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. Matsuoka has studied Japanese religions both in Japan and Brazil. 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.