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After spending five years in psychoanalytic training in the United States, in my second language, English, I returned to Japan in 2006 and began to communicate again with my colleagues and patients in Japanese. I felt compelled to address and translate self psychological concepts and explain them in the context of my native culture. Somewhat to my own surprise, I found this was not, and is not, always difficult. Indeed, Doi (1962, 1973, 1989) discusses a well-known cultural concept, amae—a concept similar to self-selfobject relatedness in Kohutian terms. Self psychology, intersubjective theory, and relational self psychology are recognized in Japanese psychoanalytic circles, but they have not occupied the center of attention as they have in America. It is my impression that in America, Kohut was known as having a strong interest in culture; yet, the discussion of non-North American cultures within self psychological circles has rarely occurred there. These two components—that is, the emphases of the North American and Japanese psychoanalytic circles—have been dissociated from each other; I hope that the process of exploring Japanese terms from a self psychological point of view could become a means to draw them closer together.
Mono no aware is one of the Japanese cultural ideals to which I have paid close attention because I believe it includes a dynamic systems view.
Norinaga Motoori, a linguistic scholar in 18th-century Japan, and other philosophers, consider it to be the essential element in Japanese aesthetics. The phrase is often translated as “an empathy for things/life/love,” “the ah-ness of things/life/love,” or “the pathos of things/life/love.” A single image is often used to explain it: Mono no aware is what happens when a person experiences the fluttering down of cherry blossom petals as a movement of the mind. The aesthetics of the term are manifest in any post-medieval Japanese art form, such as waka (a 21-syllable Japanese poem), and a N