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For the Analyst's Notepad section, the Editors welcome the contribution of clinical material which demonstrates nascent ideas or new approaches that may merit further discussion by our readership. We hope that this space may become a forum for the exchange of ideas and clinical experiences.
In our current issue we present such a paper, to which the author invites further discussion, entitled: “Bridging the Gap: Technical Problems in the Analysis of an Asian Immigrant.”
We are aware in presenting this paper that many of our readers will take issue with the author's Kohutian emphasis on the patient's narcissism. However, the clinical material is presented in such refreshingly complete detail, that readers may form their own opinions as to which diagnostic framework best fits the data.
— The Editors
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, a large contingent of Asians has emigrated to North America. Some of them came seeking better educational opportunities, others pursuing the American economic dream, and still others hoping for a greater degree of political freedom. Even though many psychological components of the process are fertile for investigation, psychoanalytic literature itself has only recently focused on the various elements of the immigration process: psychic determinants of the decision to emigrate, the way in which the host country receives and integrates the immigrant, and the psychological adaptation of the immigrant to a new culture (Garza-Guerrero, 1974; Denford, 1981; Grinberg and Grinberg, 1989; Antokoletz, 1993; Akhtar, 1995).
For an immigrant analysand, the experience of immigration may become available for analytic scrutiny both through his report of his extra-analytic experiences, and through his experience of his culturally dystonic analyst. Akhtar has identified nine factors influencing