Abstract
Does Freudianism, as an imported “Western discourse,” make a “bad fit” with Japan? No, according to Cornyetz and Vincent in their edited volume about psychoanalysis in Japan (2009). Two other books published in 2009—Akhtar’s Freud and the Far East and Long’s This Perversion Called Love—also see a fit. Some, of course, might disagree with Cornyetz and Vincent’s assessment. More significantly, however, others would argue that the issue is irrelevant given the many long-standing criticisms of Freudian psychoanalysis—serious flaws in Freud’s case study approach, neglect of social factors in personality formation, focus on the past rather than more immediate influences, a strangely deterministic perspective on sexuality and socialization, etc. Psychoanalysis, as a commentary on the obsessions of the collective Victorian soul, had some insights. But as a rigorous scientific theory (even if characterized as a more hermeneutic or humanistic “soft” social science), it has long been heavily criticized.
Ian Parker characterizes his Japan in Analysis, the book under review, as a “pathway” into both Japan and psychoanalysis. He puts Japan on the couch, making the entire nation, in his words, “Japanalysand.” However, this society also functions as “Japanalyst” because it supposedly forces those outside the culture to “make sense of who they have become.” In this manner the reader becomes an analysand, encouraged to discover issues that disturb “taken-for-granted assumptions” (p. 2).
The first chapter examines the ego psychologists trained in the US. The next chapter looks at Japanese analysts associated with the British tradition. Chapter 3, “Civilization and its Contents,” treats Japanese Lacanian perspectives, and notes resonances between Buddhism and psychoanalysis. In “Religion, Cohesion and Personal Life” (Chapter 4), the impact of Jungian analysis in Japan is contextualized (e.g., Kawai Hayao, Japan’s foremost Jungian). The final chapter, “Mirrors of the Other,” asks how Japanese psychoanalysis directs our attention to the emergence of psychoanalysis in the “West.”
Japan in Analysis is neither a history, a detailed, full-scale exploration of a Japanized version of psychoanalysis, nor an application of psychoanalytic theory to one particular topic chosen from Japanese society. The author selects bits and pieces of popular culture, many of which concern current events often reported in the English-speaking media: the role of women and mothers; the Aum Shinrikyō sect (responsible for Tokyo’s 1995 sarin gas attack); hikikomori (emotionally and physically isolated shut-ins); kikokushijo (“returnees” or children educated overseas attempting to reintegrate into Japanese society); otaku (avid, almost obsessive, pop art consumers); Murakami Haruki’s writings; and “Hello Kitty.”
Informative sections discuss what is “Japanese” about psychoanalysis and how Japan has “absorbed analytic ideas and produced its own particular interpretations of itself” (p. 2). The most notable challenge to Freudianism was Kosawa Heisaku’s development of the “Ajase complex” (from the Hindu myth of Prince Ajatasatru). This theory placed the mother at the center of the child’s psychic life, rather than the father (as in the Oedipus complex). The mother’s role would also be important for Nakakuki Masafumi and his ideas on “normal masochism.” The psychiatrist Doi Takeo’s theorizing about the concept of amae (indulgence) also indicated a keen interest in the analysis of more culturally-specific dependency.
Though cursory, the treatment of the tensions still characterizing Japanese psychoanalysis and the relations between key Japanese proponents of psychoanalysis is instructive. These include Kosawa Heisaku (and his student, Okonogi Keigo), Marui Kiyoyasu, Yabe Yaekichi, and Ohtsuki Kenji. Also, differences between the Japan Psychoanalytic Society (officially recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association), the Japanese Psychoanalytic Association (that has a more eclectic view of psychotherapy); and the International Mental Health Professionals of Japan (a “mainly Westerner expatriate therapist group”) are noted.
Several issues deserve comment. First, more attention to theoretical issues would have been welcome. For example, we are often told that Freud “discovered” the unconscious; this, of course, is untrue, since even before the late 19th century it was very much discussed by a host of thinkers. So given that the unconscious is the book’s conceptual lynchpin, this reviewer would like to know what the author means by “Freud’s invention of the unconscious” (p. 71) or the “invention of the unconscious in psychoanalysis” (p. 114).
A second issue concerns exoticism. The author is aware of how the powerful Orientalizing gaze of Euro–American societies stereotypes and distorts Japan, and notes how this nation functions as a “marker of the differences between inside and outside ‘our’ culture, surreptitiously defining and confirming the development and identity of the Western observer” (p. 94). It is surprising, then, that the “West” peppers the book; what is meant by this word? Latin America? The Anglophone world? Northern Europe? Central Europe? North America? And where or what is the “Western self”? Such overuse is troubling, because large swaths of the globe are homogenized and essentialized, including the very large and diverse country of Japan with its population of 126 million. Third, this reader would be interested in why Japan’s home-grown therapies, Buddhist-inspired Naikan (developed by Yoshimoto Ishin in the 1950s) and Morita (developed by the physician Morita Shōma in 1919), are not particularly hospitable to psychoanalysis. Fourth, what is the relationship, if simplistically phrased, between society and self, i.e., does culture determine personality structures? Or does personality determine culture, which seems to be the position of orthodox psychoanalysis? Or should personality and culture somehow be equated, as in the configurationalism of Ruth Benedict? A final issue pertains to readability: headings within chapters are enigmatically entitled with single words, such as “Mother,” “Culture,” “Identification,” “Folk,” “Relations,” “Nothing,” “Individuals,” “Outsiders,” etc.
If one is a believer in the faith of Freudianism (or the various psychoanalytic schools inspired by Freud’s thought), Japan in Analysis will naturally be of interest. If one is not persuaded by psychoanalytic theory but nevertheless curious about its development outside the Euro–American orbit, this work is a handy introduction.