Alan Roland, who "brought new insights to psychoanalysis by calling out a Western bias in much of the field and factoring in differences in culture and upbringing among patients," died July 22, the New York Times reported. He was 93.
Roland was best known for In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology (1988), an influential book in which he laid out his ideas. The Times noted that a crucial moment in the evolution of those ideas came in 1971, when he was teaching at the New School in New York and a man from India sought him out for therapy.
"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," Roland wrote, citing as an example the familial relationships and expectations the man had grown up with and how they differed from what he was encountering in the West.
Roland ultimately lived for significant periods in India and Japan. "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," he wrote, adding: "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."
In a eulogy delivered at Roland's memorial service recently, New York psychoanalyst M. Nasir Ilahi, who was a student in the 1970s when he first encountered Roland in his seminar on cross-cultural psychoanalysis, said, "It turned out to be a momentous and in some respects a life-changing experience for me, as for the first time I found someone articulating, in a way that made sense, the not so easy to grasp psychological differences between individuals from the radically different cultures of North America and that of my own South Asia."
Roland's other books included Cultural Pluralism and Psychoanalysis: The Asian and North American Experience (1996) and Journeys to Foreign Selves: Asians and Asian Americans in a Global Era (2011).
Roland also wrote plays and sometimes wrote psychoanalytic interpretations of plays by others. He was an artist whose watercolors and etchings appeared in numerous group shows and in several solo exhibitions. He saw connections between his artistic endeavors and his clinical practice.