Psyche East and West: The Problem of Identity and Strangeness
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In today’s multi-globalised world, the effort to define identity and strangeness becomes a significant necessity to create meaningful dialogue between different cultural paradigms in view of increasing instances of ‘civilisational’ clashes at individual and collective levels over limited resources and ideological issues.
This chapter explores the relationship of the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘strangeness’, of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as culturally embedded terms which are intimately related to the definition of the word ‘psyche’ in different cultures. It is based on a comparative study of two texts, Strangers to Ourselves by Julia Kristeva as broadly representative of the Western perspective of the ‘other’ and No One is a Stranger, a collection of articles by the Ramakrishna Mission, India, representing the Eastern discourse on the subject. The Stranger can also be defined as ‘not me’. This article will therefore study the dictum ‘know thyself’ to examine the knowability of the self in different traditions and consider its implications on ideas of universality and regarding the treatment of the ‘other’, in an attempt to understand if we are indeed strangers to ourselves of if no one is a stranger.