In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology

IN SEARCH OF SELF IN INDIA AND JAPAN

ALAN ROLAND

In Search of Self in India and Japan

Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, 1989

This book has been composed in Linotron Sabon and Gill Sans

by Vail-Ballou Press of the Maple-Vail Book Group.

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Laury A. Egan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roland, Alan, 1930-

In search of self in India and Japan.

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

I. Self—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Personality and culture—

Cross-cultural studies. 3. East Indians—Psychology. 4. Japanese—Psychology.

5. Psychoanalysis—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.

BF697.R637 1988 155.2'0952 88-9985

ISBN 0-691-08617-6

eISBN 978-0-691-22816-7

0-691-02458-8 (pbk.)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

To Jackie, Tika, and Ariel,

who journeyed with me

through India and Japan

CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

ONE Introduction: The Familial Self, the Individualized Self, and the Spiritual Self 3

PART ONE

The Indian and Japanese Self and Social Change

TWO Indian Identity and Colonialism 17

THREE Psychoanalysis in India and Japan 55

FOUR The Familial Self, Individualization, and the Modernization Process 89

FIVE The Dynamics of Change in Urban Indian and Japanese Women 146

SIX The Indian Self: Reflections in the Mirror of the American Life Style 195

PART TWO

The Indian and Japanese Self: Theoretical Perspectives

SEVEN The Indian Familial Self in Its Social and Cultural Contexts 209

EIGHT The Indian and Japanese Familial Self 242

NINE The Spiritual Self: Continuity and Counterpoint to the Familial Self 289

TEN Conclusions: Psychoanalysis in Civilizational Perspective 312

GLOSSARY 335

REFERENCES 349

INDEX 369

PREFACE

Beginnings and Belongings

No one undertakes a journey, particularly one of the psyche, without taking along a lot of personal baggage. This is even more true when investigating the psyche of persons from vastly different cultures from one’s own, such as India and Japan. Some of the baggage involves conscious, well-planned preparations, anticipating contingencies of the trip, but some of one’s belongings are taken inadvertently, and still other items may not even be known to exist until you are in the midst of your travels. Moreover, every journey has its beginnings, that is, its reasons and motives for going. We do not go just anywhere, but rather are pulled to very specific places and studies. What will be looked for, what will be perceived, how one will proceed, how the study is shaped, and what meanings are derived from it are all strongly influenced by the beginnings and belongings. The subjectivity of the psychoanalytic observer is thus an integral part of the field.

I could well say that the beginning of this entire research project occurred with a totally unexpected event in March 1971. A gaunt, intenselooking Indian man stopped me at the door in the later hours of the evening after I had just finished teaching a class at The New School. Dr. Roland, I saw in The New School catalogue that you have been to India and are teaching a course on Identity, Identification, and Self-Image. My own identity is extremely fragmented. I would like to see you for therapy. Thus began a several month collaborative therapy with an Indian novelist, Ashis, whom I describe at length in Chapter Two. I was immediately struck in those therapy sessions that the quality of his mind was of a different cast than that of any American patient I had ever worked with. Slowly, indeed, an enormous fracture in his identity did emerge between Indian and Western values and modes of being—both anchored, to be sure, within familial relationships, but nevertheless relating to profound civilizational issues. It was from this therapeutic relationship with an artistically gifted Indian that I first formulated my psychoanalytic research on Identity Conflicts and Resolutions in Urban Indians, in which I proposed working in short-term psychoanalytic therapy with urban Indian patients exposed to a high degree of Westernization. This was the beginning of my psychoanalytic odyssey to India.

Or was it? Some years previously, in 1964, my wife and I had spent six weeks of a summer vacation in India, touring major cities and centers. The trip turned out to be richly laden with interesting and unexpected experiences and relationships.¹ I arranged for lectures and meetings with various psychologists and psychoanalysts that would lay the groundwork for future clinical psychoanalytic research. My wife and I vowed to return for a year’s research—which then materialized thirteen years and two children later. Such were the initial seeds for this psychoanalytic research in India.

Is there, however, any one true beginning? Beginnings are often, in fact, journeys themselves, antecedents to new explorations not originally anticipated or even directly related. In 1950, after emerging from a year’s experience in the Marine Corps and while in the throes of a late adolescent identity crisis, I came upon the writings of Vivekananda and Vedanta philosophy in my search for values and life meaning. I transferred to Antioch College to study Indian philosophy and culture with Professor M. N. Chatterjee,² and then took the few courses on India and the Far East, did a senior thesis on Gandhi, and arranged work periods at two Vedanta centers, a Theosophical printing press, and a mountain retreat of Meher Baba in California.³ I seriously contemplated graduate work in South Asian studies, but it was the early 1950s, when graduate programs in South Asian studies were still few and far between. Instead, I headed off into clinical psychology to deal more directly with the therapeutics of both others and myself, and to fashion a career.

Why one is drawn to another culture or civilization, or resonates to a different historical era even in one’s own civilization, is something about which contemporary psychoanalysis and psychology have little to say.⁴ Perhaps we find in other cultures and eras aspects of our inner life that have relatively little place in contemporary society. Or perhaps there are even earlier beginnings. . . .

