Encountering the “Other”: Reflections on Skoufalos’ “Couples Therapy: A Painful Hour, a Pained History”

Abstract

Psychoanalysts do not usually focus on culture or cultural differences when they seek to explain or understand the behavior of individuals or couples in treatment. In this paper, I explore the way in which Nicoletta Skoufalos faced a cultural dilemma, finding herself “othering” the Jewish couple who were her patients. Her feelings were in contradistinction to her humanitarian values, which created anxiety. Skoufalos tried to assuage her anxiety by finding many points of similarity between her and the couple; however, the reasons why she needed to “other” were not interrogated or addressed because she lacked a theoretical framework about culture and its influence on subjectivity to help her frame her clinical dilemma. I suggest that there is an urgent need for psychoanalysts to theorize about the ways in which social and political experiences influence the individual’s subjectivity, and to address the question of how we can learn to have direct discussions with our patients about cultural differences and how they affect treatment.

Keywords:

• the other
• cultural difference
• subjectivity
• immigration
• multiculturalism

This article is referred to by:

Couples Therapy: A Painful Hour, a Pained History

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glenys Lobban

Glenys Lobban, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in full-time private practice in New York City. A graduate of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, she is a faculty member at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and supervises at NIP. Lobban edited Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa: Contexts, Theories and Applications, with Michael O’Loughlin and Cora Smith (2013), and wrote three chapters for With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (2011), edited by Muriel Dimen. She has written a number of papers on the psychological dimensions of the immigrant experience, including “The immigrant analyst: A journey from double consciousness toward hybridity,” which was published in Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves (2016), edited by Julia Beltsiou.