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Self-Healing:
The Dilemma Of Japanese Depth-Psychology
James W. Heisig
"Turn back, dull heart, and find thy center out." -
Shakespeare
"One's own self is well hidden from oneself: of all mines of
treasure one's own is the last to be dug up" -Nietzsche
1
When William James published his Varieties of Religious Experience
in 1902, he gave the study of psychology and religion a set of meta
phors so cardinal to the later development of the discipline that
much of the novel genius of the book is transparent to us who pick
it up today. The "divided self' is one such example. It is not so much
for the depth of james's analysis or the sturdiness of the theoretical
schemes with which he fitted it out that I wish to draw attention to
the notion here, as for the fact that as a metaphor it crystallized two
revolutionary developments in the intellectual history of the nine
teenth century: the idea of religion and the idea of the individual
self.
Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, the word religion
in the West was defined by way of analogy to Christianity. Only with
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the development of methodologically reflective "human sciences"
was it possible to advance categories for grouping and comparing
the religious traditions of the world- great and small, primitive and
modern, living and dead- as we think of them today. Naturally, this
discovery did not take place in an academic vacuum. Not only the
continuing independence of the state from Christianity and of ed
ucation from the state, which had begun with the Protestant Refor
mation, but even the new missionary era inaugurated by the
Protestant Churches and later taken up by Roman Catholicism had
a role to play. For the staunchest critics of Christianity as well as for
the staunchest critics of the new bourgeois paganism of the en
lightenment, a century of preoccupation with the scientific method
was not without its liberating effects. As information about non
Western cultures began to pour into the European academy from
the young "anthropologists" and missionaries scattered across the
globe, it was inevitable that the attentions of disinterested, objective
minds cultivated in the new freedom would find some way of deal
ing with it less prejudicial to the facts. Religious studies, we might
say, was born out of the collapse into irrelevance of the battle be
tween theology and anti-theology.
In a quite different set of circumstances, something similar had
to take place in Japan in order for the concept of religion to take
on the sense it now has. Prior to the birth of religious studies in the
West, there was nothing inJ a pan to which the word religion applied.
For all the battles that had taken place among Taoist, Confucianist,
Buddhist, Christian, and "Shintoist" currents-and no where more
furious than intra-sectarian battles- the idea that all of these might
be classes of a common human or cultural phenomenon had
-3-
nowhere in the Japanese imagination to take root. Once it did,
under foreign influence consequent upon the reopening of Japan
from its two hundred years of isolation, it was only a matter of time
before the same scientific spirit that had created the concept of re
ligion in the West would ignite and set Japan thinking along the
same lines. 1
Even though the "varieties" of religious experience that William
James describes are almost without fail drawn from the Christian
world, the fact that they were examined independently of Christian
theology, as occurrences of intrinsic interest to our study of the
human psyche, was still a relatively new experiment in thinking at
the time.
The second revolutionary idea was that of the individual self Ob
viously the notion of the skin-bound individual fitted with a solitary
personality was nothing new. Without names referring to concrete
individuals who live, act, and die, there would have been no way to
punish infractions against law, custom, or morality; no way to credit
authors or artists for their work; no grounds for establishing con
tracts for marriage or trade- in short, no way to carry on the most
rudimentary things of culture. What was new to the nineteenth cen
tury was the scientific quest for an invariable structure of the self
that would shift the definition of individuality away from ideas of
the human species dependent on membership in a given cultural
environment and towards the idea of an independent, transcultural
private destiny. In addition to many of the same factors that inspired
the concept of a science of religion, the major shifts in the imagina
tion of the individual life that resulted from the French and
American Revolutions and the accompanying ideals of universa'l
---'- 4 - Self-Healing
suffrage, as well as from the creation of the industrial laborer in
whom the relationship to work mediated by paper money (render
ing purchasing power inferior to the value of the products of one's
labor) was fully systematized for the first time,2 all helped to gener
ate the expectation of a private psychic life that to previous ages
would have seemed deranged. The clearest indication that this shift
had taken place is to be found in the nineteenth century nihilists
who conducted an experiment in letting go of all religious and cul
tural values in order to face the abyss of meaninglessness that yawns
underfoot of the solitary sele In this sense, they were the immedi
ate precursors of twentieth century analytical psychologies.
