Psychoanalysis in Asia

Alf Gerlach, Maria Teresa Savio Hooke, Sverre Varvin, Alf Gerlach, Maria Teresa Savio Hooke, Sverre Varvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917813
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The world is looking East. Whilst in the West psychoanalysis is fighting to maintain its position among the other therapies in a society which has less time for introspection and self-reflective thought, in Asia a new frontier is opening up: we are witnessing a surge of interest for psychoanalysis among the mental health professionals and among the younger generations, interest which is articulated and nuanced differently in the different Asian countries. In Asia and particularly in India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, the development of psychoanalysis reflects separate socio-political historical contexts, each with a rich cultural texture and fuelled by the interest of a new generation of mental health professionals for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method.

Part I
Conceptual Backdrop

CHAPTER ONE
Psychoanalysis and culture

Cláudio Laks Eizirik

Introduction

Psychoanalysis is a branch of science developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers, devoted to the study of human psychology. It is usually considered to have three areas of application: 1. A systematised body of knowledge about human behaviour (psychoanalytic theory); 2. A method of investigating the mind; 3. A modality of therapy for emotional illnesses or psychic suffering (psychoanalytic treatment).

Psychoanalysis has as basic principles the notion that our mind is predominantly unconscious and that all our current actions, feelings, and thoughts are associated with, or derive from, previous meaningful experiences, mainly the ones that happened during our childhood. (Moore & Fine, 1990).

The complex relationship between psychoanalysis and culture can be illustrated when we consider that it appeared in the end of XIX century, in Vienna, a cultural milieu in which the “intelligentsia” was developing innovations in many areas simultaneously. The Viennese cultural elite had a rare combination of provincialism and cosmopolitism, tradition, and modernity, which produced a sort of cohesion greater than in other cities at that time.

According to many authors (Gay, 1989; Mezan, 1996) Vienna offered a stimulus for the emergence of psychoanalysis, and this consisted in the presence of professors such as Brücke and others at the university, in a school system that provided the students with the best of western, especially German, culture, and in the complex relations between Viennese Jews and their environment, characterised by a combination of mutual attraction, hate, and contempt. But the decisive element can only be found in Freud’s own singularity and in the many influences he suffered throughout his personal and intellectual development (Perestrello, 1996; Eizirik, 1997).

1 Freud's ideas about culture

Despite the fact that Freud devoted his efforts mainly to develop psychoanalytic theory and treatment, he also reflected on the trends of the culture of his time in several works, in which he also examined the roots of human behaviour from a psychoanalytic perspective.

In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud studied the resemblances between the mental life of savages and neurotics. Amongst other ideas, he explained that like the neurotic, primitive people feel ambivalent about most people in their lives, but will not admit this consciously to themselves. They will not admit that as much as they love their mother, or their father, there are things about them they hate. The suppressed part of this ambivalence (the hate parts) are projected onto others. In the case of natives, the hateful aspects are projected onto the totem, so they can think: I do not want my mother to die, the totem wanted her to die. This ambivalence can also include the relationship of citizens to their ruler or figures of authority.

Another important idea of this book is about animism. The animistic mode of thinking is governed by what Freud called the omnipotence of thoughts, a projection of inner mental life onto the external world. This imaginary construction of reality can be seen not only in primitive people but also in neurotic and mainly delusional or psychotic disorders. As we will see this can also be found in religions, as well as in situations in which a social group or nation consider another group or nation as the enemy, without any objective evidence.

In The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud attempts to turn our attention to the future that awaits human culture. By human culture, he means all those areas in which human life has lifted itself above the animal condition and in which it differs from the life of beasts. In this sense, human culture includes, on the one hand, all the knowledge and power that men have accumulated in order to master the forces of nature, and on the other, all the necessary arrangements whereby men’s relations to each other may be regulated. Freud maintains that the essence of culture lies not in man’s conquest of nature for the means of supporting life, but in the psychological realm, in every person curbing his predatory drives.

One of the drives restrainers that man has devised to perpetuate culture is religion. Freud defines religion as an illusion, consisting of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of external and internal reality which tells oneself something that one has not discovered, and which claims one should give them credence. Religious concepts are transmitted in three ways and thereby claim our belief: because our primal ancestors already believed them; because we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from antiquity and because it is forbidden to raise the question of their authenticity at all. Psychologically these beliefs present the phenomena of fulfillment of wishes that are the oldest, strongest, and most urgent of mankind, among them the necessity to cling to the existence of the father, as the figure of God, the prolongation of earthy existence by a future life and the immortality of human soul.

So, according to Freud’s view, religion represents man’s helplessness in the world, having to face the ultimate fate of death, the struggles of civilisation and the forces of nature. He sees God as a manifestation of a childlike longing for a father, and any sort of God retain a threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of fate and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilised life in common has imposed on them.

That is why Freud suggests that any kind of religion is an illusion and that eventually the scientific thinking would prevail over this kind of magic way of facing men’s fears.

