Language,cultural psychology,and family therapy: Japanese examples from an international perspective

Psychotherapists may find the study of foreign languages valuable in understanding the cultural psychology of relationships. The logic and grammar of the language used to form relationships may offer some insight into how relationships breakdown and can be restored in psychotherapy. Language and thought are inseparable in the Whorf and Sapir hypothesis.This paper illustrates how other-centeredness, indirection, indecision, and apology are embedded in Japanese grammar and become the foundation for Japanese relationships. Two other central ideas of Japanese culture,Amae (interdependency) andOmote/Ura (public and private selves), are also presented with implications for presenting complaints, therapeutic relationships, and treatment techniques.Revised version of a paper presented at the American Family Therapy Assoc, Washington, DC, June, 1986.     

Gender,meaning, and psychology

Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning and Science Wendy Hollway London: Sage, 1989     

Erikson,psychology, and religion

The writings of the late Erik H. Erikson (1) have contributed directly to the psychological study of religion, (2) were amenable to the efforts of others to develop normative theological arguments, and (3) might be seen as themselves examples of contemporary, nontheological accounts of the religious dimension of human existence. This paper begins by reviewing the principal contributions that Erikson made to the psychological study of religion, followed by a review of the uses that have been made of Erikson's work for normative/constructive activities in such areas as practical theology and pastoral counseling. I will then argue that Erikson's writings — when viewed in the vein of William James's radical empiricism and functionalist accounts of human religiosity — identify an irreducibly religious dimension to normative human functioning. Erikson's functionalism constitutes a form of nontheological religious thinking that speaks directly to concerns presenting themselves in contemporary culture.