Unwilling subjects: Psychoanalysis and Japanese modernity (Orikuchi Shinobu, Matsumoto Toshio)

"Unwilling Subjects: Psychoanalysis and Modern Japan" examines cultural expressions of psychoanalytic thought across a range of twentieth-century Japanese cultural spheres: medical, psychiatric, ethnological, literary, filmic, and film critical. Its project is to not simply narrate the neglected histories of Japanese psychoanalysis, but, in doing so, to expand our current understanding of the experience of sexuality within Japanese modernity. The first chapter looks at medical, literary, and film critical texts in Taisho and early Showa Japan---roughly 1910 to 1945---to demonstrate the polyvalent emergence of psychoanalysis. Although it initially developed with a strong connection to literary avant-gardists, psychoanalysis increasingly lost its radical allure and grew complicit with the 1930s nativist movement to define Japaneseness. Psychoanalysis moved from a radical, sexualized position of critique to a more frequently conservative site for articulating the contours of a national and colonial subject. In contrast to the historical narrative of the first chapter, the dissertation's second chapter adopts an appositive reading of sexuality, subjectivity, and time in prewar writings of poet and ethnologist, Orikuchi Shinobu.; Orikuchi's theory alongside the theories of time, seduction and the Other developed in the work of Jean Laplanche. Drawing from Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier, I read Orikuchi as a figure who enunciates the uneven temporal coordinates of modernity itself. The latter half of the dissertation deals exclusively with film and film criticism and turns its attention film and writing in the latter half of the twentieth-century. While the third chapter details the importance of psychoanalytic thinking in the career of radical film critic and director, Matsumoto Toshio, the fourth reads Matsumoto's 1969 film, Funeral Parade of Roses, for its psychoanalytically inspired critique of high-growth economics. The final chapter looks at the widespread anxiety within North American film criticism over psychoanalysis as an inadequate interpretive framework for Japanese cinema. This anxiety, it is demonstrated, belongs to a prevalent, yet problematically articulated North American stereotype of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Western theoretical framework. It suggests the need for further mappings of the Japanese experience of sexuality and subjectivity within regimes of the modern nation-state.