When James took the bold step of announcing that psychology
can and should get along without the notion of a substantial soul,
it was part of his intention to liberate the autonomy of psyche from
the relics of the Hellenic imagination. The disenchantment of
psychology from theological controls was for him an irreversible
step. The varieties of religious experience he described in the Gif
ford Lectures were to be studied as the phenomena of the individ
ual self, not as varieties of Christian belief.4
The seventh of those lectures was devoted to the notion of the
divided self. Within a decade, Bleuler would coin the term
schiwphrenia to replace the term dementia praecox that had gained
prominence through the work of Kraeplin in the decade previous.
James's preference for a more straightforward terminology bespoke
a temperament impatient with technical jargon and altogether
pedestrian in its desire to communicate.5 But more than that, his
aim was to bring the divided self into the realm of "the mysticism
of everyday life." In a master stroke of irony he acknowledged that
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he himself was lacking in mystical inclinations, and then turned the
tables on traditional mystical theology to use the term for an assort
ment ofliterary figures, saints, and mental borderline cases in whose
states of rapture and ecstasy Christian imagery played an important
part.
As a concept, the divided self as James understands it amounts to
little more than a pragmatic restatement two of Saint Paul's famous
statements: "For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that
do I" (Rom 7: 15) and "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives
in me" (Gal 2:20). On the one hand, the self is divided between
desirable forces doing battle against undesirable forces. On the
other, "the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through
which saving experiences come" (Lecture 20). On this basis, James
draws a spectrum from the "healthy-minded" individual in whom
the division is kept within the bounds of normalcy to the "sick
souled" individual in whom the battle rages out of control and calls
for a more radical healing. In this latter class of the "twice-born" he
finds piecemeal evidence, against the reigning intellectual tastes of
the day, that there is a subliminal door in consciousness that opens
the way to "a wider world of being than that of our everyday con
sciousness" (Postscript).
The principal form of the metaphor of the divided self is clear
and the details of James's scheme need not detain us here, as
refreshing a detention as they make. That the notion was initially
illuminated by varieties of Christian religious experience surely had
something to do with the stigma with which the academic world of
his day was greeting the study of "spiritualism." Towards the end
of his study James makes passing reference to the Vedic and Bud-
-· 6 - Self-Healing
dhist traditions, but his main intention seems to have been to draw
psychology closer to the parareligious phenomena that had sprung
up on the fringes of science at the turn of the century and which
had always fascinated him. It seems equally clear that 1 ames saw the
divided self as a matter of common experience that neither academ
ic psychology nor organized religion could explain on its own
resources alone. Somehow, transformation goes on in the human
personality; divided selves, in a variety of ways, manage to get healed
within the confines of the self. The study of this ordinary fact
through aberrational or extreme cases would help,1ames knew, to
bring the data into relief and also oblige us to rewrite our map of
the human psyche and alter our attitudes to the transcendent.
2
There seems to me no major current in twentieth century psychol
ogy or religion that has taken up the challenge of 1 ames's metaphor
of the divided self as I have just explained it more seriously than
the archetypal psychology of C. G. 1 ung.6 Whatever importance one
may attach to such a claim in the context of Western intellectual
history, it is a matter of some importance in the ongoing develop
ment of theoretical psychology in Japan. There is no denying the
extraordinary impact that1ung's thought has had in japan over the
past decade,7 and certainly no gainsaying the contribution made by
its leading figures. Obviously a chord has been struck that has set
the heartstrings of significant numbers of the Japanese reading pub
lic humming.
A number of reasons for this turn of events spring to mind. A first
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set of reasons has to do with the internal appeal of Jungian psychol
ogy itself, its power to address questions about the meaning of life
across cultural barriers. As is the case in the West, the rebirth of in
terest in the "healing power" of myth and symbols; the need for a
psychology that can shed light on the interior life of normal, heal
thy individuals and offer guidance to such persons; the interest in
the religious experience freed of the dogmatic claims and inter
denominational squabbles of organized religion; and the promise
of a unified vision of life hopelessly fragmented by modern urban
life.
But there is a second set of reasons that have to do with the fragile
self-identity of the Japanese shattered by the past century of rela
tionships with the outside world. In the midst of the affiuence of
the present it is only natural that this problem rise to the surface.
