Japan in Analysis:

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This book is about the development of psychoanalysis and modern subjectivity in Japan, and addresses three key questions: 'Why is there psychoanalysis in Japan?', 'What do we learn about Japan from its own forms of analysis?', and 'What do we learn about ourselves from Japan?'

Inhalt

Acknowledgements
Introductions and Preliminary Meetings

• 1 Dependency in Development: 'Where id was, there ego shall be'
• 2 Institutional Politics and Cultural Intervention - They were killing their mothers'
• 3 Civilization and its Contents: 'Buddhistic cyberspace in Kyoto'
• 4 Religion, Cohesion and Personal Life: 'A homogeneous culture
• 5 Mirrors of the Other: 'Why are you asking these questions?'

Notes
References
Index

Introductions and Preliminary Meetings

This book is about psychoanalysis in Japan, but the issues it explores have direct relevance to the way we understand ourselves now, whether we are inside or outside Japan. It is a pathway into psychoanalysis and, at the same time, a pathway into Japan. The book draws on interviews, meetings and discussions with analysts - not only psychoanalysis - from different theoretical traditions and connects the ideas that have been adapted and developed from outside Japan with indigenous systems of thought, showing what they owe to elements of Japanese culture. Distinctive patterns of child-rearing, local conceptions of self in relation to others and culturally-bound possibilities for reflection and change raise questions about the place of psychoanalysis there, and here.
The cultural resources Freud drew upon are not accidental or tangential to psychoanalysis but necessary to it and this makes every analysis into a specific kind of cultural practice. Psychoanalysis developed at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe as a form of intense self-exploration in which one person speaks to another about themselves in a peculiar, highly-charged relationship which itself comes to re-enact what they are speaking about. As they speak, the patient, or analysand - who is the one who is really doing the analysing - has to deal not only with the presence of the analyst but with the fact that hitherto private tangled experience is thereby being made public. The stuff of who they are appears in language in the analysis and in that process the analysand together with the analyst untangles the symptoms that led them to find another to speak to about their distress. Psychoanalysis is a talking cure; a cure which requires that there be some sense that things are unconscious to us, pushed out of awareness and kept at bay because they disturb and threaten to undermine what we think will make us happy. Freud homed in on what was most disturbing, especially upon sexuality as the most intimate core of who we are and around which we construct hosts of fantasies about how we might love others and find satisfaction in that love.
Already, in this most simple cluster of assumptions about the self there arc complex culturally-specific images put to work about what is Inside and outside us, what forms of motivation are primary and how they push to the surface, and what speaking about ourselves might cover over or reveal. While there is, of course, a focus on things Japanese in this book - at least, the things that can be rendered intelligible to outsiders - we must not forget that psychoanalysis itself is quite a bizarre way of understanding people and striking up relationships with them. Psychoanalysis exaggerates to a level of unbearable horror the ideas that people would least like to entertain about themselves, and the assumptions it makes about human nature should not be taken for granted. In this book psychoanalysis sometimes seems to operate as a window upon Japan, but we will also sec how stepping into another culture enables us to find a new window upon psychoanalysis. To ask why there is psychoanalysis in Japan, then, is also to arrive at a way of unravelling the context in which psychoanalytic practitioners work.
When I started writing the book I imagined that the motif of 'Japanalysand' might be useful to highlight the way in which analytic work is undertaken by the person who makes a demand for analysis. It is the analysand who makes the most searching interpretations, and transforms themselves in the process. In much the same way, I thought, 'Japan' in this book would be our analysand; it would figure as a culture that has made a demand for psychoanalysis and has worked through some of the consequences. So, the different chapters do focus on the way Japan has absorbed analytic ideas and produced its own particular interpretations of itself.
However, at the same time we need to approach this question reflexivcly and turn it around so that the 'Japanalysand' is also the reader of this book, you, gazing into this other culture, a culture that has avidly consumed representations of itself as it has internalized psychoanalytic ideas. The reader as analysand will thus find something that disturbs taken-for-granted assumptions about the Western self and its limits. In that process, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the motif of 'Japanalyst' becomes more salient as Japan comes to function in the position of analyst to force those outside the culture to make sense of who they have become. And why should the same process not lake place for those who seem at home 'inside' the culture discovering some uncanny aspects of things that may have otherwise been taken for granted or conveniently overlooked?
The scope of analysis in the book ranges from influential US American forms of'ego psychology' to British Kleinian, object relations and contemporary Freudian approaches, as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Each of these approaches is to be found in Japan today. The book outlines the forms that psychoanalysis has taken in Japan, drawing out connections to relevant cultural-historical factors, but docs this with an eye to two key tasks. One is to try and disentangle what appears to be characteristically 'Japanese' about various forms of psychoanalysis, and the other is to explore the conditions under which those kinds of psychoanalysis could arise.
One of the most dangerous moments during the writing of this book was when I tried to explain to my barber what it was about. Incredulity that 1 should want to devote my time to such a topic quickly turned into hilarity when I had to tell him how many analysts there were exactly in Japan. He was waving a pair of very sharp scissors around my head as he almost collapsed and fell upon me crying with laughter. What on earth could such a book be about, and who would want to read it? Eventually he regained his composure and started to rehearse for me what it might include. His construction of the book was fairly accurate. There might be some history, description of how psychoanalysis in Japan had taken on a distinctive form, and then evaluation of how well it suits that culture.
This guy may think he knows nothing about psychoanalysis and he has never been to Japan, but for sure he knows something about the format that books like this should take. But then, he did not press me further on why exactly I should Ik writing this book, and it is that position of the researcher that I have actually tried to put in place of the evaluation. After all, psychoanalysis never suits any culture very well and, while it may attract some enthusiasts for it as a social theory or clinical practice, there is mostly hostility to what it says and docs. Psychoanalysis is always out of place, and this makes the study of it in one particular culture a curious enterprise. How are we to go about it?
This book first explores the perspectives of the ego psychologists trained in the US in Chapter 1 before moving on, in Chapter 2, to those who are more closely connected with the British tradition. Then we turn in the third chapter to Japanese Lacanian perspectives, before looking at wider cultural forces and representations of therapy and psychology in relation to Jungian analysis in Chapter 4. The final chapter reflects on the questions asked of Japanese analysts and how psychoanalysis in Japan draws attention to the conditions for psychoanalysis to have emerged in the West.
From the start we are faced with questions of language, and with the way English restructures the Japanese phenomena we try to describe. It may seem odd to the English reader, for example, that Japanese names in this book will follow the form they take in Japan, with family name followed by given name. Good. This particularity of naming is the least of it, and it is one of the aims of this book to attend to what is strange in Japanese psychoanalysis so that we may reflect on assumptions we make about psychoanalysis and thus, for a moment, become strange to ourselves.