Abstract
This article explores the making of a relationship between Japanese psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in the life and work of Kosawa Heisaku. Kosawa did not work out the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Buddhism in abstract, theoretical terms; rather, he understood them as two different articulations of the same practical approach to living well. He saw this approach in action in the lives of Freud and Shinran, the latter a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist reformer. For Kosawa, both individuals exemplified the ‘true religious state of mind’, at the achievement of which Kosawa understood psychoanalytic psychotherapy as ideally aiming. This article uses newly available documentary and interview material to examine the historical dynamics both of Kosawa’s work in this area and of the broader ‘religion-psy dialogue’ of which it is an early example.
Keywords
Seen from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, one of the intellectually richest encounters of the twentieth occurred between professionalizing and expanding ‘psy disciplines’ – principally psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy – and the thinkers, leaders and laypeople of the world’s religions. An array of interpretive problems and opportunities arose, touching on faith, hermeneutics, personhood and agency, pastoral care, religious practice, cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry, the metaphysical and moral meanings of mental illness, and the nature of religious experience. With varying degrees of subtlety and accuracy, Asian cultures were explored and invoked, and they continue to play a role in the five major areas of contemporary life into which this historical encounter has fed: psychiatric interest in the diagnostic relevance and therapeutic potential of patients’ religious world-views (including the abstracting of practices from religious contexts and their adaptation to the requirements of secular conceptions of health and well-being); the interpretation of experiences and behaviour where apparent psychotic content or neurotic form is understood by patients, families and/or wider communities in religious terms (Jackson and Fulford, 1997; Rashed, 2010); new forms of therapy and counselling that draw upon or root themselves in Christian, Buddhist or other religious concepts, integrating psychological methods and developmental models with religious or quasi-religious teleologies and understandings of personhood; the use of psy concepts and practices within traditional and newer religious organizations and movements, in supporting the health of priests, monks and nuns, and in bringing renewed emotional and psychological immediacy to religious teachings for the benefit of laities; and finally the organizational, therapeutic and literary subcultures of modern spirituality and self-cultivation, drawing on older religious traditions and on the psy disciplines while asserting their own claims to autonomy or authority.
This ‘religion-psy dialogue’ touches upon critical, long-term issues in psychiatry and mental health, from clinical work in culturally diverse and mobile communities (Kitanaka, 2012; Rashed, 2010) to the need for a ‘regional epistemology’ to address psychiatry’s hybrid objects of inquiry (Marková and Berrios, 2012). In addition, one finds in psychiatric, anthropological and religious literatures a concern about the possible deleterious social and psychological effects of mixed ‘religion-psy’ cultural constructs that combine encompassing and influential visions of the human person with an incorrigibly vague (mis)use of language and concepts. Starting from common experience, speaking to existential concerns, evoking the transcendent, borrowing the scientific legitimacy of ‘research shows’, and couched in compassionate, easily assimilated terms, this religion-psy dialogue potentially provides ready means for what Nikolas Rose has called ‘government of the soul’: Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us by others. Through self-reformation, therapy, and the calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by experts of the soul. [This] depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person. (Rose, 1999: 11)
An additional concern is that the extraction of ‘useful’ ideas and practices from religious traditions otherwise regarded as outmoded and expendable is, arguably, intellectually incoherent (Carrette and King, 2005) and threatens to deprive us of cultural and moral counterpoints to the utilitarian calculus at work in much of contemporary psychiatry and society more broadly. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette (1963: 228–32), writing in the 1960s with Freud in mind, offered a radical iteration of a related point of view, warning that a reductive co-option of religion into (materialist) psychology was part of a broader ideological relegation to the ranks of the inconsequential – even the non-existent – of anything in contemporary western culture that was non-public and non-physical.
If these diverse concerns about the religion-psy dialogue provide sufficient grounds to seek to subject it to serious analysis, there remains the problem of how one goes about such a task: how one evaluates accurately a phenomenon marked by its use of multiple registers of meaning – from the literal-objective through to the metaphorical, symbolic and devotional – and by an insistence that much of its subject matter lies beyond the grasp of human consciousness and cognition. Recalling Paul Ricoeur’s warning about conflating symbol/myth with allegory, by confusing the latter’s ‘explanatory pretensions’ with the former’s ‘exploratory significance’, the inadequacy of investigating the claims and pretensions of the religion-psy dialogue simply by unpicking static concepts and claims – of seeking to make the implicit discursively explicit – becomes clear (Ricouer, 1967: 5; Sels, 2011). An alternative – to adapt a phrase from Rose (1999) – is to confront the religion-psy dialogue with its histories: to use the tools of the social history of psychiatry and of religion to explore the transnational, institutional, intellectual and personal circumstances in which the dialogue has come about, tracing its impact and ambiguities as they play out among practitioners, clients and others, and offering as a counterpoint to its sometimes rather totalizing claims a vivid sense of the sheer historical contingency of particular forms.