To make a long story a good deal shorter than it should be, the
proliferation ofbooks, public conferences, and research associations
devoted to the illusive quest for the distinctively unique of the
Japanese soul have given voice to a commonly felt need to secure
an inviolable island of distinctiveness in the midst of wave after wave
of cultural changes flooding the country from abroad. It is a prob
lem that could have, but for the unfortunate hiatus of an experi
ment with military conquest, been faced haifa century ago. It is into
such a situation that Jungian psychology reached Japan, or more
accurately, that the Japanese who went abroad to be certified as
psychologists have found the courage to stand up and proclaim that
their loyalties to the legacy of Western thought must come second
to the experience of being Japanese. Not surprisingly, this act of
defiance- and a bold and unmistakable non voglio piu servir it is-
- 8 - Self-Healing
has driven J ungians back deeper into the recesses of the religious
and cultural past of Japan in quest of models, vocabulary, and roots
to bridge the gap from their own expertise and training to the crying
need of the public for some account of what it means to be
Japanese.8
Observation of this turn of events has convinced me, more than
anything else, that there is no significant contribution to a solution
to be made by those of us who do not and cannot experience the
problem. But that having been said, there are questions that arise
as one watches the weight of contemporary contributions to Jun
gian thought tilt more and more impressively in the direction of
Japan. Whatever use the problematic I am about to outline may
have for the Japanese is not mine to judge. I offer it here only as a
widow's mite to the growing collection of attempts by Western
psychology to find unbiased, common ground from which to engage
their Japanese counterparts. Once again, I restrict my comments to
the problem of the divided self and its healing, a question so much
at the cutting edge of the Japanization of Jungian thought that one
can hardly touch it without drawing blood.9
3
The rational adjustments that leading figures in Japan's Jungian
circle have tried to make to J ung's map of the psyche- his model
of the "divided self'- have already distinguished themselves at both
the theoretical and practical levels. 10 J ung, as is well known, viewed
the human psyche as an ongoing process of self-transformation, a
dynamic of opposing tendencies out of whose relationship a unity
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was constantly being formed and reformed. On the one hand, he
saw, there is the drive of consciousness, urging the individual to
direct its energies towards the world of the known and controlled;
on the other, the drive of unconsciousness, pressing towards the un
known and uncontrollable that surrounds the narrow pale of con
sciousness. In whatever balance these two drives happen to co-exist,
one can speak of a Self that is greater than either the private egoity
of consciousness or the more impersonal egolessness of the uncon
scious. Only in the most abstract of terms can one speak of a con
scious or unconscious psyche by itself; the reality is always a mix. At
the same time, this dynamic relationship has a natural telos to its
ongoing transformations, the asymptotic ideal of a healed Self in
whom the two forces are balanced and mutually supporting. 11
In other words, the Jungian map of the psyche is based on a fun
damental paradox: the Self that nature obliges us to become is the
permanently elusive goal of the Self that nature has equipped us to
be. It is this innate incoherency of our human being that Goethe
captured in his injunction "Werde wer du bist!" This would amount
to no more than a complicated restatement of the ancient philoso
phical principle that the human mind generates ideals which it is
unequipped to realize but which it cannot help being Jed by, except
that J ung aligned this theory to the symbol-producing function of
the psyche. It was his claim that by analyzing the imagery arising
relatively spontaneously out of the unconscious mind, one could
look at the divided Self in quest of health as if in a mirror which
reflected the Self against the background ofthe entire history of the
human race. In place of the abstract notion that the drive to be a
whole Self belongs to human nature J ung offered the depth of the
- 10 - Self-Healing
Self as a repository of the collective efforts of humanity to express
this aim and struggle towards it. Reflected in this mirror the Self
thus walks a way of transformation that is no longer a private prob
lem set in the private circumstances of a single time and place but
a type of a universal problem, inJung's term, an archetype. To recog
nize these images from unconsciousness and give them room to ex
pand in the conscious mind was the healing mysticism of everyday
life, repressed only when consciousness has prejudiced itself
towards the privacy of its own problems or the dogmatic definition
of what images are suitable to express the universal problem. This
was why he continually inveighed against ego-psychologies at one
extreme and religious or philosophical dogmatism at the other.
With this much of Jungian theory the Japanese psychologists
were in no hurry to take exception. It was rather in terms of specif
ic descriptions ofthe various elements or facets ofthe psyche-con
scious and unconscious-in terms of which transformation takes
place that the need to differentiate Japan from the West first dis
played itself. 12 Only later did this strategy begin to inspire an over
turning of even the basic model itself. Not surprisingly, the focal
point of difference was J ung's notion of ego-centered consciousness.
At the very time that the first certified Japanese therapists were
being turned out of the C. G.Jung Institute in Zurich and returned
to Japan, more perceptive of Japan's students of the psychoanalytic
tradition were also noticing a problem. 13
The originality of the Jungians lay in the attempt to reformJung's
notion of how the psyche is structured- reform it, that is, to account
for the Japanese experience-is still most evident in the work of the
man who pioneered the venture, Kawai Hayao. To my mind,
- 11 -
Kawai's clearest statement of his first reformation appears in a 1977
book The Structure of the Unconscious. 14 I cite his own succinct state
ment of the argument:
I have the feeling that the notion of a Self is easier for a
Japanese to appreciate than a Westerner. The anchoring of the
ego as the center of a consciousness clearly differentiated from
an unconscious shows, it seems to me, the characteristic working
ofW estern culture. J ung' s notion of the Self, fashioned at a time
when Western rationalism was at the height of its power,
mistakenly sets the ego up as the center of the psyche as a whole.
