Cherishment Culture

Introduction

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century—since Goethe in his Weimar old age—prophets in the West have had a sense of impending catastrophe, for the West, but also, in consequence, for all humankind. From European travelers like Stendhal, de Tocqueville, Burckhardt, from lonely philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, from anticipators of salvation through catastrophe like Marx, and from the pre-eminent diagnostician, Freud, have come historical conceptions of a profound caesura separating modern people from their ancestors. The prophets have recognized that the world’s great traditions, stemming from distinct origins in Europe and north Africa, in China, in India, were coming to a common end in a planetary condition of man-madeness, an age of all-embracing technology, and in a political condition of world-wide interdependence and ambition—eventually of world war, global trade and communications. In the period since the end of the Second World War, which to date has been the nadir of humankind as an actually existent unit, as a unit of technologically and politically common destiny, thoughtful individuals from all regions of the earth have come forth to join their hopes and fears into a conversation about humankind’s possibilities.

To this conversation, the followers of Freud bring a particular perspective and experience. We, like all reflective people, can consider the condition humaine currently from the evidence of interactions we observe and read about, media images we receive, travels we undertake, but we can also attend to, attune to, the streams of our own and our patients’ associations—to conduits from the unconscious, like oracles from Delphi, as each is a “navel of the universe.” Each patient we work with needs, of course, a cure for an illness or malaise, but each, as well, needs help with a condition not peculiar to her or him but common to all of us as contemporaries, relatively well or relatively ill; a civilizational condition. The world historical thinking of a psychoanalyst is a therapeutics.

In this essay, ¹ we would like to reconsider Freud’s analysis of the modern civilizational condition: to appreciate it, and to build upon it as therapists working half a century after his death, half a century further into the world crisis he analyzed while it was still in its turn of the century form. To put the theme we want to explore introductorily, in a very abbreviated way: what Freud analyzed, particularly in Civilization and Its Discontents, was what might be termed the active and Oedipal level of the modern civilizational condition, while the level that has been revealed since is receptive and pre-oedipal. Psychoanalytic theory has shifted accordingly since Freud’s time. But we feel that it has not made this shift clearly or broadly enough, and that it has not developed from its new thinking a new cultural analysis or ideal. We want to invoke such an ideal—“cherishment culture” we call it.

Further, we want to argue that psychoanalysis has not come to any new cultural vision because it made its post-Freudian shift in a specifically Western way, one that reflects a specifically Western view of the civilizational condition as a crisis in human activity or productivity, not in human receptivity. From the East, by contrast, there has come a contemporary psychoanalytic revision—not fully developed, but very suggestive—that illuminates the post-Freudian direction. Its author is Takeo Doi of Japan, although Takeo Doi has been supported—unconsciously—by a tradition of Eastern philosophizing that goes back at least to the period of Confucianism and Taoism in China, the Chinese civilizational originary moment. The “cherishment culture” we want to invoke in this essay is very Chinese.

The Lost Thread in Freudian Theory

The main theme of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents is, as his translator James Strachey succinctly introduced it, “the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.” But this summary, of course, requires qualification, as its stark adjective “irremediable” requires inquiry: which demands of what instinct? which restrictions of what civilization?

We need to put Freud’s theme in context. Tentatively...