On Becoming a Psychoanalyst in Japan

This special issue introduces psychoanalysis in Japan, its history, thoughts, and development, through the autobiographies of some Japanese psychoanalysts. I graduated relatively recently from a training course in psychoanalysis at the Japan Institute of Psychoanalysis and was certified as a psychoanalyst by the Japan Psychoanalytic Society (JPS). If I am to write about why I aimed to become a psychoanalyst in Japan and how I became one, not only my personal history but also the influences of Japanese culture and Japanese therapeutic culture will undoubtedly be important. In this article, by relating my life history, I trace the path I followed for becoming a psychoanalyst and explore the broader implications of my experience. The paper “An Autobiographical Study” by Freud (1925) is a famous autobiographical psychoanalytic essay, and a more recent paper “Learning from Life―Becoming a Psychoanalyst” by Casement (2006) is also well known. To publicize an autobiography, a psychoanalyst always includes the possibility of self-disclosure. Because I am still practicing psychoanalysis regularly, I hesitate slightly to write this article. However, writing an autobiography is also, in part, a process of self-analysis after becoming a psychoanalyst, and can be considered a part of a psychoanalyst’s interminable training (Okada, 2012).