In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward A Cross-Cultural Psychology. Alan Roland. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1988.

If psychoanalytic theory had developed from clinical experience in India or Japan instead of Western Europe and North America, problems in applying the theory to practice in a setting different from its origins would be as apparent to critical analysts in New York or Boston as these problems were to Alan Roland in his study of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Indian and Japanese patients. Fundamental differences distinguish notions of identity, self, and family relationships among Americans, Indians, and the Japanese; but efforts to demonstrate the universality of psychoanalysis and delineate characteristic deficits among the people of non-Western cultures, judging them by an inappropriate Western standard, too often have constrained psychoanalytic thinking about comparisons across cultures. While some thoughtful analysts who trained in the West and practice in India, like Sudhir Kakar, carefully preserve conceptual frameworks that worked better where they trained than where they practice, Roland proposes overhauling the theory to make it more responsive to essential cultural differences. He reformulates the concept of self, highlighting essential differences between the typically Western notion of the individual who values independence and invests identity essentially in the “I-self,” and a typically Asian construction of self that is fundamentally interpersonal, investing identity in the “we-self of family, work group, or other social unit.

Roland chronicles a journey of psychological discoveries, beginning with a personal account of his background and interests, reflecting upon the limits of psychoanalytic theory and the attraction of other civilizations and historical epochs, “something about which contemporary psychoanalysis and psychology have little to say” (p. xi). Although he raises fundamental questions that challenge the universality of current psychoanalytic theory, he does so from within the field, as a psychoanalyst practicing in Greenwich Village, hig