This is why he had continually to insist that it is the Self, and
not the ego that is the center of the psyche.
But was not the East in fact already alert to the existence of
the Self? Without having to conceive of a firmly established con
sciousness, did not Easterners have an appreciation of some all
embracing unity or other that permeates consciousness and
unconsciousness and grows out of them? .. .
The structure of Japanese consciousness is clearly different
from that of the Westerners, and it therefore follows as a mat
ter of course that the unconscious must be different as well . . .
It seems that we can longer take the West as a model. ..
There is a great deal to be learned from J ung's theory of in
dividuation, but in the last analysis, at the point ofindividuation
as japanese, it is important to think for ourselves and live for
ourselves.15
In short, Kawai wishes to redraw the map of the psyche where,
in place of the dual centers that Jung posits-the ego in con
sciousness and the Self in the unconsciousness- a single center, the
Self in the consciousness is set up. And this he offers as a clarifica
tion of the "recent boom in theories ofjapaneseness."
In a series of essays composed over the next seven years and
gathered together in a collection entitled The japanese and Identity,
- 12 - Self-Healing
Kawai gives more attention to the uniqueness of the Japanese ego
which even makes the use of the term suspicious. The book begins
with an acknowledgement of the fact that his claim of a different
ego was the most controversial idea he found in his contacts abroad
with professors and fellow students of psychology from the West. 16
Not long thereafter, he settled on the expression that the Japanese
have no ego.
A little over one year ago, in a public discussion I had with Profes
sor Kawai regarding a more recent book on The Convergence of
Religion and Science, 17 he took the next logical step and made the
claim that the Japanese have no Self. Lacking an ego-centered con
sciousness, he found it logical to conclude that there should be no
Self-centered unconscious (or what for him amounts to the same
thing, that the Japanese should possess an unconscious centered on
no-self). Unsympathetic to the use of metaphors drawn from the
Judeo-Christian scriptures to describe the Japanese psyche, Kawai
found himself drawn to the Buddhist scriptures. Although by his
own admission he lacked even the familiarity with the basic texts
that the average Westerner has with the Bible, his years of experi
ence in carrying out Jungian hermeneutics quickly overcame his
reserve as he plunged himself headlong into Honen and Shinran
to fish out their notion of"naturalness" or El P,S, $; m . Nature thus
replaces the Self as the centerless unconscious substratum into
which the Japanese consciousness sinks when it takes leave of the
everyday.
The evidence for all of this, it should be said, begins in the same
common sense that provides depth-psychology with so much of its
critical evidence. The difference is that the sense is common to the
- 13 -
Japanese, and perhaps also to those who have lived here long
enough to become familiar with their culture, literature, and their
daily life, but most uncommon for the countries of the West. The
secondary evidence is supplied by "amplification" of these intuitive
hunches and feelings with material from folk literature, classical lit
erature, and more recently religion. In this sense, the pattern of re
search ahead is not unlike that of J ung. Even though the original
roots for the pattern are foreign, the development is distinctively
Japanese.
Discussing, even elaborating the argument, would require us to
back up and give some account of what it means to do theoretical
work in a basically therapeutic profession; of what, in the context
ofJungian thought, can count for and against the reasonableness
of an argument; and of how metaphors that have outlived their use
fulness tend to be taken literally to facilitate their rejection. Here,
however, I would like to focus on a single, rather more positive
aspect of the question: the need to take a radical reformulation like
Kawai's out of its native soil of the problem of Japanese identity and
return it to a psychology of human nature.
4
The birth of religious studies, with its clear separation of the notion
of religion from the values of Christianity shows, at least in prin
ciple, the eagerness for academic to establish itselffree of the biases
of a particular tradition. Without this same principle the psychol
ogy itself could not have begun, let alone the psychology of religion
or Jungian psychology. As stated at the outset, this is the same na-
- 14 - Self-Healing
tive soil into which James planted his notion of the divided self. For
such a standpoint, it is only natural that, faced with the incom
patibility of a psychological model to the facts of an Oriental cul
ture like Japan, psychology is committed in principle to redrawing
its maps. But who is to do the rewriting? That it has not occurred to
the Japanese J ungians to take up the challenge remains something
of a disappointment. It also nudges one willy-nilly towards a look at
what biases might lie sub rosa in the adventure of independence.
