Cultural Pluralism and Psychoanalysis: the Asian and North American Experience. By Alan Roland. New York and London:  Routledge. Pp.  218.

This is a fascinating book. Alan Roland is a psychoanalyst with extensive experience of treating Indian and Japanese patients in New York. He also lived for a number of years in India and Japan, where he undertook psychoanalytic research. He therefore has excellent credentials for exploring the extent to which psychoanalysis can adapt to a world in which cultural pluralism is becoming more and more a fact of life. For us, this is of more than academic interest, for as we are increasingly called upon to see patients from minority ethnic groups, we will inevitably have to consider which aspects of our theory and technique are relevant to them, and which might be said to constitute an unwitting cultural imposition which, of course, would run counter to the whole spirit of the psychoanalytic approach.

Roland's book addresses the question of whether psychoanalysis is properly equipped to understand and treat patients who come from cultural groupings other than those of European extraction. Broadly, his answer is no. Although it claims universal validity for its models of the mind, Roland argues that, as a product of Western thought, psychoanalysis is in fact built on hidden values that revolve around what he calls individualism. This is a set of values (whose trajectory he traces back to the Reformation) that permeates Western society, underpinning a mode of living in which the individual is regarded as the self-contained unit of society.

If individuals are set on their own in society in a way never before done, then psychoanalysis is oriented toward enabling them to be on their own by resolving all kinds of inner conflicts and deficits. What other psychological theory is so thorough-going in its exploration of the individual psyche, or is so oriented towards individuals taking full responsibility for their lives through resolving the dictates of the unconscious?

Although he concedes that psychoanalytic metapsychology has a critical edge that enables it to question a