Session 108: Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis

Organizer and Chair: Nina Cornyetz, New York University

Keywords: perversion, Japan, psychoanalysis, modern.

For Freud, perversion denoted all sexual deviances from the heterosexual and genital social norm. For Lacan, perversion meant a particular structure of desire, regardless of social norm. Our interdisciplinary panel uses psychoanalytic methodologies to tackle a few examples of "perversion" as both sexual deviance and as a structure in modern Japan. Rather than arguing for or against so-called culturally particular complexes such as the Ajase Complex, our panelists make use of conventional psychoanalytic concepts. We expect that this positioning will itself engender a good discussion.

Driscoll’s paper lays out a historical framework for understanding perversion to be, rather than something aberrant, in fact an effect of modernity. Using modern Japan as his illustrative model, his paper shows how modernity and perversion are two sides to the same coin. Katsuta’s contribution focuses on one example of a contemporary social perversion, suggesting that a cultural nostalgia for a self-effacing bond to another, and for the aesthetics of death, inform the new phenomenon of Japanese suicide-murder websites for Japanese youth. Piven narrows his focus to analyze one of Japan’s most famous writers and perverts in a formal psychoanalytic interpretation of the structure of perversion in Mishima Yukio’s life and fiction. Cornyetz interprets desire for the father in the Akiyuki trilogy by author Nakagami Kenji as an inversion of the Oedipus complex. We have opted not to have a formal discussant to allow for a longer and freer period of audience commentary and questions.

Hentai = Modernity

Mark Driscoll, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

My talk will treat the articulations of a surprisingly "liberal" rendering of hentai (perversion) in Japanese sexology, psychoanalysis and the mass culture discourse of the ero-guro-nonsense in Japan in the Taisho and early Showa periods. Although the standard histories of Japanese sexology of the 1910s and 1920s emphasize the "importation" of hentai’s signifieds "homosexual" and "hysteric" from European psychiatrists and sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, these histories consistently overlook the ways in which hentai was understigmatized. The decoding and recoding of hentai by sexologists like Tanaka Kôgai and Habuto Eiji, psychoanalysts like Kubo Yoshihide, Ihai Setsuzô and mass culture figures like Edogawa Rampo had the effect of de-pathologizing and universalizing it as a general description of modern subjectivity. In this non-stigmatizing discourse of hentai the deployment of Freudian notions of the unconscious is as important as the genealogical recovery of an Asian, non-Christian erotic subject. My talk will emphasize the ways in which this important, though undertheorized discourse of hentai supports the language of "mu" or nothingness offered as the non-grounded ground of subjectivity in the philosophical modernity of Nishida Kitarô. These different levels of social discourse in Japan add up to a recasting of modernity itself as hentai, or the embodied mode (tai) of transformation (hen).

Searching for a Bond at the Expense of Life

Yuko Katsuta, National Psychological Association

Recently, there has been a daunting trend among Japanese youth. Alongside numerous websites dedicated to matchmaking are ones where one seeks a match not to love, but to die with. Some youth may merely fantasize on these sites. But others actually commit double-suicide-murders. Still others try to kill themselves but survive. And then sometimes only one dies and one survives. Some youth, who otherwise may have taken no action, may be lured into mutual murder by the website’s stimulation of their fantasies. Further, these youth also wish to watch the other kill/be killed—a sadistic undertone complicates these suicides. My talk will use a psychoanalytic approach to explore this trend.

At the same time, I will consider the fact that in Japanese history and literature, suicide and suicide pacts have been idealized, associated with an ephemeral and tragic aesthetics. Does this tradition play a significant role in this trend? For many figures in Japanese history and literature (such as samurai under the same authority, or lovers), it was essential to have a strong bond between or among co-participants. This bond, which may be personal or constitutional, is something to which they surrendered at the expense of their individual lives. It must be this bond that Japanese youth pine for, and the websites provide a makeshift version of such a bond. I will consider this aesthetic tradition in analyzing the phenomenon of the contemporary youth suicide-pact websites.

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Jerry S. Piven, New York University

In this presentation I would like to adumbrate some psychological aspects of Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s greatest and most disturbed artists. Mishima suffered an indescribably traumatic childhood. The impact of a sadistic father, separation from his mother, and a deeply unstable authoritarian grandmother impelled Mishima toward misogyny, grandiose fantasies, and the drive to murder his own weakness and sexual vulnerability. Throughout his fiction Mishima continually envisioned sadistic, violent scenarios of sexual merger with objects of his erotic adoration and envy. In his fiction the agony and humiliation of abandonment invariably result in murderous rage, and I would make the case that such repeated images are transferences, fictive reenactments of far older pain. In addition, Mishima’s voyeurism is explained as a fantasy of both capturing and wounding unattainable loves, as well as maintaining his own existence against disappearance and loss. Mishima’s later exhibitionism can also be understood as an attempt to confirm his own precarious existence through perception by others. I finally address the complex nature of Mishima’s disembowelment as a fantasy of rebirth, sexual merger, and escape from death.

Inverting Oedipus: Incest, Suicide, and Fratricide in Nakagami Kenji

Nina Cornyetz, New York University

According to Japan’s creation myth, sibling deities Izanagi and Izanami birthed Japan and a pantheon of other deities, including Susano-o, who procreated with his sister Amaterasu, birthing the ancestor of the first Japanese Emperor. The myth of sister-brother incest is thus at the core of Japanese mythology, much as we might argue (and as Freud indeed did) that the Oedipal myth lies at the core of Western (Judeo-Christian) mythology.

My presentation will take up a tale of brother-sister incest in a modern literary trilogy by Nakagami Kenji (written in the late 1970s and the early 1980s) to show how it inverts the psychoanalytic structures of relation to the father and the mother as mapped out by Western psychoanalysis. I argue that the protagonist brother—Akiyuki—engages in sex with his half-sister because of his desire for a relation to his father in order to differentiate or know how he is and is not like his father. I will show how, in other words, what looks like desire for his sibling turns out, upon closer inspection, to invert the Oedipal drama. Moreover, not only does Akiyuki show no desire for his mother, it is she who has denied her son access to his father, rather than the father acting as the term of interdiction that interferes with the mother-son dyad. Finally, a conflation of father and son replaces the supposed imaginary oneness of mother and child—the father functions as the parent with whom an imaginary symbiosis is possible.