The Anatomy of Dependence [Paperback]

Takeo Doi (Author), John Bester (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1994

This work offers insights, not only into the character of Japan but into the nuances of dependancy relationships. It is an analysis of amae, the indulging, passive love which supports an individual within a group, and a key concept in Japanese psychology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Sensitive, original, and penetrating." -Robert J. Lifton, M.D., Yale University

"A major contribution to the science of human behavior in general and to psychotherapy in particular." -William P. Lebra. University of Hawaii

"An extraordinary insight into the Japanese character." -S. I. Hayakawa

"Perhaps the first book by a Japanese trained in psychiatry to have an impact on Western psychiatric thinking." -Ezra VogeI, Harvard University

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Japanese

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870114948
• ISBN-13: 978-0870114946
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,171,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amae and the West, September 25, 2004

By 

D. Tanimura "never knows best" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Anatomy of Dependence (Paperback)

Takeo Doi's "The Anatomy of Dependence" is in truth a psychological analysis of Japanese society through his linguistic interpretation of the Japanese concept of amae. Though the title of the book translates amae as "dependence", the semantic meaning of the word has a much deeper importance in Japanese culture and has a more positive connotation. The originality of Doi's hypothesis of Japanese psychology stems from his refusal to accept that the peoples of Japan and the rest of Asia cannot be understood through psychological analysis. Here, Doi explains his basic argument against using Western terminology to describe Japanese emotions, "...the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by an inexorable laws of patterns of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language-shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family, " (67). What Doi proposes is that Western psychology has yet to understand Japanese culture because it lacks a Japanese vocabulary.
Doi's text ventures to create a Japanese psychological vocabulary branching off from his concept of amae and built on the structure of Western principles of psychoanalysis. Amae, as Doi interprets it, is the interdependence of indulgences afforded between Japanese people of close relations. In Japanese society, Amae is expected to be given by parents to their children throughout their lives. Amae is also afforded to the elderly, leading some outsiders to wrongly assume that the elderly in Japan are in some way slighted, being treated like babies or small children. Within romantic or marital relationships, amae is expected to be exchanged freely as a way of expressing love and affection. The idea of dependence in Western psychology has connotations of weakness or inability to cope with reality. This is mostly due to the individualistic structure of modern Western culture, in particular, America.
Some of the most satisfying and convincing analysis in Doi's text are the parts of his argument where he openly attacks the Western interpretation of Japanese society. Doi daringly takes apart almost 20 years of Western analysis when he confronts Benedict's conclusion on Japan's total lack of guilt in her pivotal book, The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, "...[Benedict] seems to postulate guilt and shame as entirely unrelated to each other, which is obviously contrary to the facts, " (48). Benedict tried to say that Japanese people feel shame towards the group to which they belong but have no sense of guilt on an individual level. What Benedict is really talking about is the concept of betrayal.
Guilt in Western thought, as Benedict uses it in her text, is defined as a betrayal to oneself. This inner conflict is an individual experienced when there is a conflict between the id, ego and super-ego as Freud used them. Though Japanese people may not feel guilt towards themselves in the Western way, they do feel guilt towards the group. This is what Benedict defines as shame. Doi uses this idea to conclude that, "Even with the Western sense of guilt one might, in fact, postulate a deep-lying psychology of betrayal, but the Westerner is not normally conscious of it, " (49). Doi continues to hypothesize that at one point in history Western civilization did feel guilt towards the group as they do in Japan. With the advent and spread of Christianity, guilt was shifted from the community to one's individual relationship with god. With the industrial age, god was essentially dead. This left the only source of guilt to be found within oneself.
Doi is able to, within a page of text, turn the West's perspective on Japanese culture right back around at itself to create a very convincing and audacious psychological analysis of both the West and Japan. This book is one of the few satisfying texts written about Japanese society and the Japanese self. For the first time I feel that Japan can be described as something more concrete than merely inscrutable.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Better Kind of Nihonjin-ron, June 22, 2006

By 

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Anatomy of Dependence (Paperback)

The Anatomy of Dependence was first published in 1971 under the title 'Amae no Kozo' and almost immediately gained national and international recognition. The author, Dr. Takeo Doi, is one of Japan's leading psychiatrists. His experience in the US, where he made several extended research stays, allowed him to reflect on the nature of the Japanese mindset. He begins his book by recording common experiences of minor alienation that every Japanese living abroad has undergone, such as being given the choice between several options of food or drink that Americans propose "as if to reassure themselves of their own freedom."

A peculiar trait of Japanese medical studies is its heavy use of terms borrowed from the German, which entered the Japanese language at the turn of the twentieth century and which are pronounced in a way that makes them understandable only by Japanese trained in the medical sciences. Doi's main breakthrough is to record the feelings and emotions held by his patients in Japanese terms, and to show that these terms form a constellation of meaning structured around the notion of `amae'.

Part of the interest of this book comes from the fact that amae is very difficult to translate but very easy to grasp--it is the emotion felt by the baby at the breast towards his mother, the need for a passive, unconditional love, the unwillingness to be separated from the warm mother-child circle and cast into a world of objective `reality'. Such a relationship implies a considerable blurring of the distinction between subject and object; it is not necessarily governed by what might be considered strict rational or moral standards, and may often seem selfish to the outsider. Doi contends that it provides an invaluable key to Japanese behavior.

