1E Yoshinaga
Panel Title:
Practices of Kokoro: Psychotherapy and Religion in Modern Japan
Organizer:
Yoshinaga SHIN'ICHI (Maizuru National College of Technology)
Chair: TBA
1) Yoshinaga SHIN'ICHI (Maizuru National College of Technology)
Two Propagators of Hypnotism in Meiji Japan: Inoue Enryō (1858-1919) and
Kuwabara Toshiro (1873-1906)
2) Sarah Terrail LORMEL (INALCO)
Interrogating the Scientific Drive and Religious Colouring of Morita therapy
3) Christopher HARDING (Edinburgh University)
‘Doing Psychoanalysis in the Spirit of Shinran’: The Relationship Between
Therapy and Worldview in the Lives of Japan’s First Psychoanalysts
Discussant: Hideaki Matsuoka (Shukutoku University)
Yoshinaga Shin’ichi is an associate professor at Maizuru Naional College
of Technology, specializing in the history of modern Buddhism, alternative
psychotherapies, and spiritual thought movements in the modern world. In
the field of modern Buddhism, he has written about the relationship between
Theosophists and Japanese Buddhists. His papers on “unorthodox”
psychotherapy, or mind cure movements, in Japan include “Tairei to Kokka”
([Great Spirit and the Nation], Jintai Kagaku, vol.17 no.1). He has also
edited 15 volumes of a reprinted series entitled “Nihonjin No Shin Shin
Rei” [Body, Mind, and Spirit of the Japanese, (2004)]. Some of his articles
are available on his web pages (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ma-tango/) and he
can be contacted by email at yosinaga@maizuru-ct.ac.jp.
Sarah Terrail Lormel is Ph.D student at INALCO (Institut national des langues
et civilisations orientales) in Paris. She is currently a Japan Foundation
Fellow, based at Keio University. Her research field is the history of
psychiatry in Japan: she explores the history of the emergence and
development of diagnostic entities specific to Japanese psychiatry (taijin
kyofu and shinkeishitsu) during the twentieth century. She has conducted
previous research (maitrise and master's dissertations) on the introduction
of psychoanalysis into Japan and on contemporary psychiatric issues.
Christopher Harding is Lecturer in Asian History at the University of
Edinburgh (UK), specializing in the modern circulation of ideas in religion
and the psy disciplines between Europe, India, and Japan. His first book,
Religious Transformation in South Asia (OUP, 2008), dealt with conversion
movements amongst low caste groups in northern India to European forms of
Protestant and Catholic Christianity, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Since then he has been working on the co-evolution
of religious and mental health ideas in India and Japan
(www.religionandmentalhealth.co.uk), including his current project on
early Japanese psychoanalysis.
Matsuoka Hideaki studied psychiatry after graduating a medical school.
Then switched to be an anthropologist by taking Ph.D. from the University
of California at Berkeley.
Currently he is a professor in International
Communication at the Shukutoku University in Japan.
Japanese religions both in Japan and Brazil.
Matsuoka has studied
In his book Japanese Prayer
under the Equator (Lexington, 2007) Matsuoka examined why and how a Japanese
new religion named Sekai Kyūsei Kyō or The Church of World Messianity has
been accepted by non-ethnic Japanese Brazilians.
Since 2009, he has been
carrying out fieldwork in a palliative care unit in a large hospital focusing
on how medical staffs internalize the norm in the space which is hétérotopie
in Foucauldian sense.
Practices of Kokoro:
Psychotherapy and Religion in Modern Japan
Organizer:
Yoshinaga Shin’ichi, Maizuru National College of Technology
Panelists:
Yoshinaga Shin’ichi, Maizuru National College of Technology
Sarah Terrail Lormel, Institut national des langues et civilisations
orientales
Christopher Harding, University of Edinburgh
Discussant:
Matsuoka Hideaki, Shukutoku University
The various sorts of relationships that exist between ‘psychotherapy’ and
‘religion’ can be understood in terms of practical and historical dynamics:
in practical terms, some medical doctors have stood against religion while
others have recognized the usefulness of religiosity in the context of
care-giving; historically, most psychotherapies have come about through
a secularizing of religious practices, with others taking on a religious
dimension at some point in their development.