The present paper offers a contribution towards this larger project by examining the relationship forged between psychoanalysis and Buddhism in mid-twentieth century Japan. The psychiatrist Kosawa Heisaku provides the focus: generally regarded as the ‘father of psychoanalysis’ in Japan, he travelled to Vienna in the early 1930s to study and receive analysis with Freud and his circle. 1 Privileged access to Kosawa’s personal papers makes possible for the first time an appreciation of the role played in his life and work by his devotion to the Jōdo Shinshū sect of Japanese Buddhism and especially to its charismatic thirteenth-century founder Shinran. Crucial to the making of this relationship was the intellectual, institutional and socio-political backdrop of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan: an emerging psychiatric profession with institutions and paradigms rooted in imported German neuropsychiatry; debates over the relevance of Japan’s religious traditions to her aspirations for a form of modernization that would not collapse into mere westernization; and widespread popular interest in imported and adapted ideas and practices such as hypnotism, which under the rubric of ‘self-cultivation’ purported to offer the pressurized populace of urban Japan a degree of insight, balance, health and purpose. 2
Historiography on Japanese psychiatry remains very limited outside a Japanese language scholarship which, as Suzuki Akihito has pointed out, faces its own conceptual and methodological challenges (2003). Where psychoanalysis is concerned, Okonogi and Kitayama (2001), Takeda (1990) and Blowers and Yang Hsueh Chi (1997, 2001) have led the way with short overviews based chiefly on the published recollections of key players, the Sigmund Freud archives, and Japanese psychoanalytic journals. One of the key revisions, made possible through access to Kosawa’s own papers, is a move away from a model that finds Freud and his inner circle forming a ‘human metropole’ for the quasi-colonial spread of psychoanalysis (albeit that Freud himself enjoyed this metaphor; Harding, 2009), and towards a more evenly balanced encounter shaped by transnational flows and counter-flows of religious, political and psy ideas. 3 Kosawa’s time in Europe now looks rather less like the intellectually formative pilgrimage hitherto imagined: aside from the ‘god-like’ Freud himself – an image formed in Kosawa’s mind long before the two actually met – Kosawa was largely unimpressed by the Viennese Freudians. He felt that his own psychoanalytic technique, developed in Japan, was superior, and that there was relatively little the Viennese could teach him; he looked forward instead to getting back to Japan as soon as possible, to open his own clinic (Kosawa, 1932). An understanding of Kosawa’s career also has a role to play in the revision, within the history of Japanese psychiatry, of the old import/modernization paradigm whereby traditional, often religious, understandings of mental health and illness are seen as having been simply replaced by western medical alternatives.
Universities and the cultural politics of psychiatry, religion and philosophy
Kure Shūzō, Professor of Psychiatry at Tokyo University between 1901 and the early 1920s, is generally regarded as the key figure in establishing the early parameters for Japanese psychiatry. As Okada (1982), Hashimoto (2006) and Suzuki (2003) have shown, Kure’s field research into the treatment of the mentally ill across 15 of Japan’s prefectures revealed the continuation into the twentieth century of a long-standing blend of confinement within the family home, placement in custodial facilities organized by local authorities, and attempts at treatment in religious, particularly Buddhist and Shintō, settings. Kure and his co-researcher Kashida Goro were heavily critical of the conditions in which patients in custodial facilities were kept, as they were of many of the temple and shrine therapies they studied. Although, in the latter cases, successful cure – or at least the abating of symptoms – was not unheard of, the metaphysical rationale for this presented by temple or shrine personnel was deemed false and in itself dangerous for patients (Hashimoto, 2006). Kure and Kashida also sought to influence government and public attitudes towards mental health and healthcare, although successes such as the Mental Hospitals Act of 1919 did not result in the building of public mental health facilities on the scale envisaged (Suzuki, 2003). Pressures operated too in the opposite direction: the Meiji government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to co-opt psychiatrists in its campaign to cleanse public discourse of ‘evil spirits’ and other such ‘superstitions’, in favour of westernized medicine and a concept of ‘hygiene’ that was rapidly politicized through the linking of mental illness, delinquency and crime (Ambaras, 1998; Kitanaka, 2012; Matsumura, 2004). Some prominent psychiatrists went along with these things, whether out of genuine agreement or the need for funds and other types of backing for their new university departments and hospitals, but on occasion psychiatrists sought either to push or redirect the political process, as with the eugenics movement in the 1930s and 1940s (Matsumura, 2004).
Kure’s promotion of Kraepelinian neuropsychiatry via his teaching and via the new Japanese Society of Neurology (together with its associated journal, Shinkeigaku Zasshi), was decisive for Japanese psychiatry. As Japan’s imperial universities – Tokyo, and later Kyoto, Tohoku, and Kyushu – became major centres of power and prestige in psychiatry, the dominance at these institutions of neuropsychiatry, maintained through strong personal and training links with Germany, came to be cited by Japanese psychoanalysts as a reason why psychoanalysis did not enjoy the mid-century heyday seen in other parts of the world. Psychoanalysis failed to secure for itself an influential professorship of psychiatry in mid-century Japan; instead figures such as Uchimura Yūshi, Professor of Psychiatry at Tokyo University, actively resisted American pressure after 1945 for a psychoanalytically oriented university psychiatry – although the dreaded ‘American psychologism’ did make inroads into Japan via clinical psychology and education (Sato, 2007). Kosawa Heisaku found himself on the outside looking in when he returned from Europe, while lay analysts such as Ohtsuki Kenji were beyond the pale, in institutional terms, from the very outset. Yet the psychiatric establishment proved to be not so much a straightforward barrier to the success of psychoanalysis in Japan as a shaping influence upon the sort of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy that could succeed there.
Japanese universities in this period were influential too in terms of the natural forum they provided for interested individuals seeking to test the utility and compatibility of different academic disciplines in tackling particular problems and questions. If the process of academic specialization in nineteenth-century Europe was rapid, Japan’s assimilation of these specialisms was little short of revolutionary, both in terms of the speed of change and the pre-existing intellectual culture onto which these specialisms were suddenly grafted. Sawada (2004) has pointed to the ways in which a single rubric of ‘self-cultivation’ covered, in early modern Japan, that which European philosophy, language and academia tended to separate out into religion, morality, health, education and psychology. That is not to say that in Europe, North America, India and elsewhere there was not a great deal of what Gieryn (1983) has called ‘boundary work’ going on between competing visions and interests in the worlds of medicine, alienism/psychiatry, psychology and philosophy at this time. But in Japan the rise of rival new specialisms was more abrupt, a ‘break’ of sorts, leading to confusion and problems in a number of areas including popular understandings of depression (Kitanaka, 2012).
