Christopher Harding opens his comprehensive new history of Japan with the image of the novelist Jakucho Setouchi placed on the psychiatrist¡¯s couch in the mid-1960s by Heisaku Kosawa, a pioneering figure in the introduction of Freudian psychoanalysis to Japan.
Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present, by Christopher Harding.528 pagesALLEN LANE, History.
The reception ¡ª lukewarm as it was ¡ª of psychoanalysis in Japan is a specialist topic of Harding¡¯s, one that he infuses at intervals into this stylish history of modern Japan, as if placing the nation itself on the psychiatrist¡¯s couch and sagely taking notes on the national narrative. Sometimes with spectacular success, other times unleashing the monsters of hell, Japan has neurotically struggled to cope with the demon of ¡°modernity¡± over the past 150 years.
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