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encouragement and reminders. These methods promote the child’s identification with caregivers in moderating aggressive drive and renouncing individual needs in favor of adapting to external expectations, thus arriving by a different path to superego formation. Nonetheless, increasingly complex and frequently restrictive external rules, roles, demands for harmony, obedience, etc., are difficult cultural values to be accommodated to, causing considerable stress on the still fragile individual psyche. Shame by outside judgment and the threat of withdrawal of a loving connection might be utilized to prompt compliance to superego demands in renouncing the child’s individual needs. In these conflicted negotiations of superego and id demands, regression might take place to the rapprochement stage of development where the child seeks temporary reassurance of symbiotic maternal comfort before again moving forward on an individual, separate path. Both Akhtar (2009) and Freeman (1998) describe the emotional refueling aspect of the function of amae . Freeman’s observation of amae as temporary, intermittent yearning and his emphasis on the reciprocal mutual benefit of the amae interaction support this hypothesis. Extending his observation of the mutuality of the amae interaction, it should also be understood that amae can be initiated by the “dependent” party primarily for the benefit of the other party. For example, the amae recipient might consciously or unconsciously sense an anxious mother’s need to be reassured by the child because the child’s need for separation may be perceived by her as a rejection ; amae can also meet the need of an insecure boss to feel power over an ingratiating subordinate, or an aging parent’s need to experience his/her value to a capable grown child. For that matter, sometimes ‘amicable’ amae behavior might camouflage a challenging aggressive demand couched in an appropriately dependent manner, which would correspond to Doi’s (1989) reference to ‘negative/convoluted amae.’ While Doi’s original definition of amae (1971, 1973) as “helpless desire to be loved” stresses the aspect of passivity, this passive dimension appears to have its own complexity. Just as Doi (1971, 1973,1989), Balint (1935/1965; 1968) sees amae as a primary biologically underpinned striving/primary need and wish for love, and Bethelard and Young-Bruehl (1998) consider Doi’s amae as the expectation to be indulgently loved, which they call cherishment, based instinctually and arising at birth. They, just as Doi before them, propose a reconsideration of the self-preservation ego-instinctual hypothesis, with respect to amae . In view of more recent infant research that indicates greater infant capacity for active engagement, the ‘passive-active’ spectrum, pertaining to amae, may need further study. In the context of amae , this activity observed behaviorally, for instance in the attachment studies of Bowlby (1971), reflects an internal experience, with attachment as its behavioral manifestation (Doi, 1989). We could hypothesize, that psychoanalytically amae presents a layered concept, which depicts an active instinctual/affective striving to receive love passively, to be indulged. An alternative to Doi’s defining amae as “desire-drive” (1971) would be to reformulate the definition of amae as a specific form of defense, particularly prevalent in Japanese psychology, though it certainly exists elsewhere, East or West. We might then see amae as the ego’s defensive operation, an “appeal for indulgence-allowance,” mediating demands of the superego and demands of the id, or individual desires wherever they might be located in the
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