It is impossible at present to judge how thoroughly, in the transition to an approach to mental illness that understood its object of inquiry primarily in neurological terms, Japanese psychiatrists abandoned competing approaches and the broader epistemologies and frameworks of meaning of which they were a part – whether these were alternative anatomical understandings of mental illness as imbalances elsewhere in the body, or more psychological and quasi-moralistic accounts. Recent work by Daidoji (2013), Kitanaka (2012) and Suzuki (2010) is beginning to trace the role of early modern and modern Japanese culture in how psychiatry has come to constitute its objects of inquiry (prior to processes of naturalization which tend to obscure that process; Marková and Berrios, 2012: 222), but a great deal more research is required to give us a fuller sense of these dynamics. A second area of interest is how porous the borders were thought to be between different disciplines at this time, when it came to the interpretation of subjective experience and the framing of the inner life. Tokyo University provides a vivid example of how such institutions underpinned the allocation of intellectual problems to particular disciplines while simultaneously providing a forum for overcoming these divisions. Kure, whose credentials in research-based neuropsychiatry ran alongside a strong interest in new psychotherapies, including hypnosis, was influenced by the philosophical ideas of a colleague at Tokyo University, Inoue Enryō, who was himself a significant, cosmopolitan figure: psychologist, philosopher, pedagogue and an advocate of a reformed Buddhism. Time spent at Tokyo University was also crucial in the development of the psychotherapeutic pioneer Nakamura Kokyō: a student of English Literature, his questions about human troubles and behaviour led him to supplement his studies under the great novelist Natsume Sōseki with attendance at psychology lectures given by Fukurai Tomokichi. While Fukurai briefly endangered the credentials of psychology in Japan through his experiments in parapsychology and clairvoyance (he was politely asked to take a leave of absence from his job in 1913), Nakamura went on to be rather more successful, making important contributions to psychotherapy and the study of abnormal psychology, including the establishment of the journal Hentai Shinri [Abnormal Psychology] (Sato, 2007). 4
To depict Inoue, Nakamura and, later, Kosawa as pioneering discipline-hoppers, however, risks assuming too much about the extent to which they inhabited any particular discipline in the first place, in the Kuhnian sense of a trained identification with foundational assumptions and commitment to a discipline’s integrity and goals (Kuhn, 1962). On the contrary, what makes these individuals significant to the emerging religion-psy dialogue in their day is that they treated these disciplines instrumentally – though not in a cavalier way – in the service of particular concerns, while to varying extents relying on these disciplines’ continued intellectual and institutional coherence, and general reputation, for their livelihoods. This feature of individuals such as Inoue and Kosawa is central to understanding how psychoanalysis and Buddhism could be brought together relatively unproblematically: where dialogue between parties who are rooted in their own traditions tends to home in, sooner rather than later, upon the nature and compatibility of foundational assumptions, Inoue and Kosawa’s approach was highly pragmatic. Kosawa, as we shall see, was concerned more with Freud’s method than with his naturalism or his socio-cultural vision. Before looking in detail at Kosawa’s approach, however, it will be useful to explore Inoue’s work, since his approach to religion-psy dialogue became paradigmatic in pre-war Japan.
It was in Inoue’s ideas that three imperatives of his era came together: a desire in government to consign various ‘superstitions’ to Japan’s backward past; the increasing need felt by cultural critics to find and assert a place for Japan’s heritage amid political and intellectual advocacy of all things western; and concerns within various Buddhist sects about how to rescue their declining position in Japanese society. Inoue’s father was a priest of the Jōdo Shinshū, or True Pure Land sect, within Japanese Buddhism, founded by the thirteenth-century monk Shinran. However, Inoue turned his back on a priestly vocation and instead studied and later taught western philosophy. In keeping with his fellow Seikyōsha 5 member Miyake Setsurei, whose 1891 essay ‘Shin-zen-bi Nihonjin’ [‘The Japanese: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty’] suggested that real progress in the world relied upon different nations with differing traditions competing with one another to create a general advance in civilization, Inoue saw Japanese Buddhism as one of his country’s most important offerings to the contemporary world. Popular Japanese anger at Buddhist establishments for their perceived role in the country’s economic and intellectual stagnation over recent centuries made this a difficult sell, and helped to fuel a distinctly defensive and nationalistic pragmatism on Inoue’s part – captured in one of his slogans: gokoku airi, ‘defence of the nation through the love of truth’. He advertised a rationalized, psychologized form of Buddhism to his compatriots as offering the keenest possible insights into ‘reality’. Beyond western science and philosophy, and clearly superior to Christianity and to non-Japanese forms of Buddhism, this was to provide the bedrock for a much-needed modern Japanese sense of self and community (Josephson, 2006; Ketelaar, 1991; Staggs, 1983). The idea that there is something about the Japanese people and their culture that gives them a relative head-start in directly apprehending reality was in circulation long before the twentieth century; but from Nishida Kitarō and his ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy to Kosawa Heisaku and Morita Shōma (psychiatrist and founder of Morita therapy) its modern influence was significant. There was frequently a tension in pre-war philosophy and psychotherapy between universalist, humanist approaches and a romantic essentialism that in later years was captured in the phrase ‘nihonjinron’ – theories about the Japanese. 6
Inoue was both in tune with the needs of his times and, as with some of his psychiatrist colleagues, willing to adapt himself to political agendas. Taking his cue from new government ethics school textbooks, which aimed to banish superstition from the minds of the next generation, he produced his own book on harmful superstition and embarked on lecture tours exhorting Japanese peasants (about whose meagre levels of sophistication he was consistently and vividly offensive) to jettison their beliefs in monsters and demons (Josephson, 2006). For Inoue, socio-political imperative dovetailed nicely here with his philosophical project of using the tools of modern reason and science, including the findings of psychology, to delineate as precisely as possible the boundaries of what the human intellect can and cannot grasp. His treatise, Shinri Ryōhō 7 [Psychological Therapy] (Inoue, 1904) presented an ambitious account of the workings of the mind across cultures and examined different sorts of treatment, including the role of faith in psychological healing: he used the concept of shinkō ryōhō – literally ‘faith healing’ – and appeared to allow that even superstitions might play a useful, functional role here, for people of an educational level such that higher forms of religion and philosophy were effectively barred to them (Inoue, 1904). Moreover, Inoue saw psychological therapy as important, not just for people who were suffering some form of mental illness, but for anyone seeking a clearer view of how the world really is.
