Institutional Politics and Cultural Intervention: ‘They were killing their mothers’

Abstract

Psychoanalytic ideas were first taken up in Japan when Freud was still the leading force in the movement, and so a visit to the father of psychoanalysis was assumed to be crucial if the ideas were to be accurately represented in the country. And, right from the start there were attempts to interest Freud in culturally-specific creation myths so that the re-creation of psychoanalysis on home ground might be easier to develop, creation myths that have borne fruit in new conceptions of desire, how it is incited and prohibited. These new conceptions developed after the Second World War while profound transformations in psychoanalytic accounts of childhood were taking place in the British Psycho-Analytical Society. So, here — from Britain — were theoretical resources for Japanese analysts to shift attention from the father to the mother in psychoanalysis and, at the same time, resources to comprehend growing generational conflicts and political violence. In the process, psychoanalytic accounts which could be used to interpret the culture — in motifs of motherhood, security and sexuality — were becoming common currency. The cultural-political profile of psychoanalysis thus started to intersect with images of the self and with the sense that psychoanalytic notions could become authentically Japanese.