Japanese culture is often invoked as an exemplary case by those concerned with the anthropology of the emotions, for we can observe in that culture one striking instance of the different forms that feelings take in different language systems and how certain feelings are brought to life when they are named as such. The argument is that people in places that are so distant and different from ‘us’ display and experience a range of emotions that will seem to Westerners very strange, far from what we assume to be normal. Far from pathologising another culture, though, an attention to the particularity of these feelings may also serve as a moral lesson to us about the limits of our own language.

Psychoanalysis itself would then have to take on a quite different character as a ‘talking cure’ if the talking is about feelings that presuppose a quite different relationship between child and parent and then, by implication, between patient and analyst. The Japanese word ‘amae’, for example, names a kind of emotion that the English term ‘dependence’ only imperfectly captures, for it cannot be pinned down so neatly by us in our language. Many studies of amae evoke aspects of a comforting nestling in the care of others in early life and the way a degree of indulgent helplessness would be anticipated, enjoyed and resisted later on when someone may go into analysis.