Towards a Japanese psychoanalysis: Shinran’s and Freud’s shared project
Such were the circumstances in which Kosawa Heisaku (b. 1897) grew up and acquired his professional credentials as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He completed medical training at Tohoku Imperial University, and having been introduced by his psychiatry professor, Marui Kiyoyasu, to the theory of psychoanalysis, he travelled to Vienna in 1932 to study its practice with Freud and his circle. Kosawa’s time in analysis and supervision was short: three months of analysis with Richard Sterba, followed by a few months more of supervision under Paul Federn. The supervision seems to have gone well, with Federn evincing serious interest in the thesis that Kosawa was working on and telling him that his skills as an analyst were sufficiently developed that he should spend the rest of his time in Vienna on more ‘advanced matters’. 8 But Sterba was clear that his time working with Kosawa was ‘nothing more than the opening phase of an analysis’ (Sterba, 1936). Sterba later recalled being struck by Kosawa’s tremendously aggressive attitude towards his father, which he thought ‘clearly stemmed from the Oedipus Complex’ and which he saw playing out in Kosawa’s troubled relationship with Marui. 9 Sterba also noted Kosawa’s ‘childlike dependence and close connection to [his] mother’, although it is unclear whether the connection here with the maternal in Kosawa’s Buddhist faith, explored below, was made during this short analysis (Sterba, 1936).
Kosawa too regarded his analysis in Vienna as incomplete, both because it was conducted in a foreign language (his spoken German was relatively poor) and because he believed that the psychology of Japanese people differed greatly from that of westerners. He thought that for a Japanese person to receive a complete analysis, it had to be conducted by a Japanese analyst. In his own case, he considered his analysis with Sterba to have failed to heal his psychological and personality problems, but was consoled by the thought that Freud himself had not been analysed, and had instead received his ‘analysis’ via his clients and from reading Goethe (Kosawa, 1951). In general, Kosawa seems to have been more impressed by the taste of Vienna’s coffee – to which he referred approvingly in a letter to his brother – than with its psychoanalytic psychotherapy. After just four months he concluded that the method he had previously been developing for himself in Japan was in fact best. Returning in 1933 and excluded from university psychiatry because of an earlier falling out with Marui, he opened a private clinic in Tokyo and began placing newspaper advertisements, paying for signboards in busy locations, and letting medical colleagues and friends know that he was in business.
The biological and research focus of Japanese psychiatry was relatively hostile at this time to psychological approaches, as a Tokyo University professor of psychiatry admitted in 1924 (Kitanaka, 2012: 35), and also it lent, unwittingly, the stigma of ‘disease’ to all manner of interior suffering. This had the effect of opening up a space in which Kosawa was able to operate. 10 Early newspaper advertisements for his clinic stressed that he was open to any sort of problem that a person might want to discuss, and his client notes show nearly 400 new clients visiting him between 1933 and 1936, with many more people writing to him seeking advice. Some required hospital care and rather than attempt analysis Kosawa was forced to refer people onwards until he had his own hospital establishment in the mid-1950s. Of the small fraction who ended up in long-term analysis, diagnoses ranged from erythrophobia, obsessional neurosis, depression, masochistic character and hysteria to kleptomania, alcoholism, homosexuality, stutter and fear of leprosy. Enquiries by letter included a woman concerned because her child had become interested in Christianity and was considering the monastic life – she wanted to know whether this might be a mental health problem; a young male correspondent worried by his love of strong women and the fact that he became aroused in exams when the ‘five minutes left’ announcement was made; and a second young man who had recently met two women on arranged dates (omiai) and wanted Kosawa’s help to decide which of the two he should pursue. 11
Kosawa was seeing an average of three clients per day in the mid-1930s, rising to around six clients per day by the mid-1950s, partly thanks to growing popular interest after the war in western (and particularly American) psychiatry and psychology, and Kosawa’s co-translation of three books by Karl Menninger. Kosawa strengthened his position in Japanese psychoanalysis from the late 1940s onwards by gathering around him a group of medical students from some of Japan’s elite institutions, including Tokyo, Keio and Kyushu Universities. He worked to establish a single Japanese branch of the International Psychoanalytical Association (Seishinbunseki Kyōkai: Japan Psychoanalytic Society), a related journal, 12 and also his long hoped-for psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospital and training institute, Hiyoshi Byōin. Kosawa also maintained correspondences with European and American colleagues, and arranged for some of his students to study abroad.
The role played in all this by Kosawa’s Buddhism was abundantly clear to friends, colleagues and some of his clients, but religion was rarely mentioned in his published writings and its relationship to psychoanalysis was never comprehensively worked out in theoretical terms. In large part this is because of the way in which Kosawa believed Buddhism and psychoanalysis to relate: not as two distinct systems requiring extensive intellectual heavy lifting to be rendered compatible, but as two different articulations of the same essential approach to living well. This focus on how to live, and on what Kosawa called a ‘religious state of mind’, was a legacy both of his Jōdo Shinshū religious tradition and of a modern paradigm – for which Inoue Enryō was partly responsible – that viewed psychology and a highly pragmatic Buddhism as two sides of the same coin, helping to clear the approaches to a truer apprehension of reality.
