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Encountering a person from a different culture often elicits reactions that can be informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference: What of our perception is anchored in reality, and what is generated by fantasy? What are the real differences between two people, and what cultural biases might shape perceptions of difference? Extrapolating from the individual to the larger culture, we can ask similar questions: What human commonalities exist between two cultures, and what is unique to a culture? Do social and historical forces create unique cultures such that commonalities between distinctly different cultures are challenging to identify? In his monograph China on the Mind, Christopher Bollas addresses such questions, bringing his unique psychoanalytic perspective to understanding “Eastern” and “Western” cultural experiences.1
Bollas—like many others before him—has observed that there seem to be fundamental differences between Eastern and Western modes of thought and being. What are these differences, and how do we understand them with regard to the organization of the mind? As we explore cultural differences, questions about cross-cultural constants naturally arise. Most writers interested in such questions ultimately posit some unity of Eastern and Western minds (we're all human, right?). The brain is the brain, and there is no reason to believe that fundamental brain structure—and therefore, fundamental elements of the mind—differ across cultures. The central issue, then, is how history and current sociocultural context (i.e., the environment) shapes the mind. Bollas identifies what he believes are major differences between Eastern and Western minds, although he believes that these differences stem from unique sociocultural experiences that caused a divergence from a previously unified mind. In many respects, in this monograph, Bollas is arguing that East and West can be unified again—at least conceptually and philosophically.
Philosophers—and Bollas's essay