These four dynamics have been of great importance in modern Japan, in terms
of the relationship between psychotherapy and religion – and Buddhism
especially, whose growing closeness to psychology was a feature of
modernization in Japan. The founding father of modern Japanese Buddhism,
Hara Tanzan (1819-1892), talked about Buddhism as “mental philosophy”, while
Inoue Enryō (1858-1919) was active in the introduction of hypnotism and
other elements of psychology into Japan, advocating the practical
application of therapeutic ideas and rational interpretations of what he
regarded as superstition. Hara’s legacy went via hypnotism to practical,
private forms of therapy, while Inoue’s work helped give rise to movements
in psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and other sciences of the mind.
However, research up until now has rarely considered these things as
movements within a dynamically changing Buddhism. Therefore the aim of this
panel will be to consider the introduction of hypnotism and the birth of
two therapies with connections to religion – Morita therapy and Buddhism,
and Kosawa Heisaku’s Japanese psychoanalysis – explicitly within the
framework of modernization movements in Japanese Buddhism in the post-Meiji
period.
Paper 1:
Two Propagators of Hypnotism in Meiji Japan:
Inoue Enryō (1858-1919) and Kuwabara Toshiro (1873-1906)
Shin’ichi YOSHINAGA
As the titles of Frank Podmore’s classic work, Mesmerism and Christian
Science(1909), and Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud(1993) indicate,
hypnotism was ambiguous in that it implied both to a ‘rational’ system of
psychotherapy and a ‘religious’ system of healing. The idea that the
modernizing process of religion involved a simultaneous ‘de-enchantment’
and ‘re-enchantment’ is borne out by the history of hypnotism. In Meiji
era, hypnotism began to be practiced after 1885, when an entrepreneur Kawada
Ryōkichi (1856-1951) gave a demonstration of hypnotism at his home.
Amongst a number of philosophers and medical doctors to show an interest
in hypnotism was Inoue Enryō, a Buddhist philosopher who sought to reform
Buddhism. He not only proposed to establish Yokai-gaku to clear up the
superstitious elements by using the latest science including Edward
Carpenter’s psychology, but he also introduced hypnotism to Japanese
intellectuals as a new way to cure illnesses – creating, in the process,
the neologism ‘shinri-ryōhō’ (psychotherapy). Inoue wrote articles about
hypnotism in academic journals of philosophy and conducted experiments in
collaboration with a hypnotic healer.
He rationalized the effect of magical
rituals of prayers in terms of the concept of
‘suggestion’, and tried to
make ‘shinri-ryōhō’ a substitute for prayer.
Despite Inoue’s efforts, hypnotism’s profile remained low, until in 1903
it suddenly came into vogue.
It was Kuwabara Toshiro (1873-1906) who started
a boom in the publication of hypnotism books.
Kuwabara was not a charlatan
but a teacher of Chinese letters at Shizuoka normal school.
He became a
hypnotic practitioner simply by reading a popular guidebook, and claimed
to be engaged in psychic healing. Contrary to Inoue, Kuwabara argued for
the existence of supernatural phenomena, which he said he could produce
with his power of mind. He developed a pan-psychic worldview, with religious
overtones. For Inoue, hypnotism and abnormal psychology were a tool to
interpret magical experience at the psychological level, while, for Kuwabara,
hypnotism rebuilt religion anew as a kind of “Cosmic Psychology.”
The type
of healings Kuwabara began would be denounced by Nakamura Kokyō (1881-1952)
and Morita Masatake, but would appeal to people with anguished “kokoro”.
