Religion, Cohesion and Personal Life: ‘A homogeneous culture’

Abstract

The divided subject of psychoanalysis calls for a view of each ostensibly unified culture as riven with contradictions, a view which poses a challenge to the idea of an authentic self rooted in tradition and to popular versions of analysis that ground individual experience in archetypes of a ‘collective unconscious’. In Japan there is a paradoxical relationship between the most influential versions of this kind of analysis looking to cultural traditions on the one hand and modern scientific psychology on the other, both imported and each mobilized in governmental policy. Psychoanalysis reveals how images of ‘others’ that have been historically maintained at a distance, outside the culture, come to mould the internal shape of indigenous psychologies. Internal conflicts have always driven the development of theories about psychology and the management of the self, driven these developments in particular ways concerning specific ‘internal others’ in Japan. This attention to internal contradictions then poses questions about how psychoanalysis itself as a historically marginal practice functions in this place, and the marginal identities it attaches itself to. Psychoanalysis is then divided, between something that is already non-European and something that cannot ever be at one with a unified Japanese sense of self.