Once again, I shall operate within the confines of the Jungian
theory, if only to maintain consistency of vocabulary and
problematic.
For Jung, the notion of the Self as telos is extrapolated from im
ages of the Self that arise spontaneously in the psyche, indepen
dently of one's conscious upbringing. They are archetypal images,
which is another way of saying that we have no more idea of what
is behind them than we do of what makes an instinct instinctual. At
the conscious level of culture and reflection, the images of Self are
projected differently from one time and place to another. In some
situations they may appear most formidably in overtly "religious"
figures; in others, in legendary heroes or heroines; in the more phi
losophical of cultures their clearest representation may even be in
concepts (which can also be understood symbolically) or esoteric
doctrines. But for J ung, images of the self can be said to represent
a universal telos of the human- namely, a cultivated union of con
scious and unconscious mind. Like a ghost whose form is visible only
when draped in vestments, the Self is clothed differently from cul
ture to culture and age to age, only the pattern ofthe fabric remain
ing constant- namely, that of the union of opposites.
- 15 -
Now if the central function of the unconscious, the central ar
chetype of the psyche, holds up an ideal of an undivided Self, this
seems to me to entail a notion of a divided self, a basic, ultimately
incurable trauma. That dividedness is healable only in the form of
an archetypal image of a telos; the transformation process itself has
no magical spear of Achilles that can heal the wounds it inflicts. The
psyche always does its surgery with a rusty scalpel.
This twofold notion is so central to Jung's theory that without it
the walls would cave in and his major concepts would have no foun
dation on which to stand. This rests, of course, on a prior act of phi
losophical faith in the universal structure of the human psyche, but
is in no sense reducible to that faith.
Accordingly, the claim that the psyche has to be restructured to
account for cultural differences in the Orient, and in particular in
Japan, leads one to expect some restatement of the nature of the
transformation process in terms of a redefinition of the divided self
(the trauma) and a redefinition ofthe whole Self (the telos) that sets
the psyche free from the confines of cultural conditioning. It was
precisely such an entailment that pushed Jung beyond the West to
the East. He may not have gone as far from home as he imagined;
and on this point I am happy to defer to the Eastern psychologist's
experience. But this criticism itself is demanded by Jung's own pro
ject. It is therefore also to be demanded of an oriental corrective.
J ung was wont to carry on these cultural transcendences in terms
of his archetypal theory. From what I have been able to see of the
interpretations of Japanese J ungians, little attention is given to the
notion of a transcultural Self as a critical principle aimed at avoid
ing the same pitfall for whichjung is criticized. I am not saying an
- 16 - Self-Healing
answer is impossible; I am saying that because it is not forthcom
ing, the forays into "the unconscious" through an examination of
Japan's folkloric tradition, its creation myths, and its religious im
agery look suspiciously like what J ung would call archetypes of the
structure of consciousness. Admittedly, it is not the ego-con
sciousness that J ung wrongly made the center of his theory of con
sciousness; but it is certainly closer to some form of conscious than
to J ung's universal unconscious. If this is not the case, and the in
tention is to argue that the archetypes ofthe collective unconscious
are located in some racial layer of the unconscious, then the evi
dence for such an idea, which Jung himself found wanting, would
have to be clarified. But if the argument is also drifting quietly in
the direction of the claim that the racial level is in fact the deepest
layer that can be attained, there will be too little left of the scheme
to go on calling it Jungian psychology any more.18 It is not difficult
to predict that individual Japanese psychologists will set out in a va
riety of directions once the haze has cleared from the horizon. For
the time being, there is challenge enough trying to be Japanese and
Jungian at the same time.
If, as I believe and as my students regularly tell me, one of the
reasons for the Japanese interest in J ung's psychology is that it holds
out a promise of a way for them to find a proper place in the human
community without forfeiting their cultural uniqueness, the simple
quest for proofofthe absence ofa Western ego or of an archetype
of the Self patterned after the heroic, central, solitary ego is only
answering one half of the need. The archetype of a Japanese telos,
without an archetypal explanation of the trauma, leaves one only
with an insular reform.
