed in a rapidly changing, multicultural and multilingual world. In this sense Freud's Vienna was a kind of a metaphorical Babel (Amati-Mehler et al., 1990). Throughout almost the whole of the twentieth century, war, emerging totalitarian regimes, wide-ranging socio-cultural upheavals and serious changes in economic conditions caused the migration of great masses of people. Analysts and patients changed countries of residence, cultures and languages.
In the context of these dramatic circumstances, and also under the influence of other complex cultural and linguistic factors, psychoanalysis itself can be said to have represented a kind of a metaphorical migrant, obliged to change its predominant language and adopt new customs and standards of ‘another’ world. The recent introduction of psychoanalysis into Russia, Eastern Europe and even more culturally distant areas such as the Middle and Far East is also challenging our professional community to pay due attention to cultural and linguistic differences within psychoanalytic theory, practice and procedures of training. However, in spite of the innovative work of some analysts (Erikson, 1946; Kakar, 1985; Amati-Mehler et al., 1990; Akhtar, 1995; Puget, 1995, to name only a few) who stressed the fundamental and irreducible character of variable cultural and linguistic factors, psychoanalytic theory—and psychoanalytic practice as a whole—for a long time awarded priority to the ideal of a ‘universal man’. The very inclusion of such a panel as this in the programme of the IPA Congress is a sign of current recognition of the importance of this problem.
After introducing the members of the