Other important antecedents to this research project lie in the kinds of psychoanalytic identity and theoretical orientations that have shaped the study. In the 1960s, when American Freudian psychoanalysis was with rare exceptions medical and highly traditional in theory and technique, I became trained at and associated with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (N.P.A.P.).⁵ Given the marginality of N.P.A.P., I could develop professionally in a milieu where I did not have to adhere to any psychoanalytic party line, but could make my own integrations of theory and technique from the complexities of the broad Freudian mainstream. Even in the 1960s, Freudian psychoanalysis was by no means monolithic, and even in my early training, I was drawn to a multi-model approach to Freudian psychoanalysis.⁶ My theoretical orientation thus differs from others in cross-cultural psychoanalytic work in its emphasis and use of multiple psychoanalytic models.

I have always staked claims to whatever intensely interested and excited me, but have never felt the need continually to mine the same vein. I later found that what had initially seemed to be disparate interests frequently coming together at unexpected levels of integration in new journeys.

One of the most relevant theoretical paths for this study was an investigation of the internalization process which I developed in a course at The New School (Roland 1972) involving issues of identity and self.⁷ A comprehensive approach to the personal internalization of social and cultural reality seems to me an area of psychoanalytic theory that affords a far more pertinent and workable basis for integrating psychoanalytic work with the social sciences and cross-cultural research than does classical Freudian psychosexual theory, or even much of Freudian structural theory when it does not sufficiently account for cultural differences in peoples’ consciences. This exploration into the internalization process almost immediately led to an interdisciplinary course on psychoanalysis and the social sciences team-taught with social scientists at The New School Senior College; and soon after it led to an interdisciplinary book on Career and Motherhood: Struggles for a New Identity (Roland and Harris 1978). The multi-faceted integrations of psychoanalysis with both social science and history were central to this study.

Another relevant psychoanalytic beginning that involved extensive interdisciplinary collaboration started with a clinical paper on dreams, and another on dreams and art (Roland 1971, 1972). Work on these led me to understand the fundamental reductionism psychoanalysts frequently invoke when analyzing literature and the arts, and to envision a new basis for more valid interdisciplinary investigations (Roland 1974a, 1974b, 1978b). This pathway soon led to intensive collaborative work on Pirandello with Gino Rizzo, a noted Pirandello scholar and critic at City University (Roland and Rizzo 1978).

This work not only impressed me with the necessity of considering fully the complexities of other fields when doing interdisciplinary work, but also showed me that serious interdisciplinary collaboration necessitates a tolerance for threats to one’s self-esteem where one must willingly apprentice oneself to the other’s field—as indeed the other must do to the complexities of psychoanalysis—and function simultaneously as specialist and student. I soon came to realize that when psychoanalysts ply their trade in disregard for the ecology of another discipline, little of substance can be accomplished.

I further realized that my insight into the relationship between the dream and art—that the unconscious personal elements in art are embedded in and fuel a larger artistic vision that in important ways transcends psychoanalytic viewpoints—has to be extended to issues raised by the juxtaposition of psychoanalysis and cross-cultural research or the study of historical change. I came to see the psychological makeup of persons in societies so civilizationally different as India, Japan, and America as embedded in the fundamentally distinct cultural principles of these civilizations and the social patterns and child rearing that these principles shape.⁸ This is quite different from the many psychoanalysts, who tend to assume the primacy of psychic reality, and believe that psychology determines culture and society—another form of psychoanalytic reductionism.

Two other major parts of my theoretical framework acquired from past psychoanalytic explorations became highly relevant to this study along the way. The first is my orientation to the real relationship in psychoanalytic therapy (Roland 1967), which stood me in good stead in India and Japan, where the real relationship is central to the psychoanalytic relationship; some therapists in these relationship-centered cultures are highly critical of the Western tendency to ignore the importance of relationship—outside of transference—in psychoanalytic therapy (Neki 1976a; Nishizono 1980; Surya and Jayaram 1964). The second is the use of the psychoanalyst’s awareness of his or her own emotional reactions and attitudes toward patients for understanding the transferences of the patient (Roland 1981). Again, I found myself at home in both India and Japan, where one must constantly rely on one’s empathy, inner reactions, and intuitions in the predominant modes of communication.

From the very beginning of this research project I was strongly impelled to go to Japan as well as India (these are the only two Asian countries with a psychoanalytic movement). This impulse was later confirmed by two Japanese psychoanalysts who commented that much of what I had to say about the Indian familial self was generally true of Japanese as well.⁹ The need to grasp the similarities as well as important differentiating factors resulted in a journey to Japan in the summer of 1982.

