Rejecting Freud

Japanese Novelist Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970, was amazed when he first learned how many American intellectuals and artists go to psychoanalysts. "Would it not be more proper," he wrote, "for the psychoanalysts to consult the artists instead?" In Japan it is not just creative people who avoid the couch. Everybody does. Tokyo, with a population of 11 million, has only three psychoanalysts in private practice. New York City (pop. 9 million) has nearly 1,000.

Seriously disturbed patients in Japanese mental hospitals generally receive similar kinds of treatment to those offered in the U.S. But the 3,000 Japanese who are qualified psychiatrists usually prescribe tranquilizers for patients who display neurotic or obsessive behavior, instead of probing for the root of the trouble.

Why the near total rejection of psychoanalysis? After all, Freud's works had been translated into Japanese by 1930, and after World War II many Japanese medical students and doctors went to the U.S. to study psychoanalysis. Tokyo Analyst Soichi Hakozaki offers one answer: the "softened ego" of the Japanese, produced by a clannish and group-oriented culture that ignores the individualism that is essential to the success of analytic techniques.

Group Trips. Individualism may be on the rise, however, now that more and more Japanese corporations are discarding their traditional paternalism. Tensions and anxiety are certainly increasing among the Japanese. But instead of setting up psychiatric care for their executives and workers, the corporations have begun subsidizing group trips to Zen temples for sessions of meditation. Mishima saw this coming a decade ago. Writing about the Japanese way of thinking, he concluded that it is Buddhism, with its conviction that existence is a transitory and basically unessential phenomenon, that keeps the Japanese off the analysts' couches.

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