Intimacy as Viewed From a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Aspects of the Self in India and America*

Francis Hsu, the noted Chinese-American anthropologist, in a 1971 paper, “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing Psychological Anthropology,”1 admonished his fellow anthropologists for never investigating or defining intimacy relationships in non-Western cultures, particularly Eastern ones. Hsu made the important distinction between the structure and quality of relationships in a society, the former being concerned with the role relationships and structures that social scientists mainly study, while the latter is often involved with the intimacy relationships of a given society that are almost never delved into.

Hsu's formulations struck a most responsive chord when I read his paper a year ago. I had found from some eight months of shortterm psychoanalytic work in India that there is a quality of relationship and relating that seems quite different from what we have here. I thought that perhaps as a psychoanalyst working in the highly intimate therapeutic setting I could make some fresh observations on intimacy relationships in India, and in turn that this could yield a broader perspective on intimacy relationships in our own society.

I recognize, however, that such psychoanalytic formulations would have to take into account differing social and cultural contexts, something which psychoanalysis as a whole has been notably delinquent about. Yet we are blessed with psychoanalytic movements