In this episode Dr. Kenichiro Okano displays how shame and social phobia could manifest differently between the Eastern and the Western countries, and investigates them from a psychoanalytical point of view. With his personal history of becoming a bicultural psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the United States and in Japan, he considers that while passivity and non-action induced by shame can be misunderstood in Western culture, it can potentially exert some paradoxical power and influence, at least in the Japanese society. In its conceptualizations, the dissociation construct plays a central role, consistent with its research and clinical experience. 

Dr Kenichiro Okano is a Japanese psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and professor of Clinical Psychology at Kyoto University Department of Education. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Japan Psychoanalytic Society. He is the author of 26 books on psychoanalysis, dissociative disorder, and neurobiology. In 2016 he won The Japanese Psychoanalytical Association’s Distinguished Publications Award.

This episode is available