But this journey to Japan, like the Indian one, also had earlier roots. In 1969 my wife and I had spent eight weeks in Japan, where I met major Japanese psychoanalysts with whom I renewed contact thirteen years later for this research project. But my overwhelming involvement then was as an artist. We stayed four weeks in Kyoto, where I did a series of etchings and watercolors of Zen gardens, and studied woodblock printing.¹⁰ Even before journeying to Japan, my landscapes frequently seemed to many to be Far Eastern in sensibility. These artistic beginnings have undoubtedly still earlier ones involving my father, a commercial artist by profession and a recognized water-colorist by aspiration, who on occasion was mistaken for being Japanese. Thus, my initial great attraction for Japanese culture was not through philosophy, as in India, but rather through art and aesthetics.

This intense involvement with art has also played a major role in shaping this study. Most salient is the trust developed through art in my own imagination and vision of reality, which has helped me in formulating new concepts and frameworks for the Indian and Japanese selves. Simultaneously there is a striving to be perceptive in a closely detailed way, rather than a demand for rigorous theoretical consistency.

The Journey

What I had originally thought would be an interesting journey in clinical psychoanalytic research in India and Japan turned out to be a much longer odyssey with a far greater rethinking of psychoanalysis and myself than I had anticipated. A psychological journey through India and Japan is also a voyage of self-discovery. I do not mean this simply as an inner spiritual quest. As a gradual understanding of the major contours of the inner landscape of the Indian psyche came into focus from my clinical work in India, I found myself looking back over my shoulder at the American psyche, including my own. It is not that the details changed in any significant way from what I had known before. Rather, as when ascending steeply to a Himalayan hill station or pilgrimage site far above the towns below, the perspective sharply changes and the patterns of the town become clear in a way they hadn’t been while walking its streets, similarly, certain patterns implied by my Americanness as well as by my ethnic Jewish background become distinct in a way they hadn’t been while I was immersed in American relationships.

I realized that being Jewish was central to my understanding of the emotionality and relationships of the Indian extended family. Having grown up on the periphery of a traditional Jewish extended family in Brooklyn, where innumerable relatives were living in close proximity to each other, I experienced from frequent visits a joint household and intimate, interdependent, extended family relationships, although my parents had already opted for the more individualized American mode of the nuclear family. I felt my Jewish roots have enabled me to be psychologically half way to India; nor was I surprised to learn that many of my Indian friends and colleagues, when they had studied in the United States, had mostly Jews as their close friends. The emotionality and intellectuality are at times strikingly similar.

Just as Indians and Japanese who have headed West frequently search for their own roots and identity as they encounter a totally different culture and life style, I went in the opposite direction.¹¹ As we were coming in for a landing to Bombay, the plane banked so sharply that when I supposedly looked down all I could see were the stars, while if I looked up, there were the lights of the city. It was as if the world was turned upside down. India, I found, is indeed on the other side of the world from America, a mirror reflecting many of the antitheses between the two societies and psyches. It dawned on me that it is not simply that we view things differently, coming from varied cultures (Hall 1959: 128-164), but that our very inner emotional-cognitive makeup is of another order. I had to question much that I had come to assume was normal and natural.

As I wrestled with psychoanalytic formulations that would capture the makeup of the Indian self as I was observing it, I began an increasingly searching reexamination of the theoretical models of psychoanalysis I carried with me. From my reflections on the current psychoanalytic theories, ranging from developmental models—especially the psychosocial ones of Erikson (1950) and Mahler (Mahler et al. 1975)—to our present norms of mental health and adult functioning, to various aspects of classical structural theory (particularly involving superego and ego functioning), to the more current issues of narcissism and the self (Kohut 1971, 1977), and even to Rank’s interesting work on the will and individuation (Menaker 1982), I realized that the whole elaboration of the psychoanalytic theory of personality in its many variations is Western-centric. Much of it is clearly related to the clinical data of Western personality in societies emphasizing individualism. Although psychoanalysis repeatedly claims to deal with the universals of psychological makeup and ideal norms of mature human functioning, yet these universals, ideals, and norms were frequently contradicted in India and Japan. And when these norms of development and functioning have been applied by psychoanalysts to Asians, Africans, and others, the inevitable results are that they are seen as inferior or psychopathological¹²—a theoretical position that is tenable only if one assumes the inherent superiority of Western civilization and psyche. When not used normatively, the central developmental constructs are simply not very relevant to persons from these other cultures.

Only much later in my reflections did I realize that not only did the norms and values of psychological functions, and psychological makeup itself, differ but that the very categories in which I was thinking as a psychoanalyst differed from Indian cultural categories of thought about human nature. Such Indian assumptions include the constant emphasis on contextuality, from time to space to ethics to human nature to groups; the subtle interrelatedness of the divine and the mundane; the flows and exchanges of substances within and between persons, with minimal outer boundaries. I could accept that empirical reality itself might be varied, but I was less prepared for questioning my basic way of thinking.

Only now have I begun to appreciate how much of the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis is based on Western philosophical thought—for example, the fundamental split between self and object, and between self-representation and object-representation—and flows directly from Cartesian dualistic assumptions. Thus our very way of conceptualizing human nature is deeply rooted within Western culture. More than this: when we universalize our findings and assume that everyone has essentially the same nature (Ramanujan 1980), we take for granted the Western cultural premise of universalization. It finally dawned on me that there are profound intrinsic interrelationships between cultural conceptualizations of human nature (even when philosophically and scientifically based), actual psychological makeup, and the nature of interpersonal relationships in a given culture.¹³ But this is anticipating much of what this book is about.