Shinran and the Jōdo Shinshū tradition
Shinran, to whose life and work Jōdo Shinshū traces its foundation, had left the Tendai Buddhist order that he had originally joined because he felt unable to continue with its complex ritual and intellectual life. He came to focus upon his own absolute helplessness and that of other human beings, who attempt through all manner of methods to secure peace and salvation but never succeed. Taking up the Pure Land tradition within Mahayana Buddhism, which had origins in India and China and which focused on the recitation of a short nembutsu prayer as a means of salvation, Shinran developed a distinction between jiriki versus tariki: one’s own power to help effect one’s salvation versus the power of the ‘Other’ to help bring about that salvation. The ‘Other’ in question was, or was represented in devotional imagery by, the celestial Buddha Amida, whose vow to assist all beings in achieving rebirth in his Pure Land was the basis of the Pure Land tradition.
There has long been disagreement within the Shinshū tradition over whether Amida’s vow is to be considered in literal, historical terms, or as a means of communicating via limited and dualistic (either-or) language a truth about how the world is. In practice, there seems to have been a willingness among practitioners to tolerate ambiguity on this point, due to the primary emphasis in Japanese religiosity and Mahayana Buddhism upon action rather than propositional belief, and upon manifesting truth in one’s way of living and being rather than seeking to encapsulate it in conceptual formulae. 13 Moreover, in Jōdo Shinshū in particular a (literal) focus on the question of one’s own rebirth in the Pure Land is regarded as egotistical and out of keeping with the tradition’s primary interest in the salvation of all, together. This runs alongside a general disdain for heavy intellectualizing, as resting on an unrealistic estimation of one’s own powers: a constantly tempting but always futile indulgence in jiriki, when one’s only hope is tariki. For Shinran, humans are so unable truly to know and do good by themselves that even the recitation of the nembutsu cannot be considered a self-generated invocation or achievement. A true nembutsu must be untainted by the hopes and desires of the person reciting it, which means that the initiative has to be taken ultimately by the Other, ‘perfuming’ conventional, corrupted historical time and its inhabitants. 14
A couple of lines by the Shin Buddhist educator and poet Kai Wariko, a near contemporary of Kosawa, expresses this understanding of agency: The voice with which I call Amida Buddha Is the voice with which Amida Buddha calls to me.
15
This calling is a key moment for what is referred to in Jōdo Shinshū as shinjin, or ‘true entrusting’. For some thinkers within Shin Buddhism, it is this moment – a dynamic blend of an act and an experience – that is the first part of a person’s rebirth in the Pure Land.
Kosawa’s Shinran, Kosawa’s Freud
Kosawa seems to have approached Shinran both as a devotee of Jōdo Shinshū and as one of numerous Japanese intellectuals trawling Japanese history for suitable role models at a time of rapid change and of wide and uncertain western influence upon Japanese society and culture. Shinran was enjoying something of a revival in this context, hailed in plays, biographies and magazine articles as a charismatic exemplar of the spirit of independence, strength and compassion for which the times seemed to call. Schepers (2004) has suggested that the Japanese public were particularly receptive to new interpretations of Shinran immediately after World Wars I and II, with a popular 1918 work by Kurata Hyakuzō – translated title: ‘The Priest and His Disciples’ – giving rise to a flurry of fresh writings on Shinran. After 1945 interest emerged in Shinran as a proto-Marxist man of the people, thanks to the work of the Marxist historian Hattori Shisō and also to a posthumously published essay by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (who died in prison in 1945), which suggested that Shinran’s moment of self-realization was not just subjective and psychological, but incorporated a realization of his concrete historical situation and its significance (Curley, 2008; Schepers, 2004). Similarly, Radich (2011) and Iwata (2011) have shown that the Buddhist legend of Prince Ajase (Ajātaśatru in Sanskrit), in which Shinran took an interest and out of which Kosawa would later build a psychoanalytic theory to rival Freud’s Oedipus Complex, was also the subject of extensive literary and devotional treatment in this period.
Against this general cultural backdrop the young Kosawa had a life-changing encounter with a Buddhist priest, Chikazumi Jōkan, while attending the Second High School in Sendai between 1918 and 1921 and staying at a Jōdo Shinshū hall of residence. Chikazumi had been a junior colleague of Inoue Enryō, coupling the latter’s modernist aspirations with a more devotional Buddhism. Chikazumi was particularly interested in the way that human foibles and relationships might be the springboard to fresh religious realization. This is a line of thought to be found in the Tannishō – a central text in Jōdo Shinshū, which includes a short compilation of Shinran’s sayings – but Chikazumi’s appreciation of this dynamic stemmed from his own familial experience: suffering emotional and physical ailments while at (Tokyo) university, he returned home for surgery and at one point heard his father, sitting beside his bed, say: ‘I’m an old man now. I wish I could take on your suffering’. According to his autobiography, this triggered in Chikazumi a profound moment of conversion, in which the self-sacrifice of his father and mother illuminated his own weaknesses, desires and defilements (Iwata, 2011).
On this basis, the adult Kosawa’s central concern was an ethical and experiential focus on human frailty and the possibility of sange – a form of repentance that involved an immediate and accurate apprehension of oneself, made possible by overwhelming acceptance at the hands of an intimate other, through whom could be sensed the sustaining power of a broader Other. This dual notion of ‘seeing’ – as inquiry and experience – was at the core of his regular invocation of Shinran and Freud side by side in private correspondence and occasionally in public. Both had dedicated their lives, Kosawa insisted, to the pursuit of this seeing, and had provided to humanity indispensable practical tools – not least Freud’s method of free association and the therapeutic relationship. Kosawa put it in the following way to Freud himself in 1925, in a letter originally composed in rather stilted and romanticized German: ‘You describe the human mind with the same certainty that we, in our student years, observed in the structure of cells under the microscope.’
