In Search of Self in India and Japan

Drawing on work with Indian and Japanese patients, a prominent American psychoanalyst explores inner worlds that are markedly different from Western psyche. A series of fascinating case studies illustrates Alan Roland's argument: familial self, rooted in subtle emotional hierarchical relationships of family and group, predominates in Indian and Japanese psyches and contrasts strongly with Western individualized self. In perceptive and sympathetic terms Roland describes emotional problems that occur when Indians and Japanese encounter Western culture and resulting successful integration of new patterns that he calls expanding self. Of particular interest are descriptions of special problems of women in changing society and of paradoxical relationship of spiritual self of Indians and Japanese to familial self. Also described is Roland's own response to broadening of his emotional and intellectual horizons as he talked to patients and supervised therapists in India and Japan. As we were coming in for a landing to Bombay, he writes, the plane banked so sharply that when I supposedly looked all I could see were stars, while if I looked up, there were lights of city. This is world turned upside down that he describes so eloquently in this book. What he has learned will fascinate those who wish to deepen their understanding of a different way of being.