I was further struck by the overwhelming orientation of Freudian psychoanalysis to intrapsychic phenomena, generally ignoring how historical, social, and cultural patterns shape the inner world (with certain exceptions such as the ego-ideal and superego)—another manifestation of Western individualistic assumptions. I began thinking of Freud’s statement of the narcissistic wounds suffered by man, first in his realization that the earth is not in the center of the universe, then that he is an evolutionary descendent of the primates, and finally that man is governed far more by unconscious processes than he is aware (Freud 1917, 139-141). Perhaps we should now add a further blow to the self-esteem of Western man: the realization that the prevailing psychological maps and norms assumed to be universal are in fact Western-centric.

It was only after these reflections that I saw the necessity for a significant reorientation and restructuring of psychoanalytic theory to take into account the Indian and Japanese experiences. As a Freudian analyst deeply committed to the psychoanalytic endeavor, I began a profound search for the essentials of psychoanalytic therapy and theory. I found that psychoanalytic therapy was indeed helpful to my Indian patients, that the various dimensions of human nature that psychoanalysis addresses were all relevant, but that how the content of these dimensions are spelled out in psychoanalytic theory is Western-centric.

I gradually worked out a theoretical strategy to integrate both Western universalizing and Indian contextualizing modes of thinking (Ramanujan 1980) wherein broad psychoanalytic categories from the major models of Freudian psychoanalysis are used as universals,¹⁴ but are elaborated upon contextually from the observations of actual clinical psychoanalytic work with Indians and Japanese rather than from their present content in psychoanalysis. I also formulated new concepts to delineate psychological and psychosocial realities in Indians and Japanese that are minimally present in Western cultures. Thus I decontextualize various psychoanalytic categories of their Western content before recontextualizing them with the clinical data of Indians and Japanese. Such analyses of content have rarely entered psychoanalytic theorizing even in relation to patients from greatly differing ethnic groups in the West.¹⁵

For instance, I deliberately avoid setting up current psychoanalytic elaborations of certain structures (such as the superego) as yardsticks to measure Indian and Japanese psyches. Rather I first endeavor to elaborate the universal category of conscience in its Indian and Japanese forms on the basis of clinical psychoanalytic therapy. Then I compare the Indian ego-ideal and superego with the Japanese and American ones to show how each is oriented toward functioning only within its own social and cultural contexts. I therefore interrelate psychoanalytic theorizing about Indians and Japanese with historical, cultural, and social patterns far more than Freudian psychoanalysts generally do.¹⁶

Only much later did I learn that this whole comparative psychoanalytic enterprise has been anticipated by a revolution in the social sciences and philosophy of science.¹⁷ Psychoanalysts, in a positivistic mode, usually assume they are free of the interplay of culture in making their observations and formulating them into theories. In contrast, anthropologists in their shift to symbolic analyses have realized that embedded in the very foundations of theory are a variety of cultural assumptions; that, in effect, the social scientist is very much part of a sociocultural field in his basic mode of thinking and values, and therefore must relate to another culture in terms of its own symbolic systems and meanings without imposing his own on it. It is evident that these realizations and endeavors are central to evolving a comparative psychoanalysis.

Indians and Japanese

In both India and Japan the patients and colleagues I worked with are well educated, urban, and from the middle and upper middle classes. My access to the world of the Indian patients was particularly helped by the fact that of all Asian groups—far more than the urban Japanese I worked with—urban Indians such as these have been the most exposed to Westernizing influences through two centuries of British colonial rule, and since Independence through relatives in one Western country or another who visit home at least every other year. Although rooted within their Indian milieu and culture, these urban Indians have assimilated Western culture to a great extent both socially and psychologically. Firmly grounded in at least two Indian languages, they also speak and write fluent English—an English that has evolved along distinctly Indian lines.¹⁸ It was thus possible for an English-speaking Western psychoanalyst such as myself to conduct psychoanalytic therapy with them with only a minimum of language difficulties.

Both men and, increasingly, women are college-educated, with a sizable number having postgraduate degrees. Though obviously still a small percentage of India’s total population (some estimate them to be as much as 15 percent of India’s 700,000,000 + population), these urban, educated persons nevertheless now include the third-largest national group of scientists and technologists in the world. Undoubtedly, these urban, educated Indians are the largest group in the world who have extensively bridged two vastly different civilizations. This book is a clinical psychoanalytic study of the inner world of such persons, who are still in the process of effecting an integration into an expanding self.

Most of my psychoanalytic work in India was done in Bombay, where I conducted short-term psychoanalytic therapy with some thirteen Indian patients for periods of one to six months, two to five times a week. The number of sessions for various patients ranged from ten to the seventies. Patients were encouraged to speak as freely as possible whatever was on their mind or whatever came to mind, and I focused consistently on various resistances and transferences, the hallmark of psychoanalytic work.

