On the concepts of amae and the mother-group

Notwithstanding Freud's (1921) early linkage of psychoanalytic group psychology with patriarchal themes (i.e., father-leader), more recent findings suggest that the regression in group behavior in general, and in group psychotherapy in particular, tends to evoke frequent maternal ideations. In this connection, this article points to a phenomenological relationship between the individual's universal need to be at one with the internalized mother, as exemplified in the Japanese concept of amae and that of the Mother-Group. With amae serving as an explanatory construct for the group members' interpersonal relations (i.e., identifications and transferences), the idea of the Mother-Group ties in with the group entity's simultaneous supportive functions (i.e., "we are all in the same boat") coupled with its role as a collective arena for the reactivation of unconscious wishes for the nurturing mother of early childhood. In linking a Japanese psychological concept with another, which was developed in the West, I am disproving Rudyard Kipling's often quoted assertion that "never the East and the West shall meet." I was encouraged in this task by Takeo Doi's written comment to me that the idea of the Mother-Group "certainly can be linked with that of Amae. For instance, when the group functions as the Mother-Group, you can say that the participants are experiencing Amae in one way or another" (T. Doi, Sept. 17, 1993, personal communication). In an extended sense, one hopes this essay might even serve to revive our interest in the interrupted well-known early collaboration of psychoanalysts and of anthropologists, which had begun to forge a way to connect personality formation with its cultural context (LeVine, 1974). The insufficient attention paid to the influence of cultural factors on attachment behavior was recently decried by Bretherton (1997).