ABSTRACT
This close relationship between the mother and the son, and the weak ego of the Japanese which may have resulted from it , are very often discussed from the psychoanalytic point of view. Takeo Doi , a senior psychiatrist at the Tokyo St. Luke's Hospital, pointed out that the Japa nese word amae is a special term meaning the psychological state "to depend and presume upon another's benevolence," and this is "generally used to describe a child's attitude or behavior toward his parents, partic ularly his mother." He speculates that this amae exists in the Japanese continually, even in the period of adulthood, and should be a key concept for understanding Japanese personality structure (Doi , 1956, 1960, 1962, 1963). Wil l iam Caudill, a psychoanalytically oriented anthropologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, discovered the over-representa tion of eldest sons among Japanese psychotic patients, which should be related to the eldest son's dependent relationship wi th the mother (Cau di l l , 1963). He also points to the fact that Japanese male schizophrenic patients show physical assaults most often against their mother, and he interprets this as being caused by their strong desire for amae wi th the mother (Schooler and Caudill, 1964). He stresses that one of the factors strengthening this desire may be the traditional sleeping arrangement whereby parents continue to sleep in the same room as their children, frequently unti l the children leave home (Caudill and Plath, 1966). My own data from the Sentence Completion Test collected from several hun dred urban and rural junior high school students in various parts of Japan (Sofue, 1965) and my study of neurotic students at a university in Tokyo (Sofue, 1964) suggest the same general features as mentioned above, which tend to create a "mother complex" and a "dependent personality," causing in extreme cases maladjustment to college life. Today this "mother complex" is a very popular topic in Japanese newspapers and journals. I conclude that although in Japan the father-son relationship is explicitly dominant-or borrowing Dr. Hsu's own word, legally (jurally) dominant —the mother-son relationship is implicit ly (covertly) dominant, or more exactly, affectively dominant. This may be in some sense similar to the
case of Mexico discussed by Mr. Hunt. There, both the father-son and mother-son relationships are equally dominant, and he concludes that i t is hard to state which of the two should be more important. There must be many other similar cases in the world, and I would say that i t is not always necessary to find only one dominant relationship; in Japan the father-son and mother-son relationships should be closely related to each other and must be regarded as two sides of the same shield. To theoret ically separate overt (explicit) dominance and covert (implicit) or affec tive dominance, as already mentioned, would be one method needed to explore the problem.
