A conference volume, not a single thesis

This book comes out of the 2019 International Association for Jungian Studies regional conference in Osaka—the first the association held in Asia—and it carries the shape of its origin. Seventeen chapters by Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Latvian, American, British, and Italian contributors are sorted into four parts: East and West, Images, Clinical Issues, and Identity and Individuation. The coherence is editorial, not argumentative. Konoyu Nakamura frames the collection as documentation of how deeply Jungian psychology has taken root in Japan; Stefano Carta, introducing the same chapters separately, reads them as a dialogue between East and West held deliberately in tension, without resolving it into a synthesis. Two introductions doing two different jobs is the honest signal here. A reader who wants a thesis will be frustrated; a reader who wants to watch practitioners inside a tradition disagree about whether that tradition’s basic structural claims are universal or provincial will find the volume unusually candid. The disagreements are not decorative. They run through the paternal principle, through the meaning of emptiness, and through whether cultural psychology describes an inheritance or an event.

The ego without a centre

The claim that recurs most often, and that would most disturb a standard analytic training, is that the psyche need not be organized around a fixed egoic center at all. Toshio Yama opens the volume by building on Hayao Kawai’s 1976 model, in which the line between conscious and unconscious is far less distinct than Western models assume and the Self occupies the center while the ego recedes from that position. What keeps this from being a national generalization is that Yama then goes looking for evidence outside the consulting room. Japanese screen paintings and the Katsura garden are built to defeat the single fixed viewpoint that linear perspective installs; the eye is given no privileged station from which the whole composes itself. Hsu and Kuroda carry the same claim into clinical work through the house imago, where security is constellated around the circumference, without a defended center point. The argument’s force lies in that transposition. A theory of the psyche that can be read off a garden, a painted screen, and a patient’s drawing of a house is doing more than asserting cultural difference; it is proposing that a structure Western analytical psychology treats as developmental fact is one arrangement among several.

The cultural Father and the cultural Mother

Two chapters relocate the East/West contrast away from psychic structure and into the paternal principle specifically, and they do not agree about what they have found. Elly Lin, working in San Francisco, sets an Asian-American patient crushed by an over-dominant Confucian Father complex beside a Caucasian American patient who has no Father to slay at all—not a weak father, an absent principle. Following Neumann, she argues that the maternal image stays relatively constant across cultures while the paternal image varies sharply, which makes the father, not the mother, the site where culture writes itself into the complex. David Fisher accepts the asymmetry and then historicizes it out from under any essentialist reading. Kawai’s Japan as a maternal society is not, on his account, an eternal national character but the product of an enantiodromia precipitated by a datable humiliation: the ritual staging of surrender in 1945. This is the volume’s most productive internal fault line. Lin’s comparison risks stabilizing culture into type; Fisher makes cultural psyche the residue of defeat, contingent and reversible. Read together they check each other, and the collection is better for not adjudicating between them.

Emptiness as achievement and as trap

Here the volume refuses the consolation its subtitle might promise. The familiar comparative move—Eastern emptiness as the cure for Western nihilism—is dismantled by Inomata, who follows Giegerich in arguing that Western nihilism is itself an achievement: an emptiness consciousness produced by a long sequence of self-negations and therefore earned. Japan’s hollow center is something else entirely, an indigenous inheritance that never had to be won and that swallows individual will, which Inomata is willing to connect to the country’s rate of autism spectrum diagnosis. Whether that last link holds is a real question the chapter cannot settle from where it stands, and the reader should hold it loosely. The structural conclusion is sturdier: Eastern ideas cannot cure Western nihilism, and the reverse import fails equally, since two voids arrived at by opposite routes are not interchangeable goods. What remains is circumambulation of both. That is the volume’s clearest corrective to the comparative romanticism that has attached itself to Jung’s own East-facing writing since the 1930s, and it is delivered from within the tradition itself.

Clinical work at the edge of speech

The clinical chapters are strongest where patients cannot use words, and each argues that non-verbal expression is evidence in its own right, not a fallback when speech fails. Matsushita’s decade-long study of the Baum test in refractory chronic schizophrenia takes drawings that produce no tree—funnel-shaped open-ended trunks, parallel single lines—and reads them as records of an individuation process still attempting to integrate opposites, not as artefacts of illness. The reclassification is the argument: what a symptom-oriented eye discards becomes evidence. Miwa reads the Ensou circle through Hisamatsu’s Formless self to show how much rides on a therapist’s response to a few centimetres of pencil line, which can protect a fragile ego or overwhelm it. Furukawa extends the same attentiveness to Ainu dream culture, where dreams function as the direct channel between humans and Kamuy—and where the demand on an analyst is to receive a dream inside its own cosmology without converting it into archetypal currency. Since these chapters rest partly on images this commentary cannot assess, their claims are reported from the contributors’ prose. The methodological point survives that limit: attention, not interpretation, is what these clinicians treat as the discipline.