Cultural Reference and Seduction

In an ideal analysis, the patient and the analyst, protected by the frame, would be totally cut off from the influences of the outside world. The analyst would listen only to the free associations of the patient, his/her attention would be aroused only by the interruptions in the patient's discourse, the changes of direction towards lateral paths and repetitions. This ideal model would be realised if they could use something other than language to communicate. Unfortunately, every utterance is linked to the whole system of the language and opens the door wide to cultural differences. A shared cultural reference can be at the source of a connivance that is both decisive and dangerous.

In a megapolis of India, a lawyer entered analysis with the psychiatrist who had been treating her in psychotherapy since her hospitalisation for a depression when she was an adolescent. She was a young woman from a traditional Indian background who had become a senior executive in a large multinational company. Her analyst came from a background very similar to hers. He had attended the same sort of university as her, knew the particularities of her hometown, the problems of religion, caste and emancipation of women that arose there, and which were different from those of the megapolis where the analysis was taking place. Naturally, the analysis took place in English, which the analyst and patient spoke perfectly. But they had another language in common: Hindi, the language of their early childhood and their material life. The interpretations often focused on cultural references of a sociological nature, for example on the patient's efforts to make a guru out of her analyst. They also used the double meaning of words in English, for example that of the word hot, when she found that the ventilation was not cooling her analyst's office sufficiently, while at the same time the transference was getting a little too “heated”. The patient overcame her depression and her inhibitions, her inter