The patients came from highly heterogeneous regional and religious backgrounds, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Bombay, where people from all over India have come to live. They were from five different religious communities: six were Hindu upper-caste persons, three were Parsees, two were Muslims from the Borah and Ismaili communities, one was Christian, and another Jewish. Their heterogeneity was further reflected in the fact that seven were Maharastrian, three were Gujerati, two Punjabi, and one Goan. Ten of the thirteen were college graduates, eight of these with postgraduate work and specialization, mostly with master’s degrees, and one each in law and medicine. Two patients have achieved recognition in the arts and one more is obviously artistically talented. Their age range was from nineteen to sixty-three, with the majority in their middle to late twenties and thirties—much like my patients in New York City. Seven of the thirteen were married, four had children, and one and possibly still another were homosexual. I have naturally disguised the true identity of all of my patients for reasons of confidentiality, but in a way that is not incongruent with their real background.

With only one exception, all of these patients were functioning in a range from reasonably competent to highly creative in their work and/ or family. They were thus very much like others of the educated urban middle and upper middle classes, and could by no means be considered deviants or significantly disturbed members of Indian society. They were rather similar to what is sometimes humorously termed the normal neurotic of American society.

This intensive psychoanalytic work in Bombay was supplemented by other clinical data from various sources: supervision of psychoanalysts, students in psychoanalytic training, and psychoanalytically oriented social workers and psychiatrists—some of whose patients were from the lower and scheduled castes. I co-counseled with two women social workers from the Indian Council of Mental Health female college students from three colleges in Bombay whose student bodies’ life styles range from traditional to moderately modern; and I sat in on individual counseling sessions at St. Xavier’s College.¹⁹ Still other data came from my participation in case conferences at a variety of institutions.²⁰

Throughout my clinical experiences in Bombay and elsewhere, I had continuous opportunity for discussion with other psychoanalytic therapists, mental health professionals, and various social scientists. This became an integral part of my methodology. I also had occasion to give a large number of lectures at various institutions.²¹ I sometimes requested an informal discussion of questions and topics emerging from my own clinical work in exchange for lecturing. Some of the comments and critiques from discussion periods were highly apropos and helpful, as were examples cited to illustrate further some of the formulations I had made. Sometimes the group dynamics at these meetings were themselves significant to observe.

My journey also took me to three other Indian cities. In New Delhi I was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, the leading interdisciplinary group of social scientists and psychologists in India. Lengthy luncheon discussions enabled me to develop a broader sociocultural and historical view of India.

I spent only two weeks in Ahmedabad at the B. M. Institute of Mental Health, the outstanding psychoanalytic mental health center in India at that time, but this part of my experience was very significant. Dr. B. K. Ramanujam, then Associate Director, in collaboration with the Director, Mrs. Kamalini Sarabhai, planned a program in which I attended case conferences and gave some lectures. But most valuable was a period every day for four days in which I was given the opportunity to raise any issue I wanted with the senior staff. During the second week there, during a Conference of the International Study Group of Child Psychiatry, I was able to present some of my initial formulations on Indian identity as related to attitudes toward psychoanalysis, which are incorporated into Chapter Three.

My third city of clinical work was Bangalore, where I was affiliated for a month in the summer of 1980 with the National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (N.I.M.H.A.N.S.). I wanted to ascertain whether my observations and formulations of the familial self and how it is expanding through Westernization/modernization, could be extended to south Indian patients living in a more traditional life style than the highly cosmopolitan west and north Indian urbanites I had seen in Bombay.²² N.I.M.H.A.N.S. afforded clinical experience involving supervision, short-term therapy, case conferences, and Family Institute group therapy, as well as lengthy exchanges with staff members on south Indian patients. Many of the latter were from the urban middle and lower classes, and some came from villages through the Community Psychiatry Program. I found that many of my formulations are relevant to these south Indian patients and to those from rural areas, as well. The significant differences between rural and urban patients are attributable to the psychological effects of Westernization/modernization, which I discuss in Chapters Two through Five.

My clinical experience in India has been supplemented since returning by short-term psychoanalytic therapy in New York City with five Indian patients. Four of these patients have been women, two from a north Indian background (Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh), one from south India, and still another from Bengal. All have doctorates in different fields, and two of them have returned to India to stay. The fifth patient has been a Punjabi man with a college degree. All are uppercaste, three coming from distinguished families.

It is relevant to acknowledge the limitations of such a psychoanalytic sample, even when it has been extended through discussions with other Indian analysts. Like anthropological samples, it cannot be held to be entirely representative of the overall population, or even of the patient’s community or class. Nevertheless, clinical observations of a number of patients do convey a picture of the Indian self and its reactions to social change that is undoubtedly relevant to other similarly educated urbanites.