16
This vision of Shinran’s and Freud’s shared project comes through in greater detail in notes that he made for an English-language speech or radio broadcast in later years, entitled ‘Principle of Freud’ (undated notes): We [scientists and/or doctors
17
] must study over and over again, tracing … the route of Freud and then consider[ing] for ourselves. I use the word ‘route’ of Freud instead of ‘science’. The science of Freud is his human character itself and the route that he walked. It is not a preparation of medicine kept secret by an old doctor’s house [school of thought], not a moral principle of an abstract sort usually [offered] by certain Oriental sages, but a route anyone can find and reach if he does his best.
Kosawa went on to suggest that a defining moment for Freud’s life and career was his realization, in the context of squabbles within the early psychoanalytic community, that even the trained analyst shows imperfections and resistances in his or her dealings with others – colleagues and patients alike. ‘By this experience’, wrote Kosawa, ‘Freudism was firmly established. This spirit is truly fitted to the work of our Saint Shinran … there is no difference between these two spirits’ (Kosawa, undated notes).
This unusual reading of Freud extended to the suggestion that his was the epitome of a ‘religious state of mind’, and that his reduction and rejection of religion was therefore somewhat puzzling and should be put down to his limited acquaintance with it – knowing only certain elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and unaware, for example, of Jōdo Shinshū (a sentiment of which Inoue Enryō would thoroughly have approved). Kosawa’s psychoanalytic theory of the mother-child relationship – the ‘Ajase Complex’ – was developed expressly to describe the genesis of this religious state of mind, which Freud’s Oedipus theory seemed to miss. Where Freud’s vision of religion featured a fearful, guilty, negative sense of weakness or wrong-doing, with associated attempts at placation easily erupting into aggression, in Jōdo Shinshū it is precisely at the moment of realizing one’s weakness and guilt that one is forgiven, accepted and saved – by a mother figure and by a broader Other experienced as a maternal force (see Kosawa, 1931). 18
Kosawa’s attitude here was powerfully apparent to one of Kosawa’s clients, a student in the mid-1940s who recently recounted to the author his time in analysis and his relationship with Kosawa. 19 Mr Fukuda, as I shall refer to him, went to Kosawa plagued by deep and enduring self-doubt that had tipped over into neurosis. He partly blames an old ethics teacher of his during the war, who taught pupils that a ‘true man of character’ would never display any emotion. Fukuda had put his hand up in class to ask whether the having of emotions was permitted, and being told that it was, he proceeded to ask more questions. The teacher became angry and eventually put a stop to the exchange by accusing Fukuda of being a pointless quibbler and asking him whether he was also a Communist. Unsurprisingly, this did not settle things for Fukuda, and when he walked past Kosawa’s house in 1946 and noticed the sign saying ‘seishinbunseki’ (psychoanalysis), he decided to knock on the door. He ended up in therapy for around a year, towards the end of which time he recalls walking along the street and suddenly experiencing a falling away of his usual sense of self, replaced by what he calls a sense of being lived, or lived through.
Mr Fukuda attributed this life-changing event – which, in phenomenological terms, resembles descriptions both of the moment of shinjin (true entrusting) in Jōdo Shinshū and satori (enlightenment) in the Zen tradition 20 – to his intensive recent analysis. When he told Kosawa about it he received strong confirmation: this, said Kosawa, is the new sense of selfhood at which psychoanalysis aims but which it seems to struggle to achieve – without this sort of religious experience at its heart psychoanalysis will ultimately fail to progress. Fukuda, who later became a doctor, believes that in medical terms his condition resembled depersonalization disorder. Although Fukuda understood the liberating experience he went through as a culmination of therapy rather than as a feature of his illness, this nevertheless raises the question of whether Kosawa ever took a psychiatrist’s or psychoanalyst’s interest in the apparent closeness of such a liberating experience to the out-of-body symptomatology of depersonalization. 21 Mr Fukuda’s case-notes do not survive, so it is unclear whether Kosawa, for whom psychiatric illness was a particular manifestation of the universal human weakness upon which Shinran focused in his teaching, considered Fukuda’s situation in terms of depersonalization. The fact that for Mr Fukuda the experience of a falling away of the self brought to an end his psychological troubles and symptoms may, as far as Kosawa was concerned, have spoken for itself in terms of its significance. Indeed, Mr Fukuda remembers at one point in his analysis, on the occasion of another breakthrough, Kosawa patting him on the shoulder and saying, perhaps only half-jokingly: ‘hotoke-sama ni natta’ (‘Now you’ve become a Buddha’).
Mr Fukuda insists that for the most part Kosawa did not bring the language of Buddhism into his psychoanalytic therapy and, from surviving photos, Kosawa’s consultation room seems to have been the model of calm neutrality. But he did invite some clients, including Fukuda, to have tea with him after an analysis. On these occasions Kosawa was happy to talk about Buddhism and to show Fukuda a scroll that Chikazumi had given him. He also invited Fukuda to attend Buddhist talks at the Kyūdōkaikan, which was the base for Chikazumi’s work and that of his followers, and he introduced Fukuda to some of the people there as his deshi, his disciple. Crucially, Kosawa clearly saw his therapeutic style as influenced by the teaching style of Shinran. A motto of his, which he used to repeat to Fukuda and which he even ventured to include in his major introductory work on psychoanalysis, was ‘Shinran no kokoro wo motte, seishin bunseki wo suru’ (doing psychoanalysis in the spirit of [or ‘possessing the heart of’] Shinran).
