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How comprehensive are (Western) psychoanalytic theories of psychological functioning? Alan Roland, who for twenty years or more has been treating Indian patients and studying Eastern cultures, argues that psychoanalysis, and in particular classical psychoanalysis, needs to modify its claims for universality. His main aim is to integrate aspects of Eastern psychology into psychoanalytic thinking. A second aim, expressed in the last chapter, but not discussed here, is to initiate a synthesis of psychoanalytic thinking with that of social history and the social sciences, a synthesis in which there is no reductive dismissal of these other disciplines.
I agree with Roland that psychoanalysis has misrepresented itself in claiming to be value-free and universal; some of its values are intrinsic to the enterprise, such as trying to face painful truths about oneself; other values, often surreptitiously imported, are not essential. Analysts are constantly engaged in evaluating behaviour as pathological or healthy, as infantile or mature, and in doing so are liable to apply standards derived from their own culture, standards which have been built in to the theories, without recognizing their local character. There are, of course, common threads of humanity, and Roland agrees that these threads are captured by the structure of our theories. But, he argues, the 'content' of these categories is 'overwhelmingly Western-centric'.
Though no analytic school of thought is exempt, classical instinct theory is particularly prone to such tendencies. For this theory claims for itself the moral neutrality of the physical sciences and bases its metapsychology on the analogy with hydrostatic systems. Secondly, the mind of the infant is thought of as a discrete entity from the start, developing according to inbuilt laws; of course such seeds require an environment—physical, personal, and cultural—to actualize and channel their potentiality, but cultural input has been seen as relevant o