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In the first decades of the 20th century, Freud's ideas travelled the globe. Looking back, it is astonishing to think that the words penned in between patients, lectures and family obligations in a modest apartment in the 9th district of Vienna, would reach places as distant as Calcutta, Mexico City and Moscow. Even more astonishing is the contrast between the debates sparked by psychoanalytic theories around the globe. In each country, the cultural, historical and political context shaped the way in which Freud would be read. As Alexander Etkind (1997) has shown, most Soviet readers - including Leon Trotsky - were primarily concerned with the question of how psychoanalysis could be reconciled with Marxism. In France, the most innovative readings of Freud were done by artists linked to the Surrealist movement, and one can even conceive of the entire history of Surrealism as emerging from André Breton's eccentric reading of The Interpretation of Dreams in his Manifesto of Surrealism (Roudinesco, 1990). In Spain, Freud was translated in the 1920s, a decade characterized by the mounting tensions that would later erupt in the Spanish Civil War, and his ideas about sexuality were immediately entangled in the culture wars fought between conservative Catholics and liberal-minded reformists (Glick, 1984). In India, Freud's readers seized on psychoanalytic theory to launch a discussion about cultural differences, including the question of whether the Oedipus complex was a universal psychic structure or, on the contrary, one that needed to be adapted to specific cultural contexts (Hartnack, 1990).