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III. SOCIO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
Erik Erikson (1950) described how varied and specific societal and cultural influences result in different modes of adaptation during the process of human psychological growth and development. He expanded on Freud’s biologically based psychosexual developmental stages to include psychosocial stages of human development beyond oedipal resolution, extending them over the life cycle. Doi’s concept of amae and its significance in understanding the specific nature of Japanese psychology can also be appraised in this context. Many social scientists and cross-cultural observers have noted the particularity of Japanese society and Japanese psychological adaptations. Doi’s concept of amae adds another dimension to this discourse. A few important characteristics noted as specific to Japanese society and culture include: 1. Hierarchically organized social relationships; 2. Group orientation over individual distinction; 3. Separation of private and public, inner and outside relationships in thoughts, feelings and conduct; 4. Emphasis on shame (generated by outside judgment) and guilt (expression of internal judgment); 5. Avoidance of conflict and the value of harmony; 6. Indulgent, responsive and permissive parental style during infancy and early childhood, followed by increasingly stringent social role assignment and behavioral control in later years. Widely recognized and keenly observed by cultural anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (1946) and the historian Edwin O. Reischauer (1977), and articulated further by Chie Nakane, the best-known Japanese anthropologist outside Japan (1970), the vertical hierarchical nature of most Japanese relationships is omnipresent. Related to and intertwined with it, the characteristics cited above are the cultural and psychological echo of four centuries of a feudal system of rigid political and socio-economic class stratification. Modernization with the influence of the West started in the late 19 th Century and accelerated after World War II with the new democratic government institutions and many societal changes in political, economic and technological public life. However, traditional cultural values and characteristics endure in contemporary Japanese life as psychological undercurrents. Reischauer (1977) notes the Japanese adaptive capacity for change and recognizes much human commonality between the East and the West. Dean C. Barnlund (1975), in his comparative cultural analysis of U.S. and Japanese adhesiveness of core cultural values transmitted as normative in a society, refers to amae as a representative of the “cultural unconscious.”
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