For a month in Hiroshima, I had the unusual experience for a foreigner of becoming part of a working group of up to thirty-five psychoanalytically oriented therapists from many cities in the Inland Sea area, including the graduate students of Dr. Mikihachiro Tatara, who headed the group.²³ I supervised in depth five cases seen in once-a-week psychoanalytic therapy. Process notes of all sessions had been carefully kept and translated into English. Three of the persons I supervised, Drs. Idei and Ichimaru, and one graduate student, Miss Yuko Takenori, all spoke fluent English; Dr. Tatara, a gifted simultaneous translator, translated my comments to the other members of the group and their remarks to me. Since the supervisory sessions were all held in a group, this enabled lengthy exchanges and discussions to go on both within the formal sessions and afterward at one or another local snack place to which we always retired. Our meetings also included a two-day seminar on self psychology, where there were lengthy exchanges on differing narcissistic structures in Japanese and Americans.

The patients I supervised included a middle-aged traditional woman with marital problems, two teen-age boys with school problems, and a young man and woman in their mid-twenties who were seen in a mental hospital, but who did not seem to be schizophrenic. All were from cities in the Inland Sea area, the former three being from an educated, middle-class background, and the latter two coming from unstable, lower middle-class families. This case material was supplemented by two other sets of material: a young man and woman in their early twenties from upper middle-class Tokyo families seen in psychoanalysis by Miss Chizuko Yamagami, and cases of schizophrenic patients seen by Professor Moses Burg.²⁴ Supervision of patients seen in psychoanalytic therapy was supplemented by intensive discussions with a number of Japanese psychoanalysts on Japanese psychological makeup, in which I used the same methodology as I had in India.

I was relatively quickly attuned to the Japanese familial-group self, the psychosocial dimensions of Japanese hierarchical relationships, and the Japanese reactions to Westernization/modernization thanks to my prior work in India. The Indian experience also enabled me to see the Japanese from a perspective different from the usual comparison with Westerners.

Methodological and Theoretical Orientations

My central methodology is to use the disciplined subjectivity or trained empathy of the psychoanalyst in actual psychoanalytic therapy with Indian patients and in supervision of Indian and Japanese psychoanalytic therapists. Integral to the methodology have been on-the-spot dialogues with psychoanalytic therapists and social scientists from within their own culture, enabling me to understand a number of puzzling observations, to become sensitive to certain phenomena in my patients that I was unaware of, and to see things from an Indian and Japanese viewpoint. These discussions also helped to expand my data base by ascertaining whether my observations on a very limited number of patients seen over a short period of time are generalizable for a more comprehensive picture of the Indian and Japanese selves. The fact that five of my Indian patients were actively working as therapists themselves, so that they were able to reflect with considerable awareness on what aspects of their own conflicts, psychological makeup, and situations were representative of others in the culture and what were idiosyncratic to themselves and their own families, was often of enormous assistance. I use the clinical data from psychoanalytic therapy to formulate the inner workings of the Indian and Japanese psyches, to evaluate how they have been affected by Westernization/modernization, and to conceptualize a comparative psychoanalysis rooted within its social and cultural contexts. This endeavor differs from the usual interests of psychoanalysts, who wish to elaborate different kinds of psychopathology and their therapeutic resolutions, or to frame a new universal theory of personality or a new developmental model.

In doing psychoanalytic therapy, there is an implicit or even hidden methodology that is constantly employed by analysts but is rarely articulated. Psychoanalysts assume an implicit understanding of more or less normal modes of psychological functioning, relationships, and development in assessing psychopathology in their patients. Analysts are always juxtaposing the figure of the problems patients are struggling with and their developmental genesis with the ground of what is more or less normal. Theoretical arguments to the contrary—that psychoanalysts are or should be neutrally objective and value-free—do not take into account how a psychoanalyst must actually function.²⁵ These understandings are rarely articulated in ongoing clinical work, but enter psychoanalytic theory primarily through its developmental models of normality and psychopathology. In doing clinical psychoanalytic work in societies so different from America as India and Japan, I have frequently had to struggle with understanding basic relationships and courses of development that are the assumed ground for any analyst working there. Articulating these understandings thus became a methodological cornerstone in formulating a comparative psychoanalysis of the Indian and Japanese selves.

Why, then, has such psychoanalytic research rarely been used by Indian and Japanese psychoanalysts in a formulation of their own psyches? Or for that matter, by European and American analysts on theirs? For one thing, formulating a comparative psychoanalysis of persons within one’s own culture has not been the approach of practicing psychoanalysts anywhere. Psychoanalysis as constituted today is largely an elaborate ethnopsychoanalysis of Western man (and to varied degrees Western women),²⁶ but implicitly rather than explicitly. A comparative psychoanalytic orientation has not developed because it is extremely difficult to focus one’s mind in this way without functioning as an analyst in two cultures that are civilizationally different, in order to observe the constant dramatic contrasts. Indeed, the only Indian psychoanalysts who have written about the Indianness of psychological phenomena are men who have trained abroad; in Japan, again, the major contributors of theories about the Japanese psyche have also trained abroad.²⁷ These analysts have also commented on the Westernness of certain psychoanalytic formulations, something Western analysts could not do because they lacked experience in Asian or African cultures.

