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Dr Doi has followed up his important work on The Anatomy of Dependence (1985) by an equally important book on the Self. The former is, or should be, basic for psychoanalysis. The new one encompasses philosophy and sociology. It is not a book on analysis though it is clearly informed by it. Doi's eminence in Japan, where he has held several professorships, need not be emphasized here, but it should be mentioned that he has thought deeply about many things, that his reflections are significant, that he writes well (a natural presumption since his work translates well), and that he is fortunate in his (American) translator. Doi cites examples widely from European literature and does not restrict himself to English. In the earlier work he was concerned with hardly more than one Japanese term 'amae'. In this one he discusses a great many, which are hard to keep track of if one lacks minimum linguistic skill. Amae is a psychological quality, important for the unconscious. Here there are two pairs of terms which are basic for understanding the Japanese and their social relations.
The two pairs of terms are 'omote' and 'ura', and 'atemae' and 'honne'. The two pairs are almost equivalent but not quite. The second pair applies roughly to outer and inner of anything. The first pair specifically to personal behaviour and inner attitude. There are many pairs of sharply contrasting terms in English for which the Japanese translation is not so sharp.
'Ura' is an everyday word in Japanese. This fact alone would seem to render Japanese the ideal language for psychiatry and psychoanalysis. For 'ura' is a natural rendering of the Unconscious. But in most contexts it stands for the Preconscious. By contrast the Western terms are artificial in English, and I believe also in German and French. How in Japanese one distinguishes between unconscious and preconscious I do not know, though in colloquial contexts it seems that the distinction is always clear. One of the attrac