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Cross-Cultural Forays: Commentary by Keith Oatley(Toronto)Keith Oatley

a

aDept. 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:

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Cross-Cultural Forays

Commentary by Keith Oatley Toronto)

Paul Whittle has written an eloquent piece about the

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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 ex

actly 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 commu

nity, but also a containment, an emotional belonginess;

and jus t 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 pow

erful 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 psychoan

alytic psychotherapy at the Philadelphia Association

(whichWhittle mentions in a footnote). Just as, despite

my Canadian citizenship, I haven t given up my Euro

pean 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 psycho

analysis there is even a personality type called

bor

derline, 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 illumi

nated 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 main

land 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-

9

bristling soldiers

of

the Red Army, then got into an

other 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 cot

tage 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

chil

dren 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, businesspeo

ple 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 in

teresting 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 occa

sionally, to chat with people other than Chinese

(whom they found unfriendly), and to escape the con

fines 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 inter

preters who accompanied our group to tell them what

a great place America was.

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240

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 jus t aspects, but self

sufficient cultures. In Canada, for all our talk

of

multi

culturalism, 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 comfort

able 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

V

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 exper

imental psychology that emerged during the past cen

tury 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 epige

netic complexities

of

ancient regions of the mamma

lian 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 dy

namic, evolutionarily provided integrative statesof the

nervous system are of little importance for under

standing what the brain does. In fact, the probability

high that the brain generates a great deal of its

magic not simply through information transmis-

Jaak Panksepp is Distinguished Research Professor

of

Psychobiology,

Emeritus, Department

of

Psychology, Bowling Green State University,

Ohio.

sion, but through massive, coordinated operationsof

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 com

puters. 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). Experi

mental psychology became a fledgling memberof the

scientific community early in the twentieth century,

not because of any coherent sc ientific insight and syn

thesis it generated concerning the nature of mind or

the natural behaviors organisms exhibit, but rather be

cause of its willingness to implement generally ac

cepted 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 evi

dence that strict-minded experimentalists could agree

upon. Both behaviorism and cognitivism agreed, at

times all too explicitly, that emotions and other af

fective processes were issues too murky or difficult to