- 17 -
In short, the power and promise of the experiment that the
Japanese Jungians are carrying on, if we may take Kawai's work as
the most exemplary, is greater than they imagine. It calls for a new
map ofthe psyche, and in that sense a contribution to world psychol
ogy. This, for me, is the dilemma in which Japanese archetypal
psychology is caught: on the one hand it wants to accuse Western
psychology of not being truly a world psychology; and on the other,
it feels itself unattracted to any world psychology that would include
the Japanese psyche. It is, with only slight comic exaggeration, the
aporia of the man who claims, "I would not want to belong to any
club that would have me as a member."
5
The best way out of this dilemma- precisely because it is a way that
would not be possible except for the dilemma- would seem to begin
with restating in more specific terms what I called the basic philos
ophical faith ofJung's model ofthe divided self. There are two criti
cal points here.
First, as J ung himself pointed out from time to time, spatial meta
phors of consciousness and the unconscious need to be "seen
through" as merely convenient fictions for locating in language
something that is anything but localizable. The same is true, mutatis
mutandis, for models that see the two as opposing energies on a field
offorce or as complimentary functions of a common organism. Con
sciousness and the unconscious are attributes for distinguishing
mutually dependent qualities of human experience. They are not
"things," nor occurrences that "take place," or faculties that can be
- 18 - Self-Healing
attached to specific organs of sense, but rather heuristic and inter
pretative categories that allow us to attend to experience and in
some measure to direct it. The particular function of these categor
ies is that they define a basic dividedness in the human psyche and
allow for a certain definition of what it is to be psychically "healthy."
In this sense, depth-psychology accepts as its operative assumption
that all experience can be described in terms of the relative balance
of conscious and unconscious elements.
Second, as J ung did not point out to the best of my recollection
but as his thought requires, if the human psyche is structured iden
tically throughout time and space, there is no qualitatively distinct
form of experience available to some cultures and not to others. 19
Negatively speaking, history knows of no sense-organ impaired cul
ture (for example, a race of deaf or blind individuals) or brain
deformed race. Positively, history constantly reminds us of the rich
variety ofindividual experiences breaking through generalized pat
terns. This was why Jung often found it helpful, for example, to ap
peal to ancient or foreign religious to account for the psychic events
in the lives of his Western, J udeo-Christian patients. If there were
any evidence that certain cultures or genetic strains so affect the
basic psychic structure of its subjects that it closed off certain modes
of experience to those not so affected, the Jungian method of
"amplification" would lose the essential objectivity that J ung was in
sistent on claiming for it.
Putting these two assumptions together-and they are just that,
assumptions- the task of the Japanese corrective of J ung's model
of the psyche takes on different proportions. If the universal model
of the self divided between conscious and unconscious mind turns
- 19 -
out to be culturally biased in favor of a certain metaphor of the con
scious psyche as a circle with a centralized ego or of the unconscious
as a circle with a centralized Self, then the corrective applies not
only to those who notice the bias more naturally but to all those who
make use of it. Conversely, the relativization of the model does not
mean that psychology should forfeit its aim at a universal account.
For the Jungian psychologist, it broadens the range of description
and interpretations of experiences that break through that model.
The very notion of the healthy self has to undergo changes. A
Western personality that shows a lack of an ego "anchored" at the
center of consciousness is no longer for that reason unhealthy; but
equally important, a Japanese personality that shows the sort of ego
consciousness generally favored in Western culture is not for that
reason unhealthy either. The strength of jungian psychology is pre
cisely that it is able to say these things meaningfully. That some in
dividuals might feel more "at home" in a culture other than that in
which they were born, or in straddling cultures, while others find
the shift of cultures altogether unheimlich, is in no sense abnormal
for archetypal psychology. As Westerners turn East for therapy and
Easterners turn West, it is only natural that the Jungian model will
have to change.20 But in the process, at least as far as the Jungian
assumptions go, the change should be for the human psyche, not
for a racial psyche.
There are, I repeat, any number of ways that the sort of general
corrective that Kawai's work hints at could be worked out. In the
long run, I do not see any way to avoid giving more serious thought
to the metaphor of consciousness as a commune of multiple egos. 21
Meantime, it seems to me that the accumulation of case histories
~ 20 - Self-Healing
and cultural studies in Japan would permit J ungians on this side of
the world to work out a distinction between a collective ego and an
individual ego, in addition to a clearer disassociation of the notion of
the process of individuation from the cultivation of individuality. 22
Such an intermediary categorical supplement would not only direct
the attention of Japanese psychological insight beyond the walls of
Japan, but also would highlight the tendency of archetypal
psychological to cultural oversight, an old complaint against J ung's
work that never seems to have made much sense to confirmedJun
gians.
