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Since its inception psychoanalysis has spread throughout the world as a scientific discipline and as a mode of treatment. Starting in the Western hemisphere it soon travelled from Vienna to Berlin, to Budapest, to London and Moscow (Luria, 1924 (Freud, 1918, p. 10); see Etkind, 2000) and Calcutta (Bose, 1921; see Vaidyanathan and Kripal, 1999). Psychoanalytic training crossed the Atlantic ocean conquering North America by people trained by Freud himself (Shakow and Rapaport, 1964). Already, in 1911, Freud reviewed a paper by Greve, a Chilean physician, which contains the first reference to psychoanalysis in Latin America, but it was Matte Blanco's great achievement to institutionalize psychoanalytic training since the 1940s (see Jiménez, 2002, p. 83). The Japanese analyst Doi (1971) wrote about ‘the anatomy of dependence’ on which he spelled out the specific Japanese concept of ‘amae’, and for this was granted the M. Sigourney Award in 2005. After the downfall of the Iron Curtain the former countries of the Soviet Union were quick to accept the missionaries of various psychoanalytic backgrounds. The Russian development provided a special case when president Jelzin, in 1993, signed an official document for the re-installation of ‘Russian psychoanalysis’ (Reshetnikov, 1998). At present we are witnessing the implantation of psychoanalysis in China promoted by various psychoanalytic groups that have been teaching there for a number of years (Gerlach, 2005; Varvin, 2008).
Given these developments it seems fair to speak of a process of globalization of psychoanalysis and its treatment practices. At a closer view one cannot avoid noting quite a diversity of what is covered by the term psychoanalysis in respect to treatment practice. Does it make sense to insist on a sharp distinction between psychoanalysis proper and psychoanalytically informed treatments, and what would be the impact for training by giving up the strict distinction?
Differences and similarities between psyc