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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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Cross-Cultural Forays: Commentary by Keith Oatley

(Toronto)
Keith Oatley

Dept. of Human Development & Applied Psychology, OISE-University of Toronto, 252

Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada M5S 1V6
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Keith Oatley (2000) Cross-Cultural Forays: Commentary by Keith Oatley (Toronto),
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 2:2, 238-240, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.2000.10773314
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Cross-Cultural Forays
Commentary by Keith Oatley (Toronto)

Paul Whittle has written an eloquent piece about the

fault that runs through psychology, as tectonic faults
run through communities or raise mountain ranges between nations. He characterizes what lies on either
side of the fault in psychology land. His article identifies how the fault both can and cannot be crossed, how

it both can and cannot be transcended, and does so

better than any other article to date.
Whittle at last has situated the debate in the right
place: the problem is a matter of culture. Within the
culture of experimental psychology one adopts shared
values and beliefs. Enculturation takes 3 or 4 years,

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Ongoing Discussion: Paul Whittle

more if one continues with a doctorate. Psychoanalysis
takes a comparable time in personal therapy, added to
which may be a period of training. Whittle gets it exactly right: one adopts one culture or another, just as
one adopts a national or religious culture, according
to accidents of temperament and life.
A culture affords not only an identity with shared
values, a common language, and a discourse community, but also a containment, an emotional belonginess;
and just as culture contains, it excludes. So it is not
surprising to see exclusionary tactics at the border.
To cross borders one needs a certain temperament-a
restlessness with the world as given-and it means
hazarding one's containment and identity.
Whittle, one must suppose, has this temperament.
I share it. I have even emigrated to Canada, a land
dedicated to multiculturalism, that includes an uneasy
alliance of French and English in proximity to a powerful neighbor, the United States. A joke that goes
around is that for Canada there's the best of all worlds:
the English political system, American economics,
and French culture. Unfortunately it didn't quite turn
out like that. What we got is the English economic
system, American culture, and French politics.
In my personal acculturation into academic life,
I started in medicine, and then joined experimental
psychology at Cambridge. I later trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Philadelphia Association
(which Whittle mentions in a footnote). Just as, despite
my Canadian citizenship, I haven't given up my European Union passport, so despite my involvement in
the arts and psychoanalytic psychology, I have not
given up my membership of academic psychology.
Border life is, however, always an oddity. In psychoanalysis there is even a personality type called "borderline," which is a semiderogatory term meaning on
the border of psychosis. Whittle puts it more politely:
to be on the border carries the risk of being seen as
unsound. But he understates it. It is not just a risk.
From the point of view of either culture, borderline
types can never be quite sound.
My understanding of cultural choices was illuminated by an experience in 1979 when, traveling by
myself, I reached Hong Kong from where, for the first
time, it had just become easy to take trips into mainland China. One simply had to present one's passport
at the Chinese Consulate and 3 days later one could
set off on a package tour. I went in a group of 30 to
Canton (now Guangzhou) for 4 days. Our train
stopped at the barbed wire fenced border, where we
got off. We filed into a hut to be inspected by gun-

239

bristling soldiers of the Red Army, then got into another train on the Chinese side.
Here a fifth of the world's population lived in a
manner totally unlike anything in the West. Through
the train's windows I saw terraced fields on which
crowds of people bent down to tend individual rice
plants. We were shown a factory where people built
trucks entirely by hand; I watched a man make a
crankshaft on a lathe. We visited a farm in which, it
was said, all decisions were made by the collective. I
remember looking from the bedroom window of the
new concrete hotel where our tour group was housed,
to see people on their way to work on bicycles, like
flocks of starlings. We were taken to peep into a cottage in which a peasant mother cooked over an open
hearth. On several days I absented myself from the
group and walked the back streets where people in
sheds were making machine parts by hand.
All my fellow tourists were Americans. One was
an economist who would offer comments: "The children have shoes-being barefoot is an important index
of poverty," and "They've not turned the corner of
industrialization." He managed to locate and become
a drinking friend of the Polish Consul. There was also
a young man from Boston, Bob, a student of Oriental
medicine in Macau where he had lived for 6 years.
There were schoolteachers from Illinois, businesspeople from Texas, retirees from Oregon. Back in Macau,
after the trip, Bob introduced me to a wizened Chinese
woman who had adopted him. Before this adoption,
with its entry to family membership, he was, he said,
simply a nonperson in Chinese society. I also had interesting talks with two other medical students, not in
our group, but from French-speaking Zaire who had
scholarships at the medical school in Guangzhou, and
who would come to the new Western-style hotel in
the evenings in order, as they put it, to get laid occasionally, to chat with people other than Chinese
(whom they found unfriendly), and to escape the confines of six-to-a-room living.
I marvel at how compelling American culture is.
It is not only irresistibly attractive to outsiders all
around the world, it's even irresistible to insiders. As
one distinguished American psychologist says to me
each time I see him, every few years: "Don't you
think America is the best?" One of the many cultural
fascinations on my Chinese trip was a couple-I can't
remember where they were from, let's say Iowa-who
were uninterested in trucks and collective farms. What
they liked was to take on one side the numerous interpreters who accompanied our group to tell them what
a great place America was.

