The shifting place of madness in modernizing Japan: Interview with Kazushige Shingu

Abstract

The authors present an interview with Kazushige Shingu, full professor at Kyoto University and eminent contributor to the field of Lacanian studies in Japan. By analyzing the words and the places connected to the cultural and social definition of mental illness, throughout Edo and Meiji periods up to the present, Shingu provides a comprehensive view of the symbolic meaning acquired by madness within the national identity formation process in modernizing Japan. The interview starts and ends with a reflection on subjectivity, as the experience of recognizing one’s being in relation to the world. Shingu discusses the notion of subjectivity, reading elements of the psychoanalytic theory in the light of the Sino-Japanese tradition.