The Ajase complex

UNESCO Courier, March, 1993 by Etienne Barral

'DERU kugiwa utareru," or "One should knock in any nail that sticks out," is a common Japanese saying. The metaphor is symptomatic of the national approach to education. Japanese children are brought up not to rock the boat, not to be different from their neighbours and to conform with other members of the group. It is difficult to talk of the emergence of the individual when principles of this kind are firmly rooted in the national mentality.

When asked about this, Dr. Tooru Takahashi, a psychiatrist at Japan's National Mental Health Research Institute, first puts the individual in context: "Even from a purely grammatical point of view, the Japanese language allows people a choice between several types of 'I'. The 'I' they decide to use depends on the person or persons they are talking to. The individual constantly has to redefine his or her identity depending on who is being addressed--a superior, a work colleague, or a member of the family." The mental gymnastics the Japanese practise in their relationships with other people provide one clue as to why they tend to see themselves less as well-defined individuals than as persons capable of adjusting to their environment. Their ability to adjust arises, according to psychiatrist Takeo Doi, from their wish to avoid conflict with people around them, and thus to be treated indulgently, as a child is by its mother.

THE AJASE COMPLEX

In his book Anatomy of Dependence(1), Takeo Doi describes the bond of emotional dependence--amae--which in his view greatly influences the way in which the Japanese personality is formed. In a matriarchal society in which the father occupies a very limited place, the relationship with the mother determines a person's psychological development and his or her relations with society. Whereas Western psychoanalytical thinking emphasizes the "castrating" role of the father in breaking into what would otherwise remain a hermetic fusional relationship between mother and child, Japanese psychiatry starts off with an acceptance of this mother-child dyad, which was described by the first Japanese psychiatrist, Dr. Kosawa, as the "Ajase complex". (Ajase was a king in Buddhist mythology who wanted to kill his mother.)

When he used the psychoanalytical technique of free association on his patients, Dr. Kosawa discovered that their fantasies did not reveal an (Edipus complex (or wish to kill the father) of the kind he had learned about from Freud in Vienna in 1932. What emerged, rather, was an Ajase complex. "It is a guilt feeling towards the mother in a relationship of dependence, a feeling you experience after obtaining her forgiveness despite the fact that you have tried to kill her in order to satisfy your hostile wishes," says Dr. Takahashi, echoing Takeo Doi's work on amae.

"The archetypal relationship involving amae is that between mother and child, but this archetype also structures the relationship between husband and wife, teacher and pupil, and doctor and patient," writes Yves Pelicier, a French specialist, in a preface to a French translation of Doi's book. "There is never any question of equality. The relationship is asymmetrical, which means that it presupposes respect and offers in return the definition of a certain reassuring position or status in the relationship system." What the child, and later the adult, seeks in amae is not the independence of the "individual" as it is envisioned in the West, but a relationship of ideal dependence that will earn him or her the indulgence of the mother, then of the group.

"Amae is normally what a child feels in relation to its mother when it becomes capable of realizing that she can separate from it," Doi says. But while that feeling indicates both a request for the presence of the mother and a negation of separation from her, it is something that is found throughout adult life in a culture which regards the individual, or "I", as important only in his or her relationship with other people. Amae is the wish to restore a lost unity by going out to meet other people.

"The purpose of analysis," Dr. Takahashi adds, "is to grasp the subject's individuality. But the Japanese accept, and even tend to emphasize, the ambiguity of their 'I', which is determined by other people. The analysand does not seek individual independence, which would run counter to the very principles of the way human relationships work"(2).

As for his own patients, Dr. Takahashi finds they chiefly suffer from behaviour problems within groups: "There are two main problems facing my patients: either they tend to deny their individuality completely so as to merge more successfully into the group, or they react against the group to an excessive degree by overasserting their individuality." The bond between the individual and the mother is of the same type as that between the individual and the group: it is a bond based more on the emotions than on reason. As long as this relationship is an emotional one, the individual can seek the indulgence of the group in order to achieve his or her aims. This is why it is important not to create open conflicts, which would break up the harmony of the group to the detriment of each individual's interests.