A second reason may be that most Indian psychoanalysts do not feel quite comfortable in challenging or modifying psychoanalytic theory when the data call for it—a hazardous enterprise throughout the history of psychoanalysis.²⁸ Rather, they respond in an importantly characteristic Indian cognitive style: they contextualize the formal theory into one compartment, and their own frequently more astute clinical and cultural understandings, informally elaborated, into another. This problem has been handled in a completely different way in the seminal work of the Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi (1973), who jettisoned the formal theoretical structure of psychoanalysis and relied on a psychodynamic exposition of Japanese linguistic terms to delineate the Japanese psyche.

A third cause relates to psychological issues of identity that I discuss in Chapter Two: exposure to Western denigration has been (and still can be) so severe that there is a reluctance to express openly their Indianness. I hope that this work will be a stimulus to the greater publication by Indian psychoanalysts of their own frequently astute observations and cogent informal formulations. They, after all, have much more to say about the subtleties of the Indian self and its development than I have.

How is this work different from other related psychoanalytic efforts, particularly in the burgeoning field of psychoanalytic anthropology? This study is the first to examine the self from the dual perspectives of historical change and sociocultural analysis. It is also the first to be based on actual psychoanalytic therapy with several cases. Psychoanalytic anthropological studies are usually made in rural areas in the context of cohesive cultures that have maintained many of their indigenous social and cultural patterns. In these cases, the researchers apply a Western psychoanalytic framework to their ethnographic observations. This direct or indirect use of ethnographic material within a Western psychoanalytic framework, which on occasion may also include the use of autobiography, biography, and oral history, is for instance characteristic of every psychoanalytically oriented book on India to date (Carstairs 1957; Kakar 1978, 1982; Spratt 1966).

These works are thus primarily based on observational, cultural, and interview data, but not on actual psychoanalytic therapeutic work. The advantages of the methodology used in this study of actual clinical psychoanalytic work in another culture is that it can contribute a much greater level of psychic depth to our understanding; through this, one can reformulate the contents of the various psychoanalytic categories to be more congruent with the indigenous psyche, and less Western-centric.

In recent years a new trend has developed in psychoanalytic anthropology that focuses on personal, subjective experience through observation, long-term interviewing, or even quasi-psychoanalytic or therapeutic interviews over extended periods of time with villagers (Boyer 1979; Crapanzano 1980; LeVine 1979; Parin et al. 1980). In effect, some researchers are using depth psychological interviews as a new ethnographic method. Their efforts to integrate the inner worlds of their subjects with the predominant sociohistorical and sociocultural patterns of the community go far beyond the reductionistic stance of much of applied psychoanalysis. The differences between this new psychoanalytic-ethnographic methodology and the one employed in this work are first, that my subjects are part of a highly sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban culture that has partially integrated two civilizationally distinct cultures; and second, that these urban Indians and Japanese are genuinely in psychoanalytic therapy, sometimes desperately and at times painfully struggling with inner problems that they are highly motivated to resolve—rather than being paid interviewees. A greater depth of psychoanalytic understanding can thus ensue.

There remains the critical question as to which psychoanalytic framework to use to encompass either ethnographic interview data or that of psychoanalytic therapy. The actual theoretical orientations of psychoanalytic anthropology have ranged from classical drive theory (Devereux 1980) to structural theory, to ego psychology and its developmental models (Boyer 1979; Hallowell 1955; S. LeVine 1979; Obeyesekere 1981, 1984; Parin et al. 1980), object-relations theory (Lindholm 1982), the Eriksonian model (Kakar 1978), and even a Lacanian analysis (Crapanzano 1980); but these researchers have usually restricted themselves to one or another of these theoretical orientations, or at most to the first three.

I am trying to cast as large a net as possible to catch Indian and Japanese psychological experience by using a Freudian multi-model approach that encompasses all of the above theories (with the exception of a Lacanian analysis) and includes self psychology. Simultaneously I rely considerably on my own empathic and intuitive judgment as essential, regardless of what the theory says. I firmly believe that all of these models of the mind—including Rank’s innovative contributions around individuation and immortality, and neo-Freudian and Jungian positions—if approached critically and integratively contribute to varying extents to understanding one or another aspect of the human animal; nevertheless, all these theories commit the usual blind man’s error of considering an ear, leg, or tail of the psyche to be the whole beast.²⁹

What is true for the psychoanalytic theory of personality is also true for the methodology of clinical psychoanalytic work.³⁰ There is, for instance, a great deal of complexity and more than a little controversy over the psychoanalytic theory of technique, particularly involving the nature of transference and the psychoanalytic relationship. The stance one takes on these issues becomes very relevant to clinical psychoanalytic work in India and Japan. Again, my approach is to consider transference from a multi-model orientation, while assessing the nature of the real relationship between analyst and patient in these societies and its relation to the transference. I believe these principles are essential to attain the needed flexibility for psychoanalytic work in India and Japan.

