Leaving "home" : the challenges of living with radical cultural difference

The space between the importance (the ethical necessity) of living together in difference and the difficulty of actually doing so is a fertile area for psychoanalytic relational exploration. In this article, to explore some of the psychoanalytic implications of the psychological and emotional challenges of living with radical cultural difference, I use empirical data about the experiences of men and women who are, or have been, in intercultural marriages and relationships. I argue that the experiences narrated by participants in radically “othered” intercultural marriages and relationships are a microcosm of wider transglobal clashes, configurations, inequalities, and connections, and that these experiences highlight the necessity of theorizing and practicing a process-oriented psychoanalysis that eschews single, preemptive answers to the complex questions of living together in difference and takes seriously the ethical question of the capacity and willingness to live with degrees of lack, dislocation, uncertainty, and alienation.