In All the Mothers Are One (1992), Stanley Kurtz, a psychoanalytically oriented anthropologist, examines probingly the Western psychoanalytic understanding of Hindu Indian child raising. Kurtz asks fundamental questions about the relation of individualism and communalism in cultures and in individual psyches. I am grateful for Kurtz's focusing of these questions (they seem to me to be of the first importance as Western psychotherapists struggle to think out the mix of empowerments and constraints in their own and others' traditions). But I do not share either Kurtz's despair of change within Western societies nor his apparent indifference to the need of it in Eastern societies.

I argue that the great changes in cultural orientations since World War II give us grounds for more hopefulness than Kurtz assumes warranted. And I argue for the particular changes that I think are both possible and good.