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Most of our group were just tourists, peering at

one culture from the capsule of another. Only Bob
was prepared to live on the border. But he was full of
ambivalence. Like the Zairean medical students, he
did not much like Chinese society; for him it lacked
warmth. At the same time he was deeply attracted to
the tradition of Chinese medicine.
So, although it is perhaps a scandal that the two
aspects of psychology are distrustful of each other.
Whittle is right, these are not just aspects, but selfsufficient cultures. In Canada, for all our talk of multiculturalism, we have not yet managed to become com-

Jaak Panksepp
fortable with the fault-line that runs between the
Anglos and the French, let alone with our many other
cultural splits. Within psychology, we are not comfortable with our split, but perhaps by recognizing it as a
cultural one, we psychologists can know that the move
to make is toward multiculturalism.
Keith Oatley
Dept. of Human Development & Applied Psychology
OISE-University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Canada M5S IV6

On Preventing Another Century of Misunderstanding: Toward a Psychoethology of Human Experience

and a Psychoneurology of Affect
Commentary by Jaak Panksepp (Bowling Green, Ohio)

Whittle's gentle complaint provides fertile ground for

sharing some of my own thoughts on this contentious
topic-the chasm between analytic-dissective and
synthetic-integrative approaches to understanding the
mind. I will take this opportunity to share what has
been on my mind for the last 30 years rather frankly
concerning our continuing failure to have a unified
and coherent mind-brain-behavior science.
The one thing all might agree on is that the experimental psychology that emerged during the past century has yet to give us a lasting and coherent science
of the human or animal condition. In my estimation,
this is largely due to the fact that it never really came
to terms with the evolutionary dynamics and epigenetic complexities of ancient regions of the mammalian brain. All too often it skirted the most profound
and central issues of our lives-the clarification of the
many internal impulses and feelings that guide the
intentional actions and choices we routinely make
each day. For quite a while, neuroscience has also
followed that same pattern, pretending that the dynamic, evolutionarily provided integrative states of the
nervous system are of little importance for understanding what the brain does. In fact, the probability
is high that the brain generates a great deal of its
"magic" not simply through "information transmisJaak Panksepp is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychobiology,
Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University,
Ohio.

sion," but through massive, coordinated operations of

enormous ensembles of neurons that create global and
organic neurodynamics (states of being) that constitute
the forms of affective consciousness, not capable of
being reproduced, so far as we know, on digital computers. Those global, evolutionary dynamics are the
fundamental fabric of mind, which comes to be richly
embellished and besmirched by the vast complexities
of individual experiences-information that is more
readily reproducible computationally.
Psychoanalysis addressed many of these issues
but all too rarely in ways that helped create a rigorous
culture of consensual "truth" that is the hallmark of
modern scientific thought (Macmillan, 1997). Experimental psychology became a fledgling member of the
scientific community early in the twentieth century,
not because of any coherent sc'ientific insight and synthesis it generated concerning the nature of mind or
the natural behaviors organisms exhibit, but rather because of its willingness to implement generally accepted experimental and statistical methodologies in
its search for lasting knowledge. Indeed, its analytic
success during the twentieth century was largely based
on barring the door to the darker affective corners of
the mind and keeping its attention focused obsessively
on those peppercorns of behavioral and cognitive evidence that strict-minded experimentalists could agree
upon. Both behaviorism and cognitivism agreed, at
times all too explicitly, that emotions and other affective processes were issues too murky or difficult to