Culturally derived proscriptions and prohibitions usher us into the world, give shape and texture to our development, guide us through everyday life, and preside over how and when we leave it. Yet psychoanalytic institute curricula, clinical conferences, and analysts in their consulting rooms are curiously reluctant to explore how culture seeps into the pores of our unconscious, infiltrating our wishes, conflicts, representations of self and other, and self with other, as well as representations of the world at large. This is surprising since Freud was an astute observer of sociocultural and political phenomena. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he warned that “we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are” and emphasized culture's defensive function in instinctual life by noting that sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development. And yet, his model of the mind had no place for the anchoring, refueling, nurturing, motivating, and pleasure producing functions of our cultural surround. With the notable exception of Fromm, Horney, Erikson, and Winnicott, subsequent analysts perpetuated Freud's neglect.
This trend is now showing a reversal. There have been number of important books over the past 15 years, including The Analyst in the Inner City by Neil Altman, Reaching Across Boundaries of Culture and Class by Rose Marie Perez Foster et al, Colors of Childhood by Salman Akhtar and Selma Kramer, Immigration and Identity by Salman Akhtar, and Analysts in the Trenches: Streets, Schools, War Zones by Bruce Sklarew, Stuart Twemlow, and Sallye Wilkinson. These texts have brought the knowledge of cultural, ethnic, racial, and class differences within the United States population into the clinical domain of psychoanalysis while also raising important questions about its theoretical assumptions.
A wider net has been cast by four recent books edited by Salman Akhtar. These are Freud along the Ganges, The Geography of Meanings, The Crescent and the Couch, and Freud and the Far East. As might be evident from their titles, these books pertain to the peoples and culture of India, Australia, and New Zealand, the Islamic world, and the Far East, including China, Japan, and Korea. Each contains a wide-ranging introductory essay by Akhtar which highlights the terrain—both literal and metaphorical—that the reader is about to encounter.
The spiritual realm is often neglected by Western psychoanalysts and this may be one factor accounting for the reluctance of those who value spiritual life to engage in psychoanalysis.
Freud Along the Ganges begins with an overview of the history of psychoanalysis in India. Akhtar reminds us that the crosscurrents between psychoanalysis and India began with Girindrashekhar Bose's correspondence with Freud in the 1920s. Bose's book Concept of Repression made a significant, but largely unrecognized, contribution to psychoanalytic theory presaging the concepts of projective identification and intersubjectivity later developed in the West. The stultifying influence of two analysts, Owen Berkely-Hill and Claude Daly, who came to India as British army officers, is grim evidence of the profound damage which can result from the oppression of cultural prejudice and attitudes of superiority. Subsequent chapters contribute to our understanding of the long-term effects of India's partition, the pervasive role of religion in the life of Indian people, and the unconscious forces contributing to the popularity of Bollywood movies. A significant portion of the book is dedicated to matters of spirituality and Hindu mysticism. The spiritual realm is often neglected by Western psychoanalysts and this may be one factor accounting for the reluctance of those who value spiritual life to engage in psychoanalysis.
The Geography of Meanings is co-edited with Maria Teresa Savio Hooke, a distinguished psychoanalyst based in Sydney. This book is an IPA sponsored volume that pioneers an attempt to understand the psychological significance of land, space, indigenous cultures, and geographic dislocations. The book grew out of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society's 2000 Conference in Uluru, Central Australia, described as “a place of profound spiritual and cultural significance for both Indigenous and Australian culture.” Although it focuses on the Aboriginal culture which goes back at least 40,000 years, this book offers astonishing insights into both the rich heritage and the heartbreaking plight of all indigenous peoples who have been robbed of their land, painfully dislocated, and marginalized, even murdered, by foreign settlers. It challenges us to rethink some of the “institutionalized assumptions about the causes and cures of contemporary psychic ills.” One of the contributors, Craig San Roque, is critical of psychoanalysis for becoming “the handmaiden of the Caucasian psyche.” Referencing Freud's Remembering, Repeating and Working Through, co-editor Hooke, cautions, “With silence, secrecy, and lack of awareness, there will be both repetition and the passing on of depriving experiences and brutalities from one generation to another.”
Jennifer Bonovitz, Ph.D., a supervising and training analyst at the Institute of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, has co-authored The Facilitating Partnership, published articles on immigration and cross-cultural issues, and received IPA's 2009 Award For Psychoanalytic Research Exceptional Contribution.
The Crescent and the Couch constitutes a timely effort to address the dangerous, potentially incendiary, ignorance about Islam, not only in the non-Muslim world in general but within psychoanalysis in particular. The book has chapters on the history of Islam, the biography of its prophet, Mohammad, in addition to many world-renowned Muslim individuals. It also contains chapters on Islam's encounter with Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism. Hossein Etezady's chapter “Rapture and Poetry” is an outstanding example of the book's successful bridging of psychoanalytic concepts and vital aspects of Islamic life, in this instance faith. After exploring the 13th century Persian poet Rumi's “boundless creativity and transcendental consciousness,” Etezady concludes: “If we view faith as a state of relatedness to an object whose dimensions exceed the limits of emotional or cognitive mentation, we can utilize an object relations model of the mind, separation-individuation theory, and the intersubjective experience to define and elucidate faith as an individual experience, as well as an organizing agent of communal…and enduring significance.” Chapters with more direct reference to psychoanalysis also exist in the book; these include Akhtar's historical account of Muslims in the psychoanalytic profession and Aisha Abbasi's lucid report on her experience as a Muslim analyst working with non-Muslim patients.
Freud and the Far East paints broad brush strokes of the historical development of psychoanalysis in Japan, Korea, and China. Keiko Okinogi's chapter on Japan describes a number of concepts which may have universal application. For example, Takeo Doi's amae, meaning to depend and presume upon another's love, captures the infantile origin of love, providing a term that is missing in the English language. In a later chapter Daniel Freeman deepens our understanding of amae from a developmental perspective and relates it to Mahler's concept of refueling and to differences in the separation-individuation process in Japan. Mark Moore's chapter on wa provides brilliant insight into the Japanese desire for harmony in relationships with others, a way of being that may arouse irritation in “foreigners” because they misunderstand it to be oblique, rigidly conforming, or nonassertive.
Together these volumes provide North American psychoanalysts with an opportunity to learn about the sociopolitical history cultural institutions, family structure, fables and epic poems, movies, and literature of a large segment of the world's population with whom they ordinarily remain unfamiliar The discourse in these books underscores the complex interplay of the drive and the ego-driven development of personality with the powerful forces of ancestral legacies and their attendant myths and fantasies. By juxtaposing the familiar idiom of psychoanalysis with the ever-elusive narrative of culture, the four volumes deepen our understanding of how the “unthought knowns” of culture place their stamp on our fantasies, dreams, unconscious wishes, conflicts, defenses, transferences, and counter-transferences. In a world that is vulnerable to indifference, if not outright prejudice, towards geographically remote groups, such knowledge can only enhance the possibility of mutual understanding across the globe.