Dependency in Development: ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’

Abstract

One powerful image of contemporary psychoanalysis is that it is primarily concerned with strengthening the ego, and in the English-speaking world it is now often commonly viewed as a therapy designed to boost self-esteem and reinforce a sense of identity. This popular image of psychoanalysis corresponded very well with the competitive individualism of US American culture after the Second World War, and it also served as a moral lesson to America’s erstwhile enemy during the occupation of Japan. Psychoanalytic suspicion of the irrational unconscious driving forces that were assumed to underpin mass psychology chimed with political anxieties about the supposed collective nature of the Japanese. The development of psychoanalysis in Japan therefore had to tackle the way one might or might not be obedient to what one took human nature to be, and so as a clinical practice to some limited extent it set itself against ostensibly traditional psychiatric treatments. As part of this process a distinctive analysis of dependency and autonomy emerged in Japan, an analysis which adapted and transformed theories of the ego and its relation to others. Japanese psychoanalysis thus turned apparent weakness, its subordinate relationship to a culturally-specific system of psychology introduced from outside the country, into its strength.