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Since the late nineteenth century, religious ideas and practices in Japan have become increasingly intertwined with those associated with mental health and healing. This relationship developed against the backdrop of a far broader, and deeply consequential meeting: between Japan's long-standing, Chinese-influenced intellectual and institutional forms, and the politics, science, philosophy, and religion of the post-Enlightenment West. In striving to craft a modern society and culture that could exist on terms with - rather than be subsumed by - western power and influence, Japan became home to a religion--psy dialogue informed by pressing political priorities and rapidly shifting cultural concerns.
This book provides a historically contextualized introduction to the dialogue between religion and psychotherapy in modern Japan. In doing so, it draws out connections between developments in medicine, government policy, Japanese religion and spirituality, social and cultural criticism, regional dynamics, and gender relations. The chapters all focus on the meeting and intermingling of religious with psychotherapeutic ideas and draw on a wide range of case studies including: how temple and shrine 'cures' of early modern Japan fared in the light of German neuropsychiatry; how Japanese Buddhist theories of mind, body, and self-cultivation negotiated with the findings of western medicine; how Buddhists, Christians, and other organizations and groups drew and redrew the lines between religious praxis and psychological healing; how major European therapies such as Freud's fed into self-consciously Japanese analyses of and treatments for the ills of the age; and how distress, suffering, and individuality came to be reinterpreted across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the southern islands of Okinawa to the devastated northern neighbourhoods of the Tohoku region after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.
Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a broad range of subjects, including Japanese culture and society, religious studies, psychology and psychotherapy, mental health, and international history.
List of contents
Introduction 1. Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan: A Four-Phase View 2. Psychiatry and Religion in Modern Japan: Traditional Temple and Shrine Therapies 3. The Birth of Japanese Mind Cure Methods 4. The Mind and Healing in Morita Therapy 5. The Dawning of Japanese Psychoanalysis: Kosawa Heisaku’s Therapy and Faith 6. Doi Takeo and the Development of the ‘Amae’ Theory 7. From Salvation to Healing: Yoshimoto Naikan Therapy and its Religious Origins 8. Naikan and Mourning: A Catholic Attempt at Naikan Meditation 9. Hayao Kawai’s Transnational Identity and Japanese Spirit 10. The Contemporary View of Reincarnation in Japan: Narratives of the Reincarnating Self 11. A Society Accepting of Spirit Possession: Mental Health and Shamanism in Okinawa 12. Chaplaincy Work in Disaster Areas 13. Conclusion
About the author
Christopher Harding is Lecturer in Asian History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK
Iwata Fumiaki is Professor in the Department of Social Science Education, Osaka Kyoiku University, Japan
Yoshinaga Shin’ichi is Associate Professor at the Maizuru National College of Technology, Japan
