On Becoming a Psychoanalyst in Japan

ABSTRACT

This special issue introduces psychoanalysis in Japan, its history, thoughts, and development, through the autobiographies of some Japanese psychoanalysts. I graduated relatively recently from a training course in psychoanalysis at the Japan Institute of Psychoanalysis and was certified as a psychoanalyst by the Japan Psychoanalytic Society (JPS). If I am to write about why I aimed to become a psychoanalyst in Japan and how I became one, not only my personal history but also the influences of Japanese culture and Japanese therapeutic culture will undoubtedly be important. In this article, by relating my life history, I trace the path I followed for becoming a psychoanalyst and explore the broader implications of my experience. The paper “An Autobiographical Study” by Freud (1925) is a famous autobiographical psychoanalytic essay, and a more recent paper “Learning from Life―Becoming a Psychoanalyst” by Casement (2006) is also well known. To publicize an autobiography, a psychoanalyst always includes the possibility of self-disclosure. Because I am still practicing psychoanalysis regularly, I hesitate slightly to write this article. However, writing an autobiography is also, in part, a process of self-analysis after becoming a psychoanalyst, and can be considered a part of a psychoanalyst’s interminable training (Okada, 2012).

Notes

¹ Suiseki Ohashi was a Japanese painter famous for his paintings of tigers. He won awards at international expositions in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904.

² Kanehiro Takaki was a physician in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He proposed the malnutrition theory of beriberi and worked to eradicate beriberi from the Japanese Navy.

³ The JPA focuses on psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is Japan’s largest academic society for psychoanalysis. The society certifies psychoanalytical psychotherapists and supervisors; however, its conditions of certification do not include training analysis or individual analysis.

⁴ The JPS is the only psychoanalytical society in Japan that conducts a training course for psychoanalysts under the auspices of the IPA.

⁵ The Amsterdam Shock was the prompting of the JPS by the IPA to reorganize the systematic training of psychoanalysis in line with international standards.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akiyoshi Okada

Dr. Okada is a psychoanalyst from the Japan Psychoanalytical Society.