Alan Roland, who brought new insights to psychoanalysis by calling out a Western bias in much of the field and researching cultural differences and upbringing among patients, died on July 22 at his home in Monterey, Mass. He is 93 years old.
His wife, Joan Roland, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Known Dr. Roland for “In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology,” an influential 1988 book in which he laid out his ideas.
A key 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 the therapy sessions that the quality of his mind was of a different cast than that of any American patient I had ever worked with,” wrote Dr. Roland. For example, the family relationships and expectations the boy grew up with differed from what he encountered in the West.
Dr. Roland went on to live for significant stretches in India and Japan, absorbing the traditions and sensibilities of those countries. He saw differences in the ways people in those cultures communicated, what was expected of family relationships, and more — and how those forces differed from the Western emphasis on individualism.
“I saw the psychological make-up of people in societies as different from civilization as India, Japan and America embedded in the basic distinctive cultural principles of these civilizations and the social patterns and child-rearing that shaped by these principles,” he wrote.
He added, “This is quite different from many psychoanalysts who tend to assume the primacy of psychic reality and believe that psychology refers to culture and society – another form of psychoanalytic reductionism.”
American psychologists, he said in a 1977 interview with The Berkshire Sampler of Massachusetts, tend to be stuck in an approach based on Freud and medicine.
“They don’t understand psychoanalysis when it starts to be linked to philosophy, literature, linguistics, anthropology,” he said.
M Nasir Ilahi, a New York psychoanalyst, was a student in the 1970s when he first met Dr. Roland in his seminar on cross-cultural psychoanalysis.
“It has been a very important and in some respects a life-changing experience for me,” he said in a eulogy given at a memorial service on Thursday, “as for the first time I saw a man speaking, in a way made It is not so easy to understand the psychological differences between individuals from the various cultures of North America and my own South Asia.”
Sandra Shapiro, a psychoanalyst who taught at Queens College for many years and attended the service, said by email that although she had long been familiar with his work, she had met Dr. Roland on the weekend of his death.
“His words to me that afternoon were that when he started doing therapy with culturally identified Indian and Japanese people, he would be open and ask them a lot of questions,” she said. “There’s no arrogance there.”
Jacob Alan Roland was born on June 20, 1930, in Brooklyn. His father, Jay, was an artist who dropped the original family name, Goldstein. His mother, Lillian (Suttenberg) Roland, was a homemaker.
Dr. Roland graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn before earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Antioch College in Ohio in 1955 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University on Long Island in 1960.
He married Joan Gardner in 1962, when he was studying for a doctorate at Columbia University. (He became a professor of history at Pace University in New York.) In 1964, they made their first trip to India, a six-week visit, promising to return. Thirteen years later they did, where Dr. Roland pursued the research that became his 1988 book.
Including his next books “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). He maintained a clinical practice, but his interests ranged far and wide. His son, Ariel, said that Dr. Roland has been a student of Eastern spiritual practices throughout his adult life.
“It’s an extraordinarily important aspect of her identity and daily life,” he said via email, “while not so much at odds with her New York City Jewish background.”
In addition to his wife and son, Dr. Roland is survived by a daughter, Tika Snyder, and three grandchildren.
Dr. Roland also wrote plays and sometimes wrote psychoanalytic interpretations of the plays of others. And he is an artist whose watercolors and etchings have appeared in many group shows and in several solo exhibitions. He saw connections between his artistic endeavors and his clinical practice.
“In analytic work you’re listening to someone talking, and something is bothering him, but he doesn’t really know what it is,” he told The Berkshire Sampler. “And neither are you. And gradually you have to build something, a whole picture, that is not there. Now this requires a degree of chutzpah. And as an artist, you’re used to working with chutzpah, because you come out and say, this is my statement, this is the way I see things.