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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

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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

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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-

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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-

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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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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-

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.