One final point on theoretical orientation, an issue that is enmeshed in continual controversy. To what extent is human nature universal, and to what extent is it a manifestation of varying cultures and societies? Like many other critical questions and issues, this is too easily posed in terms of a fundamental dichotomy, whereas the truth resides in various paradoxical interrelationships between these seemingly polar opposites. Certainly, I could work psychoanalytically in India and then Japan—as Indian and Japanese psychoanalysts work in America— only by being able to be empathically in touch with the common threads of humanity in all of us. Likewise, a sensitive Indian, Japanese, or American can grasp and feel the other’s cultural nuances. I have further found that many if not most of the basic psychoanalytic categories that structure the psychoanalytic theory of personality also seem to catch these common aspects of humanity within their net. But when I have reexamined the elaboration of the content of these categories as they now constitute a psychoanalytic theory of personality, I find our view of so-called common humanity to be overwhelmingly Western-centric. It is only now, with the early advances of ethnopsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic anthropology, that there is any orientation that even begins to address the issues of our common humanity and the profound variations that are socioculturally and sociohistorically related. From my psychoanalytic sojourns in India and Japan as well as my work in New York City, it becomes obvious that different chords of human potential are played fortissimo in certain cultures and pianissimo in others, and some are completely differently orchestrated into highly contrasting life styles and inner psychological configurations. It is to the issue of evolving a psychoanalytic framework to encompass our common humanity and its profound variations in cultures that are civilizationally distinct that I address the concluding chapter of this work.

Tales and Readers

When journeys are completed and travelers return, tales are told and retold. Which tales are told and how they are related depends greatly on your listeners’ interests. Which stories will grip some and bore others? How should the tale be told to involve those who have not traversed the same terrain? What fillers are needed for those for whom some tales are completely foreign territory?

Readers of this work may encompass many kinds, ranging from urban Indians and Japanese to South Asian and East Asian specialists, psychoanalysts and Indian and Japanese mental health professionals, psychoanalytic social scientists and psychohistorians, those involved in comparative religion and mysticism, specialists in modernization in Asian countries, and simply the interested intellectual and intelligent layman who wishes to know more about Indians and Japanese. It is a rare person who would be familiar with the diversity of terms from the many fields drawn on in this work, including psychoanalysis and anthropology, let alone those of Indian and Japanese culture. I have therefore included a glossary to cover concepts from all of these areas. Moreover, I have spelled out some of the theoretical positions of psychoanalysis, and of anthropology and history in India and Japan, that may be elementary to specialists in these fields but unknown to those relatively unfamiliar with these disciplines.

These are cautionary tales for Western psychoanalysts, particularly those interested in cross-cultural psychoanalytic research where there are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in contemporary psychoanalysis.³¹ Erik Erikson in the keynote address at the International Congress of Psycho-Analysis in 1979 called for a future meeting of the congress to devote itself to the issues and findings of psychoanalysis from Eastern countries. It is hoped that this book, and especially the final chapter—where I use the lever of my Indian and Japanese psychoanalytic experiences to move psychoanalysis into a comparative perspective—will help to open discussion among Western analysts, with a view to interesting them in such a perspective.

I am well aware that telling tales to diverse audiences will result in criticism from a number of sides. Psychoanalysts could well question my methodology of short-term psychoanalytic work in India and Japan: that until one sees a number of patients through a full analysis, such conclusions as I have drawn are only tentative ones. Indians and Japanese may well feel I have missed important subtleties or not understood others. South Asia and Japan specialists, on the other hand, could easily criticize me for not being sufficiently grounded in all of the literature in these fields; whereas psychoanalytic anthropologists could certainly express similar views regarding their specialty. This kind of interdisciplinary work inevitably generates problems of this sort. But it is also apparent that there is as yet no one psychoanalytically trained who has worked extensively in psychoanalytic therapy in India, Japan, and a Western country, and who is also a specialist in South Asian and Japanese studies, as well as in psychoanalytic anthropology and psychohistory. Despite all of the problems and perils attending this kind of work, I expect that there is much that I have to tell that will be of real significance to all of my audiences.

Helpers and Guides

This journey was not taken alone. I received generous financing, organizational affiliation and support, the collaboration of colleagues abroad, the cooperation of my family, and by no means least, guides to unfamiliar inner landscapes.

The necessary financial support came from a Professional Development Grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 1977-1978, and a Senior Research Grant from them in the summer of 1980. I owe my deepest gratitude to Dr. Pradeep Mehendiratta and his staff at the A.I.I.S. office in New Delhi for making all kinds of arrangements for us that went far beyond financial support. Organizational support came from various affiliating agencies who cooperated in this research, and more particularly from certain persons who paved the way for my work. In New York City, my sponsoring institution was the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. For my research work in India, I am most deeply indebted to the indefatible energies and good will of Mrs. Freny Mehta, Director, and her staff of the Indian Council of Mental Health in Bombay, who effectively arranged for most of my clinical work upon which this study is based. I am also indebted to the Bombay Branch of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, and particularly to Mr. Udayan Patel, who helped me to organize case discussions and seminars.

In Delhi, I feel particularly grateful to Professor Ashis Nandy, who not only introduced me to members and meetings of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, but to other major social scientists and psychologists as well, such as Professors Anandalakshmi and Veena Das, and Dr. Shib Mitra.³² I was graciously given the opportunity to sit in