Paper 2:
Interrogating the Scientific Drive and Religious Colouring of Morita therapy
Sarah Terrail LORMEL
The psychiatrist Morita Masatake (1874-1938) has left his name to posterity
as the inventor of the Morita therapy. Considered to be the first Japanese
modern psychotherapy, it was established around 1920 and designed
specifically to address a group of neurotic disorders that Morita
conceptualized as shinkeishitsu ('nervous constitution'). The strong
influence of Zen Buddhist thought on Morita therapy has often been emphasized
in Western literature. Certainly, the recurrence of Buddhist concepts –
satori, mushojûshin, arugamama – in Morita's writings is striking, and it
perhaps not surprising that non-Japanese clinicians have viewed Morita
therapy as a sort of Zen psychotherapy.
It is nevertheless evident that Morita firmly gives his theory and practice
a scientific basis. Recent Japanese scholarship has further stressed
Morita’s resolute opposition to what he called ‘superstitious cures’, i.e.
therapies and cures proposed by the new religions of the Meiji era. Moreover
he was unambiguous about the fact that his psychological understanding
differed greatly from that of the famous method of Naikan developed by Zen
priest Hakuin Ekaku (1686 – 1768).
So, precisely what role can Zen Buddhism, as a philosophy and as a spiritual
practice, be said to have played in Morita's theory and psychotherapy? Did
it act as a structuring framework, a localized source of clinical inspiration,
or a metaphorical means of explaining psychological mechanisms to a large
lay audience? These are the questions which this paper seeks to address,
taking Morita as one of the first Japanese psychiatrists to adopt a
psychological approach to the etiology and therapy of mental disorders,
and bearing in mind the scientific and religious effervescence of the Meiji,
Taishō and early Shōwa periods.
Paper 3:
‘Doing Psychoanalysis in the Spirit of Shinran’:
The Relationship Between Therapy and Worldview in the Lives of Japan’s First
Psychoanalysts
Christopher Harding
Scholarship on Japanese psychoanalysis has tended to focus on its modest
but colourful place within Japanese and international psychiatry, telling
a story of institutional development and highlighting ways in which – as
with Kosawa Heisaku’s Buddhist-influenced ‘Ajase Complex’ – Japanese
analysts sought to adapt Freud to Japanese cultural conditions.
Before cultural adaptation, however, there had to be a conviction that
psychoanalysis had something worthwhile to offer in the first place – a
conviction that has always been rare in Japanese psychiatry and society
at large. This paper sets out to explore the reasons why two of Japan’s
earliest psychoanalysts, Kosawa Heisaku (1897-1968) and Ohtsuki Kenji
(1891-1977), fell for Freud in the way that they did. Pressures on Japanese
psychoanalysis to portray itself as loyally Freudian and appropriately
scientific have often occluded many of these, which only now come to light
with the emergence of new source materials. These materials show how, as
members of a transitional generation living in a period of extraordinary
cultural flux in Taishō and early Shōwa Japan, Kosawa and Ohtsuki sought
in Freud’s method a means of probing and reconciling conflicting
contemporary claims – in philosophy, religion, science, and elsewhere –
about the nature of the human person.
By seeking to understand what Kosawa meant when he claimed he was
‘doing psychoanalysis in the spirit of Shinran’ (an important figure in
medieval Japanese Buddhism), this paper explores Kosawa’s and Ohtsuki’s
hopes for psychoanalysis, setting them alongside new Japanese therapies
and spiritual movements in this period. In this way, Kosawa’s Ajase Complex
comes across less as ‘cultural adaptation’ and more as a symptom of Kosawa’s
highly personal reasons for taking up psychoanalysis from the outset. In
important ways, Kosawa in particular amongst Japanese psychoanalysts seemed
to presage later movements in western and Japanese psychotherapy and
spirituality that regarded therapeutic methods and ideas as having salvific
potential – from Japan’s spiritual boom to New Age and contemplative revivals
in western religions.