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The social sciences in our time have witnessed a considerable questioning of traditional objectivist views of human knowledge, especially social knowledge. Different philosophical movements, such as hermeneutics, social constructionism, poststructuralism—to name a few—have all, in their different ways, emphasized that social knowledge is profoundly influenced by history, culture, and language. In cross-cultural work, in particular, a few anthropologists have, over the last two decades, noted that whenever Western theories/assumptions about psychological development have been applied to appraise the development of selves and minds in non-Western settings, such individuals have almost without fail ended up at the lower end of the developmental scale. Consequently, such theorists are increasingly aware that their models and categories have built-in local cultural values and, while this does not necessarily invalidate them, it does require that these assumptions be made explicit so as to promote cleaner thinking.
Psychoanalysis itself, however, has had a rather complex relationship with these developments. While its radical insights into the role of unconscious factors in shaping all our perceptions were extremely significant in promoting a reassessment of earlier objectivist views, at the same time, and at various stages, there has been a tendency toward reification of its own metaphors and an inadequate awareness of the contextual influence on many of its concepts and categories, both clinical and theoretical. There is often an implicit and unexamined assumption that psychoanalytic formulations have universal validity across cultures.
Roland is one of perhaps two or three psychoanalysts who have seriously addressed cross-cultural issues in our discipline. This book, taken together with his remarkable previous one (Roland, 1988) represent the fruits of a courageous and pioneering effort over the last two decades to address these issues in a systematic way. While in a num