Psychoanalysis is Alive and Well: Meeting the Challenges of Diversity

We are living amidst a disquieting and unpredictable current of cultural change. The nuclear family is breaking up, and new forms of relationships are being created. These changes pose challenges to psychoanalysis to reconsider some of its formulations. The main thrust of my paper is that ongoing cultural transformations and the diversity and complexity of life have not been adequately accommodated in our conceptual schemes of normality and pathology. Our positing of ideal norms pathologized processes of adjustment and failed to appreciate the creative adaptive struggle of coping with the challenges of modern living. The creative momentum seen in the present venturing towards new lifestyles and new forms of relationships encourages a new appreciation on our part of conflict and struggle as evitable companions in people's lives.

I have always been puzzled by the particular historical evolution of psychoanalysis occurring after the twenties. During the twenties and in the thirties the leading theoreticians were dramatically exposed to and impressed by the molding power of diverse cultures, yet they turned their eyes in another direction. It was as if this very diversity was not congenial to their important, rewarding, and probably timely quest which aimed at clarifying and defining the nature of the pathological processes leading to neuroses, as processes distinct from normal ones. Interest in the importance of the diversity of cultural phenomena has reasserted itself these past twenty years with the expansion of the field of crosscultural