Kosawa’s psychotherapeutic technique
What did this mean in practice? The consensus among former clients and trainees of Kosawa is that his style was intuitive and intimate, bordering – to his critics – on being highly prescriptive, intolerant of disagreement, claustrophobically ‘mothering’, and suggestive of what Doi Takeo, Kosawa’s student and later a leading light in Japanese psychiatry and psychoanalysis, regarded as an effeminate tendency (Doi, 1953). In a speech to the Japan Psychoanalytic Society more than 10 years after Kosawa’s death, Doi (c.1980) reaffirmed his impression that Kosawa’s ‘Buddhist faith and psychoanalytic style were inseparable’. He blamed this for their parting of ways, alongside what Doi saw as Kosawa’s tendency to ‘interpret’ clients’ associations by offering Buddhistic advice dressed up in psychoanalytic language rather than paying sufficient attention to the content of associations and to patients’ resistances. Doi was also uncomfortable with the way that Kosawa recommended solo free association to his patients almost as a form of meditation and, though he had a strong and effective understanding of psychoanalysis, somewhat took on the mantle of a saviour in dealing with his clients (Doi, c.1980). 22 It seems probable that Kosawa, drawing on the example of Freud (see above), treated his analytic sessions as opportunities for furthering his own self-analysis – even his own salvation, in Shinran’s terms. Doi’s rather bitter reference to Kosawa’s tendency to ‘consume’ and ‘drink’ his analysands suggests a suspicion that this somewhat self-focused dynamic was at play within Kosawa as a therapist (Doi, c.1980). 23
There are a few hints in Kosawa’s writing that the intellectual challenge of the compatibility of psychoanalysis with his own Buddhist tradition – and with Mahayana Buddhism more generally – did interest him. He met and corresponded with a Zen Buddhist priest from northern Japan, Ōyama Jundō, who thought that Freud’s therapeutic method was a means of helping people ‘spit out’ their innermost thoughts as a kind of purification, and who was impressed by the idea that Freud’s linking of religion to neurosis might be used to distinguish true enlightenment from various self-satisfied or self-deluded spiritual states (Ōyama, 1957). 24 Kosawa seems to have encouraged Ōyama’s speculations at a distance – two of Ōyama’s articles are among just four touching on non-psychoanalytic topics that Kosawa published in his journal – rather than engaging him directly at any length. Instead, his own intellectual efforts at linking psychoanalysis with Buddhism involved not a two-way relationship, between the ‘psy’ and the ‘religious’, but a three-way relationship: the psy and the religious made to orbit the personal, to be drawn upon and evaluated for their ability to chime and cope with an individual’s struggles.
This comes through in the confessional style of writing that Kosawa employed both with Freud and with Karl Menninger, his correspondence with the latter straying into personal and intellectually speculative territory on a number of occasions. In a letter to Freud in November 1931, Kosawa likened the repetition compulsion to the ‘redemption of Buddha’, and said that he had finally grasped the meaning of ‘transference’ when he set Freud’s writing on this subject alongside his own past experience of conflict. 25 He even coined a phrase, at this point, for a consideration of one’s own past with the transference dynamic in mind: ‘reflexive history’. Two decades later Kosawa asked Menninger what he made of the fact that three people involved in the recent translation of The Human Mind (Menninger, 1945) had since fallen ill. Kosawa likened this to his clinical experience, in which a client’s recovery sometimes coincided with a deterioration in the health of one of his or her parents. Kosawa acknowledged the importance of the psychological relationship between parent and child, but went on to ask whether the life of one person could somehow be ‘absorbed’ by another, and whether, ‘assuming that man prefers to stay in this world retaining the physical body, [rather than] departing to the other world’ the parent concerned ought to be ‘content to see his (her) child recover – revive – even at the cost of his (her) life (longevity)?’‘If one could believe in spiritual life after death, there is no question’, he added. 26
Comments such as these would be of great interest if Kosawa were definitely trying to develop here an intellectual understanding of how the compassion of Amida Buddha (to whom he sometimes referred when writing to his brother) works through human relationships – or, to put it less dualistically, how human relationships in some sense are the working of a force or law of compassion. But it is equally possible that Kosawa was writing primarily with Menninger’s western Christianity in mind: worrying that Japanese ideas required rendering into a western philosophical idiom when in correspondence with psychoanalytic colleagues abroad – particularly in the USA – on the basis that most westerners could not make the necessary conceptual leap in the other direction (at its extreme, this notion was part of the romantic essentialism about Japan alluded to above). Given this uncertainty surrounding how Kosawa’s comments about physical bodies and spiritual life after death are to be interpreted, we are on safer ground with another of Kosawa’s comments to Menninger, characteristically bringing the intellectual back to the immediate: ‘it is really a sad truth that I have been the only one [in Japan] who not only propagated psychoanalytical knowledge but practised and lived it’ (Kosawa, 1953, emphasis added). 27
Conclusion
Kosawa Heisaku died in 1968, leaving behind two contrasting legacies for psychoanalysis in Japan and its relationship with Buddhism. The better known of the two is the so-called ‘Kosawa School’ of psychoanalysts, which to this day remains at the core of internationally recognized psychoanalytic teaching and practice in Japan. For the most part, they have broken with Kosawa’s Buddhistic approach to and practice of psychoanalysis. One might suggest that in a limited sense the most famous of them, Doi Takeo, became a post-war Inoue Enryō in his efforts at using psychological ideas to sketch out a distinct Japanese identity. Indeed, Borovoy (2012) has recently suggested that Doi sought to re-work Japan’s pre-war particularism for the post-war world. Yet as the critique of Doi offered by Dale (1986) in his excoriating work The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness suggests, a casualty of the shift in Japanese psychoanalysis from interest in a ‘religious state of mind’ under Kosawa to primarily social-psychological and cultural concerns under Doi, Okonogi and others, was the universalist aspiration that underpinned Kosawa’s work. That Kosawa’s own intentions were somewhat sacrificed to the ambitions of his students comes through clearly in Dale’s critique of Japanese psychoanalysis, where attacks on ‘Kosawa’ are based on references to the work of Okonogi (Dale, 1986), and in the general perception that Kosawa’s invocation of religion in his published writings was no more than the selection of appropriate cultural reference points.
