“Distinctly Japanese” – Political context of Nihonjinron, Nationalism

  In order to promote psychotherapy has to appear to be culturally specific Modern anxieties of showing Japan as a world power Rise of psychotherapy became a marker of how Japan was competing globally (Fruster) (Fruster) Neurasthenia – primarily affected men caused by overpowering exhaustion surrounding sexual practices, suspected that result around masturbation – Japanese fear of masculinity, threatened men’s health and by implication social order and Japan’s national stability 19th century to mid 20th Read more…

BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, Fri 8th Nov 10.45pm: ‘Therapy vs Prayer’

My BBC Free Thinking talk – ‘Therapy vs Prayer’ – will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Friday 8th November, as ‘The Essay’. For those of you with something else to do on a Friday night, the talk will be available shortly afterwards on iPlayer – here. If you have any thoughts and suggestions, once you’ve listened, please let me know! My email is christopher.harding@ed.ac.uk and I’m on Twitter as @drchrisharding.

Asian Society for the History of Medicine: ‘Doing Psychoanalysis in the Spirit of Shinran’

A few weeks ago I presented a short paper at a conference organised by the Asian Society for the History of Medicine, entitled ‘Doing Psychoanalysis in the Spirit of Shinran: The Relationship Between Theory and Worldview in the Lives of Japan’s First Psychoanalysts’. Here is a podcast of the paper, alongside the slides I was using, in two parts: embedded by Embedded Video embedded by Embedded Video    

Setouchi Jakucho

A few weeks ago, Japan’s best-known Buddhist nun and activist Setouchi Jakucho was kind enough to give me an interview about her little-known period in psychoanalysis with Heisaku Kosawa, in the mid-1960s. (For Japanese readers, she discusses it briefly in 五十からでも遅くない ). Setouchi credits Kosawa with a radical shift in the way she understood herself and the world, contributing – though she had no interest in Buddhism at the time she was seeing Kosawa – Read more…

Debating the First Principles of Transcultural Psychiatry

A natural element of my current Japanese psychoanalysis project is the question of transcultural or cross-cultural psychiatry – the variations in how mental health and illness is experienced, discussed, and treated across cultures. A small-scale project based at Glasgow University, of which I’ve been a part, has recently borne its first fruit, so please do take a look here and share your comments and wisdom… My main interests here lie in the particular cases of Read more…

Two Upcoming Presentations

I’ll be presenting some work in progress in Sapporo and then in Tokyo towards the end of this year – see here for details. For the Tokyo conference (Asian Society for the History of Medicine), I’m delighted to be part of a panel with Professor Shinichi Yoshinaga, who along with Professor Susumu Shimazono has been helping me to get stuck into some of the Japanese literature looking at the links between psychotherapy and spiritual movements Read more…

Analysis with Dr Kosawa…

I had the privilege at the weekend of interviewing a man (I’ll be keeping his name anonymous) who had a course of psychoanalytic therapy with Heisaku Kosawa back in the mid-1940s, when he was a young man of 22 and Kosawa was in his late forties. From this period of therapy and from the friendship that he later developed with Kosawa, this man was able to offer a wealth of insights into Kosawa’s attitude towards Read more…

Japan Society for the History of Psychiatry 2011 Conference

Just back from the Japan Society for the History of Psychiatry conference, at Aichi Prefectural University, where I presented some early thoughts on Heisaku Kosawa’s personal papers. We were in a part of the university built for the Expo back in 2005, so it’s still all brand spanking new, with a little monorail taking you out from the city of Nagoya to the campus itself. I’ve posted a copy of the handout here – feel Read more…

Welcome to the site!

This site is designed to give an overview of my research project on Heisaku Kosawa. I’ll post research updates here now and again, alongside my main blog – the distinctly uninvitingly named ‘Boredom Project‘…