The cultivation of a collective ego (an idea common to Japanese
psychology and one I find less evasive of the wider issue than the
simple denial of an ego) amounts to a kind of"elective affinity" of
Japanese culture for the world of the unconscious. What the
Western individualized ego spontaneously describes as a step into
the dark side, a voyage into the world of the shadows, a letting go
before the unknown and uncontrollable, is not nearly such a fright
ening suspension of trust in the everyday world for the Japanese.
There is a mass of evidence ranging from the structures of the lan
guage to the polymorphous esotericism of normal religious belief
that can be amassed to illumine this truly distinctive psychic inclina
tion. That on the one l1and. On the other, the relative ease with
which the Western ego seeks to appropriate material from the un
consciousness, to make sense of what it experiences when the ego
has been suspended or dethroned from its imperial status, has its
counterpoint in the relatively strong resistance that the Japanese
ego feels towards this appropriation. In the name of a native dislike
of "rationalization" and "moralization", even Japanese
- 21 -
psychologists are not unknown to give in to an anesthetic temper
before experiences that depart from everyday collectivity. Both of
these tendencies are cultivated habits that can, and in the Jungian
understanding of the process of individuation must, be broken
through.
In short, as Jungian psychology in Japan draws closer and closer
to the native religious history of Japan, one can only hope for a
renaissance of the broad-minded and open-hearted attitude that
James assumed in composing his Varieties of Religious Experience,
aimed at a generalized account of the basic wound of human na
ture, at a new appreciation ofthe mysticism of everyday life that en
lighten it and heal it, and at a corresponding agenda for rethinking
human psychology.
NOTES
1. Still valuable for its account of the birth of the science of religion in the
West is the book by Gustav Mensching, Geschichte der Religionswissenschafl
(Bonn, 1948). For a brief account of the history of the term in Japan, with
ample documentation, see Suzuki Norihisa, i% ;t: ili: ;;z. , lj)j m ff-; 1&: ,£t:, jtJl (J) 1ilf Ji; [Currents of Religious Thought during the Meiji Era] (Tokyo, 1979),
especially pp. 13-21.
2. The classic statement of the deduction of the division of labor from the
need for exchange appears in Book I of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Na
tions. It was the starting point for Marx's critique of the false individualism
created by capital.
3. Japan's classic study on Western nihilism, Nishitani Keiji's Nihilism
(English translation to appear in 1989), notes how the individualism of
Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Stirner, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche were all a
carrying out of a principle whose seeds were sown in Christianity. However
deep the roots of the salitary individual in Christian theology (and Greek
philosophy), there were social and economic factors in the nineteenth cen-
- 22 - Self-Healing
tury that he has not given any more attention to than have the thinkers he
examines. Not surprisingly, in fashioning Buddhist alternatives to
Western nihilism, these same issues are passed over.
4. "Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose
great maxim ... is: 'Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the
explanation of everything else.' .. My final conclusion, then, about the sub
stantial Soul is that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing." The Principles of Psyclwlogy (Harvard, 1981 ), vol. I, pp. 329, 331. In claiming that
the notion of the soul does not account for the individuality of personal
consciousness, James also meant to question the bias that the unity of con
sciousness requires a strictly closed individuality. Even if the notion of in
dividuality has to be "opened" to account for spiritualistic phenomena, the
fundamental primacy of the individual self remains.
5. In his review of James's Principles of Psychology, Charles Sanders Peirce
called accused him of using a "racy" style, arguing that philosophy is "a
field in which it is proper to employ terms designed to put off the ordi
nary reader and to be available only to those skilled in philosophic argu
ment." See Paul Van Buren, "William James and Metaphysical Risk," M.
Novak. ed., American Philosophy and the Future (New York, 1968), p . 89.
6.Jung of course knew of James's work, though he did not attend to that no
tion particularly. I am open to correction on this point, but I have the im
pression that he read James most carefully when he was composing his
theory of personality types. Accordingly, he does not acknowledge the
foresight of James in taking up what amounts to the central problem of
Jungian psychology in the metaphor of the divided self.
7. AJung Club was founded in Japan in 1981 through the inaugural efforts
of Thomas lmmoos, then Professor of German Literature at Sophia
University and Director of the Institute for Oriental Religions. The over
whelming turnout at the first conference, the success of its journal, Psyche, the sales of books (which have clearly overshadowed all other psychologi
cal traditions in the bookstores), and the widespread popularity in the
media and on the lecture circuit of its leading figures all attest to this fact.
In spite of this, what interest there is in depth-psychology in medical and
academic circles continues to lean strongly in the direction of the classical
psychoanalytic tradition.
