Difference and The Awakening of Wounds in Intercultural Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In many analyses, patients and analysts alike consciously or unconsciously wound each other. In intercultural analyses, these woundings may take on an extra bite. The author suggests that treatments can be viewed according to the following phenomenology: There are (1) sedimentations of history, which are (2) reactivated, and (3) subsequently extended to serve new and contemporary purposes via the inscription of intentionality. If the analysis is well presided over, the violence of difference may reveal significations that exceed the particular, entering into a general and transcendent sphere. Concrete and syncretic matter becomes symbolic and produces a transformation from the primitive origins of a phenomenon to new, motivated, and plural structures of experience.