Kosawa seems here to have shared the fate of two other Japanese psychotherapeutic pioneers of a similar generation: Morita Shōma and Yoshimoto Ishin, the developers of Morita therapy and Naikan therapy, respectively. All three individuals blended psychotherapeutic insights with religion in their own lives first, and later produced successful, highly pragmatic combinative therapies centring around a structured, quasi-meditative consideration of past relationships. 28 All three lineages went through processes of secularization after the war, as cultural familiarity with (and the political acceptability of) religion diminished and the casual forms of personal interaction on which they relied faded away. Both Morita and Kosawa had played on a close Japanese familial dynamic by inviting young clients into their homes (Morita’s therapy was initially rooted in clients becoming, temporarily, a part of his family); this seemed simply unprofessional to later generations and, in the context of changing social patterns in post-war Japan, was becoming less familiar and so was losing its power to comfort.
If Morita and Naikan therapies live on in contemporary Japan, while a therapy that is recognizably ‘Kosawa’ in its content does not, Kosawa’s work can at least claim a second legacy besides its institutional first – one that has been little known until now, even within Japanese psychoanalytic circles. This stems from Kosawa’s final client, just a few years before he died: the novelist, Setouchi Harumi, who went on to become a Buddhist nun (Setouchi Jakuchō) and one of the most influential religious and cultural voices in Japan. She was deeply affected by her psychoanalysis with Kosawa, and now employs what she recalls of Kosawa’s manner and technique in her hōwa, her Buddhist talks, as well as in more intimate meetings with people who come to her for help. 29 This legacy seems at least as appropriate as the first, given that Kosawa desired psychoanalysis in Japan to become both a respected body of theory and practice and, in combination with the exemplary life and teaching of Shinran, a broader influence for good in society, particularly in a country seeking to pick itself up after 1945. Kosawa’s efforts in introducing psychotherapy into schools and in speaking out against both anti-religious and cult-like ‘new religion’ influences were a reflection of this.
Perhaps it is most useful to conclude with new questions. Was Kosawa actually practising psychoanalysis? And do combinative religion-psy ideas and practices such as his necessarily involve a twisting or debauching of their constituent elements, or can there be mutual invigoration? For Kosawa, the combination of psychoanalysis and Buddhism was clearly an intensification of a single method. Moreover, for at least two of his clients – Mr Fukuda and Setouchi Jakuchō – this combination offered a successful means of ‘triangulation’ where the nature of the inner life was concerned. Religion was not to be fully reduced to psychological metaphor, nor was psychology to be understood dualistically in terms of a divine power using mental distress as a means of gaining an individual’s attention. Rather, the maintenance of a tension between two articulations of the same phenomena worked to discourage over-identification with concepts (of which Kosawa and his religious tradition was wary, and with which Kosawa himself did not, perhaps, have very great a facility in any case) and to point more precisely to the phenomena themselves. This helped to facilitate the very thing that Kosawa had aimed at all along: clarity of insight, with real, salvific consequences.
Kosawa was deeply impressive for those with whom his approach resonated – Fukuda found in him the model of the ‘true man of character’ that had eluded him at school, while Setouchi remembers him with enormous warmth. One might argue, however, that Kosawa’s approach to psychoanalysis stymied the prospects for the discipline in Japan. Although one cannot blame him for his own failing physical health by the 1950s, it is not difficult to imagine a greater degree of post-war success for a figure who had used a year and a half in Vienna differently; who had published more; striven to remain within the university system; had been entrepreneurial in presenting psychoanalysis to the general public as something free of pre-war associations – not the least of which was religion; and who had had a less divisive impact upon those he worked with, particularly a younger generation who respected him but found his approach conservative, unyielding and unscientific.
The clearer benefit from Kosawa’s experiments in making a relationship between psychoanalysis and Buddhism lies in their resonance in contemporary Japan, where psychotherapy, counselling and combinative religion-psy healing practices have been increasing in prominence over the last 30 years and have more recently become a feature of end-of-life care and emergency disaster relief, most notably in the wake of Japan’s tsunami and nuclear disasters in March 2011. 30 Understanding something of the circumstances and the mixed practical and intellectual promise of Kosawa’s pioneering work, as this essay has sought to do, places us in a better position to critique these contemporary incarnations – in Japan and further afield – and the political, medical, religious and ethical questions they continue to raise.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
In supporting my research on early psychoanalysis in Japan I would like to thank the family of Kosawa Heisaku, in particular Kosawa Yorio and Kosawa Makoto, along with Geoffrey Blowers, ‘Mr Fukuda’, Hashimoto Akira, Jim Heisig, Dennis Hirota, Inoue Yoshinobu, Ikuta Takashi, Iwata Fumiaki, Kanaseki Takeshi, Kano Rikihachiro, Kitanaka Junko, Matsuki Kunihiro, Margaret Ries, Michael Radich, Sato Yuji, Setouchi Jakucho, Shingu Kazushige, Suzuki Akihito, Takeda Makoto, Wakida Yoshiyuki and Yoshinaga Shin’ichi. For helping to fund this research, I am grateful to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the Carnegie Fund for the Universities of Scotland, and the British Academy.