ABSTRACT
In parent education classes in the United States, young mothers are often taught to “let go” of their toddlers. Compare this with Azuma’s characterization of the mother-child interaction in Japan (reported in Kornadt, 1987, p. 133), where the mother’s message to the child who is being difficult is “I am one with you; we can be and will be of the same mind.” What is the contrast? American mothers are taught to let their toddlers separate from them. This early separation must go against at least some (natural?) tendencies of mothers to “merge” with their young children, because they are asked to make a calculated effort to control these tendencies and “let their children go.” This is being done because psychological teaching, based on psychoanalytic theory, claims that unless early separation-individuation occurs, a pathological “symbiotic” relationship gets formed between the mother and the child. On the other hand, what the Japanese mother is telling the child reflects a symbiotic relationship of “oneness” of completely overlapping selves (see Fig. 4.1 in chap. 4). I sometimes ask my students to imagine themselves as a clinical psychologist fresh with a PhD degree from an American university carrying out an observation in a traditional Turkish village. What would they see? A lot of overlapping connected selves.