In a way, the Anatomy of Dependence belongs to the field of Nihonjin-ron, or commentary about Japanese-ness, a genre much reviled by social scientists but that still enjoys a high degree of popularity among the Japanese public. Its quest for `the soul of a nation' or `the structure of the Japanese personality' will appear as naive and uncouth to sophisticated readers, who might nonetheless remember that Freud also made sweeping generalizations about the future of Western civilization. To those who might object that Dr. Doi's analysis lacks intellectual rigor and smacks of culturalism, one may object that, first, the description of Japanese behavioral traits is grounded in language structures and that, second, these structures are enacted through speech acts and clinical situations.

Takeo Doi spends some time discussing the New Left and the students movement of the 1970s, which he interestingly compares with Momotaro, the monster-slaying character born out of a giant peach. Interestingly, he doesn't apply his frame of analysis to the most evident of all dependency relationships: that of Japan towards the US, all at once the indulgent motherly figure and the domineering hegemon that blocks Japan from becoming a power in its own right. The anatomy of this political and societal dependence has yet to be written.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Anatomy of Dependence - A culture of Amae, September 27, 2004

By 

G. Specht (Richmond, IN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Anatomy of Dependence (Paperback)

The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi is a look at one facet of Japanese society. Unlike other authors who study Japan as an entire society, Doi focuses on the aspect of unconditional love between parent and child and how it relates to the overarching characteristics of Japanese social structure. Doi relates many theories from many fields of study, notably psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Doi relates his theory of amae with Western schools of thought and how these schools relate to Japan. He is remarkably capable of writing without expressing culture bias, and much credit needs to be given to John Bester for translating the book so well. With Anatomy of Dependence, Doi is able to explain many traditional Japanese behaviors to a Western audience by relating them all to the concept of amaeru, a verb expressing a concept that has no equivalent word in English. Amaeru is `to act in a self-indulgent, or childish, manner toward people with whom one is very close' and Doi's main argument is that amae is the crux of Japanese psychology. It is the attempt to explain the full nature of amae that allows Doi to explain the connections as a psychologist.
The concept of amae is a characteristic of humanity and many other mammalians such as dogs and apes. The term itself and its implications are mostly ignored or misunderstood by people in Western cultures. A basic definition of amae is `to depend and presume upon another's benevolence.' This definition may be applied to common everyday relationships such as mother-child, master-apprentice, sempai-kohai, and between friends. Amaeru, described above, is best stated as the need to be loved, to depend and to be dependent on others. The way that every native Japanese citizen handles amae is the core of the mental psyche. He is able to write confidently about Japanese social nuances and psychology after being a psychologist himself for over twenty years. Amae is the root of the Japanese psyche because everything relates back to it, from apologies to the development of the self-awareness. The instinctual awareness of amae is in every human being, but Japanese society is more in touch with it. This is the crux of Doi's thesis and argument, an argument that has valid arguments and falters only every so often.
Doi does a very good job of explaining things in this account. Anatomy of Dependence is not a book for someone who does not understand psychology. Psychology and its many ways of analysis are the bases of Doi's perspectives. Oftentimes in the book he will recall a patient of his whom suffers from a lack of amae or one who fails to amae properly. He does this with care and ease to the subject, explaining social concepts like enryo, tanin, giri, and sumanai. These four words relate to the Japanese sense of companionship, its inner and outer circles, its duty or loyalty, and its way of apologizing. There are many concepts explored in the book and they are explained with appropriate depth for the time spent on them. Doi is definitely a highbrow writer, assuming that his reading audience is as intelligent as he is. While the more casual reader will be put off by this tactic, it allows for more knowledge and depth to be conveyed. Additional reading can benefit almost every topic that Doi speaks of. There are entire books on the insider-outsider social structure, but Doi can only focus on them for just a few pages. The basis of Anatomy of Dependence then is not to make someone intimately familiar with all the social ambiguities of Japanese society but to make the readership aware that each aspect is influenced by the amae.
Thus Doi is able to explain amae in the Anatomy of Dependence. He does not leave many stones unturned by the end of the account. There are a few places where Doi falters, however. A section on Eastern and Western appreciation for aesthetic beauty falters. Doi is a psychologist, not an artist. He is able to make surprisingly few cultural generalizations, but one that he does make is that the Japanese have a greater appreciation for aesthetic beauty because they are in a culture where amae is recognized and practiced many times daily. While the Japanese society has been hailed for centuries as having many beautiful pieces of artwork, poetry and philosophy on the subject of aesthetic beauty, the explanation Doi gives is a little weak. Apart from this, Doi makes about .1% of the cultural generalizations that Ruth Benedict makes in Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Doi's highbrow writing may also be considered a pitfall of the book, but it was written for people in the psychiatric field and not for the layperson uneducated in Japanese society. This book is not a casual read for a person who is just getting into the study of Japan.
That said, the book fulfills its primary objective. The primary objective is to make people, namely psychologists, aware of the Japanese sense of amae, a cultural sensitivity that is not to be found in Western cultures due to the greater sense of individuality that is placed on them as soon as babies develop self-identity. Doi writes and speaks as a psychologist and that can be perplexing to the reader. However, he is able to explain amae with such remarkably clarity and his experiences as a psychologist make the book highly credible.