8. Kawai Hayao has written on the Kamakura Buddhist figure, My6e;
Akiyama Satoko has published frequently on Zen themes; Yuasa Yasuo
- 23-
has done an analysis of the Japanese creation myth; and so forth. The at
tempt to replace the "religion" of Jung with simple "Japaneseness" is an
experiment that seems to make sense only to the trifling minority of those
carrying it out; it has not reached a receptive audience at all.
9. As for the trend known as "transpersonal psychology," which somehow
got the idea that it is more Oriental than other branches of Occidental
psychology, suffice it to note here that a widely advertised meeting in Japan
of leading representatives of this movement with major Buddhist philos
ophers and Jungian psychologists rather roundly disenchanted the
Japanese participants. See the account in '¥ Ei3 ~ ~ ""'- (f) ~ Jli (Tokyo,
1986).
10. The contribution to clinical practice is another matter, one which I pre
fer to leave out of account here. This is not to say that I am setting up a
distinction between theory and therapy and then deciding to restrict my
comments to one without the other. I do not believe that matters are so
simple. For me, good theory is itself a form of therapy, a way of drawing
the psyche outside the narrow contours of its own first naivete and bring
it face to face with a larger community of knowledge. Bad theory repres
ses experience; good theory liberates it. This is a sound principle on which
Jung himself had occasion to pronounce more than once, and one which
incidentally he was not unknown to cite William James for support.
11. The Japanese logic ofsoku expresses this relationship better than the two
valued logic of Western philosophy. There one might speak of Self as
~ ~ llP ~ ~ ~ , ~ ~ ~ llP ~ ~ (consciousness-in-unconsciousness,
unconsciousness-in-consciousness).
12. Despite frequent appeals to an "East-West" standoff, it is unclear to me
how far the Japanese psychologists intend to exclude China, Korea, and
Southeast Asia from the category of "the West." In a sense, this touches a
tender area of Japanese self-identity in general, which depth-psychology
has proved no more capable of facing with equanimity than have the tra
ditional religions and philosophies currents of Japan.
13. In particular I refer to the writings of Kimura Bin ;;f: ;ji tiP: and Minami
Hiroshi l¥J i:f . 14. Like other of his better writings, Kawai's argument is framed in the lan
guage of what we might call high-level popularization, making it accessible
to the average reading public. This factor, too, cannot be discounted for
the role it has played in the spread of Jungian thought in Japan. Much of
- 24 - Self-Healing
the work borrows rather more heavily from Western commentaries than
it does on original sources, a fact which would likely at the time have es
caped most of his readership. But this too, although it might seem a neg
ative commentary in terms of standard scholarly procedures, shows
something of Kawai's eagerness to do something original rather than be
tied down to a Western text, chapter and verse.
15. iOJ -El ~ ~ , ~ ~ ~ (J) ~ ~ (Tokyo, 1977), pp. 151-52, 183-85. The
critical point of his rewriting of the structure of the unconscious is to put
the emphasis on the "maternal" side of Japanese culture, a theme gaining
popularity among literary figures, anthropologists, and psychologists at
the time. Later Kawai returns to this theme, again and again.
16. B :$: A t 7 1 7 Y 7 1 7 1 (Tokyo, 1984), p. 5.
17. 7f-i ~ .!: W ~ (J) f& ,8 (Tokyo, 1986).
18. Jolande Jacobi argued for a racial layer of unconscious, which J ung him
selftoyed with but later abandoned; curiously, this is taken up by Kawai.
See The Structure of the Unconscious, p. 33 in what amounts to a distortion
ofJung's own theory.
19. I have dealt with this question in the context of the Freud-J ung split in
"The Reach ofthe Human," Academia (Nagoya) 37 (1983):43-73.
20. The growing interest in the West in Japanese "psychotherapies", ex
emplified by highly popularized accounts like David Reynolds, The QJ.liet Therapies:japanese Pathway of Personal Growth (Honolulu, 1980), imply the
need for theoretical questions similar to those being raised here in a Jun
gian context.
21. The most original exposition I know of is in James Hillman's He-Visioning Psychology, a work still little read and understood in Japan.
22. I am surprised at the translation that Kawai and others have settled on
for the term "individuation" ®1 i1: 11:. . The English word abounds in a
history of connotations, including the etymology nearly on its surface,
while Japanese term is restricted to only the most pedestrian of its connota
tions, that of the "particular" individual, and misses that sense of the individuum, the non-divided. This is not unrelated to the fact that Jung's
individuation theory is felt to be attached to a foreign idea of the person
and that the metaphor of"healing tl1e divided self' is not immediately sug
gested by the term.