to analyze such views in terms of the dynamic, dialectical relations between
self and culture.

The chapters of this book -- with their primary emphasis on comparative
philosophy, religion, and culture -- have been divided into four parts: Multi-
ple Asian and Western Perspectives, Chinese and Western Perspectives, In-
dian and Western Perspectives, and Japanese and Western Perspectives. In-
cluded among these analyses are Vedanta, Samkhya-Yoga, and other Hindu
approaches; Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and other Indian, Chinese, and
Japanese perspectives; Cartesian and other dominant Western perspectives;
and Marxist, Nietzschean, Sartrean, feminist, and other challenges to domi-
nant Western interpretations of culture and self.

In Chapter 1, "Social Constructions of Self: Some Asian, Marxist, and
Feminist Critiques of Dominant Western Views of Self," Douglasb Allen ar-
gues against a traditional philosophical orientation, in the East and West,
that maintains that philosophers uncover the "true," "objective," eternal na-
ture of "the self" by penetrating beneath layers of ignorance and illusion.
After analyzing some of the complex relations among texts, contexts, and in-
terpretations, Allen formulates a modern, post-Cartesian view of self as the
autonomous individual that has dominated Western socioeconomic, politi-
cal, and cultural life. Then he presents four alternative concepts of self: the
Hindu karma yoga of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddha's teaching of anatta
(no-self), Marx's analysis of the historical constitution of the modern capital-
ist self, and the approaches of de Beauvoir and other feminists to masculinist
formulations of self. Next, after reviewing various critiques of a construction
of self that has dominated much of Western culture, he considers the differ-
ences among these four concepts as well as the ways in which they may be
complementary and integrated in more comprehensive formulations. And fi-
nally, though he concurs with the recent philosophical assertion that no spe-
cific concepts of self may claim exclusivistic, ahistoric, universal truth, Allen
argues against certain extreme relativisms that insist on the primacy and ab-
soluteness of difference. Upholding the principle of "commonality with dif-
ferences," he argues for the existence of a deep level of commonality among
humans and their need to empathize with and relate to other concepts of self
created by other cultures -- concepts that, in turn, may function as catalysts
to our own creative process of self-development.

In Chapter 2, "How Universal Is Psychoanalysis? The Self in India, Japan,
and the United States," Alan Roland asks whether human nature is universal
or culturally variable and, more particularly, whether psychoanalysis is uni-
versal in encompassing an understanding of persons from radically different
cultures such as India and Japan. He focuses on these issues as they are in-
volved in major psychoanalytic studies of South Asians by Sudhir Kakar and
Catherine Ewing and of Japanese by Takeo Doi. From cultural anthropol-
ogy Roland borrows the orientations of universalism, evolutionism, and rel-

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