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With the postmodern insistence on the rootedness of all knowledge in culture and history and the widespread skepticism about the possibility of any universal theories of human nature and culture, it is inevitable that psychoanalysis, which has always prided itself on being as much an intellectual as a clinical discipline, would feel the need to address the issue of its cultural embeddedness. Many psychoanalysts are aware that in the current intellectual climate, the cultural and historical transcendence of their theories can no longer be taken for granted but has to be rigorously demonstrated.
It is therefore with a sense of anticipation that one turns to Roland's book, in which he seeks to compare Western, Indian, and Japanese psyches and thus to examine the question of the relativity of psychoanalytic concepts. The anticipation is enhanced by the claim that the book is based on his clinical experience and that its direct psychoanalytic understanding of patients distinguishes it from other, similar works in the field.
Roland's main conclusion is that "the intrapsychic self varies significantly if not radically according to the social and cultural patterns of societies so civilizationally different. I find that people have a different experiential, affective sense of self and relationships, as well as vastly different internalized world views that give profoundly different meanings to everyday experiences and relationships" (p. 4, italics added). Although I am sympathetic to Roland's intentions, the italicized words in the quotation give me pause. They seem to deny the common humanity of American, Indian, and Japanese patients; and one needs to closely scrutinize Roland's primary data, the case histories, to see how far such a conclusion is justified. This is where the disappointment begins. Roland's patients from India and Japan come across as if they are solely constituted of cultural masks with, at the most, unformed individual faces. We do not get the myth