We can see today that Freud’s analysis of religion was possibly accurate, but his view of the future was too optimistic. The current reality shows that all sorts of religion still prevail in many areas of the world, and that even radical expressions of it, known as fundamentalism, are seen under different names, but retains basically what I just described as an imaginary construction of reality.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he enumerates the fundamental tensions between civilisation and the individual. The primary friction stems from the individual’s quest for instinctual freedom and civilization’s contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of mankind’s primitive instincts (for instance, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the wellbeing of a human community. As a result, civilisation creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such rules are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilisation that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens. As human beings are governed by the pleasure principle, and this principle is satisfied by the instincts, it is understandable that such a feeling of discontent emerges as well as aggressive feelings towards authoritative figures and towards sexual competitors, which both obstruct the gratification of a person’s instincts.

These ideas can nowadays be seen at different levels, for instance in the relation of each one of us with our parents, family, school, and the society at large; the great challenge that each one faces is how to obtain a reasonable balance between the pleasure principle- the fulfillment of our unconscious wishes- and the reality principle- what each one can obtain in her relations with the others, without producing harm or ignoring the rights of the others.

3 Contemporary psychoanalytic views on culture

Now I will turn to more recent attempts to describe our culture and our globalising world from a psychoanalytical perspective. Several authors, both analysts and thinkers from other fields have tried to offer insights on our complex and changing world (Eizirik, 2007). I would now like to summarise some of these views.

Van der Leeuw (1980) characterised our Zeitgeist as constituted by;

1. A great flood of information, quantification, and massive growth that leads to superficiality, hampers independent thinking and is accompanied by a leveling process, as a consequence of which silence, solitude, and privacy become endangered, and congestion disturbs man’s consciousness of space and the experience of space he needs for his life.
2. Changes in the role of family as the basis of society, motherhood being increasingly neglected.
3. The dominant role of seductive advertising, encouraging immediate gratification and creating the illusion that total gratification is possible.
4. The increasing search for excitement, stimulation, brief and often violent explosions of emotions and the urge for rapid recharge, instead of the cultivation of warm, tender feelings, in particular where children are concerned.

From a wider perspective, Lasch (1978) coined for our era the expression “culture of narcissism”, resulting from the breakdown of the family and the accentuation of instinctive gratification. As social pressures have invaded the ego, it has become harder to grow up and acquire maturity. This leads to a failure of normal superego development. So in a world dominated by images, individual progress can only come from projected images and erroneous impressions produced by insecure egos. In this world it is difficult to discriminate reality from fantasy, and what we really are from what the products we consume suggest that we are. The “culture of narcissism” has abolished collective discipline and concentrated work, in favour of a world of impressions, appearances, and disguises.

Kernberg (1989) explored the nature of the appeal of mass culture, particularly as it is communicated by the mass media. He examined the regressive effects of group processes on the recipients of mass culture, and the striking correspondence between the conventional aspects of mass culture and the psychological characteristics of latency. Among others, he stressed the following trends in contemporary culture: the simultaneity of communication; the illusion of being a member of the crowd connected with a central figure who communicates what is important and what one should think about it; the denial of complexities; the predominance of conventional assumptions over individual thinking; the stimulation of a narcissistic dimension in the receiver, and also a paranoid one, in the form of justified suspicion or indignation; the application of a simplistic morality to social and political matters in the form of clichés (for instance, that good people together will solve problems). In his view, conventionality may be the price of social stability, in spite of the danger of more severe group regression. More recently, Kernberg (1998) described a striking tendency in large groups to project superego functions onto the group as a whole in an effort to prevent violence and protect ego identity by means of a shared ideology.

The postmodern condition, a term coined by Lyotard (1979), has become an essential part of any discussion of our culture. In spite of the controversial acceptance of this concept, several trends in our era are often described as typical of the so-called crisis of the culture. Taking into account several different descriptions of our time, we find references to these trends: complexity, skepticism, challenges to all meta-narratives which were a central part of the project of Enlightenment, acculturation through images in more and more virtual realities, claims to the right to difference and to follow alternative lifestyles, the social demands for participation and for the rights of women, pacifists, homosexuals, and other minorities, the growing presence of the so-called pathologies of immediate gratification, the idealisation of ambiguity, an era of simultaneity and immediate accomplishment of ideas, wishes, and purposes (Arditi, 1988; Baladier, 1995; Castoriadis, 1996; Ahumada, 1997; Eizirik, 1997; Carlisky & Eskenazi, 2000).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Zygmunt Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality, and social exclusion. Bauman, following Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off; European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom in order to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its “solid” form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties; it involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation—all of which attempted to gradually remove personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar. However, Bauman began to develop the position that such order-making efforts never manage to achieve the desired results. When life becomes organised into familiar and manageable categories, he argued, there are always social groups who cannot be administered, who cannot be separated out and controlled. In his book Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) Bauman began to theorise such indeterminate persons by introducing the allegorical figure of “the stranger.” Drawing upon the sociology of Georg Simmel and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Bauman came to write of the stranger as the person who is present yet unfamiliar, societies “undecideable”.

In Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar are always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. Yet this strangeness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled and ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society’s borders who is constantly threatening. Bauman’s book, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) is an attempt to give a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CONCEPTUAL BACKDROP
• PART II: CHINA
• PART III: JAPAN
• PART IV: KOREA
• PART V: TAIWAN
• PART VI: INDIA
• PART VII: CONCLUDING OVERVIEWS
• EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
• INDEX