Across civilizations: Psychoanalytic therapy with Asians and Asian Americans

This article addresses issues of psychoanalytic therapy with Asian North Americans both from their standpoint and the Euro-North American therapist. The latter are often unaware of deeply embedded cultural assumptions of individualism in their psyches and in psychoanalytic and psychological theories and norms. This can result in psychopathologizing Asian North Americans or seeing them as inferior. The most difficult part of doing psychoanalytic therapy with them is first learning a different normality/psychopathology continuum from Euro-North Americans, and then ascertaining where a patient's psychopathology is on this different continuum. The nature of the therapy relationship is related to three psychosocial dimensions of Asian hierarchical relationships. Anger, communication, the bicultural self, the magic-cosmic and spiritual self, and trauma and immigration are then delved into. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).