Psychoanalytical Observations of Japanese Ukiyo-e
Mother-Child-Relations Past and Present
Osamu KITAYAMA, Tokyo, JapanI. INTRODUCTIONIn Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, we can observe various types ofhuman relations, and every piece is interesting as a material which tells the daily livesof people in the Edo period (1600-1867). In the variety of those pictures, the reason
why we are particularly interested in the theme of mother-child relationship is obvious.
First, psychoanalysis, which is my specialty, puts emphasis on the past, that is,experiences in childhood, as determinants of our mind. As psychoanalytic therapy
proceeds, the topic of the dialogue often goes down to the problem of the pasthistory and then deeper down to its origin so as to help us to solve it. This is why
psychoanalysis has held its theoretical position that the present is a repetition of thepast, just as Japanese proverbs go “The soul of a three-year child continues to 100
years old” and “Sparrows never forget to dance until they are 100 years old.” These
proverbs could be translated in English as “What is learned in the cradle is carried to
the grave” or “The child is father of the man.”Thus, the analytic therapist is expected to study the theories of psychologicaldevelopment as a model to analyze the past. It would be quite beneficial for
psychoanalytic training and practice if the typical past of ordinary people, that is,
psychological development in childhood, is clarified and formulated in proper
language. At the same time, some people are interested in the direct observation ofbabies and mothers. The scientific techniques for observing mother-child relationshiphave been considerably advanced by scholars. The important issue, however, is not
only to observe mother-child relationship from outside but to try to understand how
the child himself or herself experiences it.
Besides, our narrative past is greatly influenced by the way we now recall
and tell it in the present cultural situation. Infancy is influenced by the way ofchild-rearing, and the “recalled past” is naturally influenced by the culture. Bothlanguage and child rearing subtly or greatly differ depending on the culture one
belongs to. This is why I became interested in studying paintings of infants andchildren as a possible clue to examine how we tend to recall things from the past,learning how our artists visually describe our childhood.
So, I'd like to show Ukiyo-e, a huge collection of Japanese paintings
produced about 200 years ago. Before examining each of them, let me explain
briefly about Ukiyo-e itself. Although some of them are hand paintings, we can see
their original beauty best in wood block prints. The main themes of the pictures also
include scenes from theatrical play and portraits of beautiful women, actors, andSumo -wrestlers Some of them are historical scenes, flowers, birds and scenery. Also,
there is a group of pictures called “Syun-ga” which describes a variety of sexual1activities between men and women. This type of pictures were prohibited to publish
openly until some decades ago.
Most of the pictures I show you today are usually called “Bijin-ga,” or picturesof beautiful women, but you also find children accompanied by women. It was not
until I had a look at the picture book entitled “Children in the pictures of floatingworld,” published in 1993, that I noticed the existence of those children in “Bijin-ga.” I
suppose most people were so eager to look at beautiful women that we didn't haveenough room to pay scientific attention to the mother-child relationship in thesepictures.
II. VIEWING TOGETHER
I have so far investigated nearly 15,000 copies of Ukiyo-e and discoveredthat the number of pictures in which a child was painted was approximately 500,
and of those, that of a mother-child relationship was about 370. Through classifying
these pictures, I realized that there were several patterns of the mother-childrelationship which repeatedly appeared.
Here, let me take a look at a typical Ukiyo-e print portraying a mother andchild. They are playing together with a toy windmill. What I noticed was that thesepictures repeatedly appear with mother and child viewing the same object just likethe mother and child in this picture. Besides, the same posture was also repeated in
pictures consisting of adult characters too. Thus, I came to have an interest in thisposture as it conveys an emotionally significant relationship, and I named the figureof more than two persons viewing the same object as “viewing together”.
My first interest is the fact that it spreads out or opens a dual relationship. In
psychoanalysis, the process of separation of a strongly-bound mother and child has
aroused our interests enormously. According to the discussion of transitional objects
by D. W. Winnicott(1953), a pediatrician and child-psychoanalyst in England, anobject such as a blanket plays an important role as a medium of illusion in theprocess of mother-child separation. We can now broadly redefine this transitional
object, which mediates the dual relationship and facilitates the opening of the
exclusive relationship of mother and infant.
Before examining the contents of Ukiyo-e in detail, we have to answer thequestion whether we can treat the mother and child relationship described in
Ukiyo-e as proper research material(by Utamaro, the mother is helping the boy tourinate). First, the purpose of producing these works was not to describe themother-child relationship but to describe mainly beautiful women. It is a feature ofthese pictures that the women painted as mother were always young and pretty,
sometimes erotic and partially naked, that is pornographic to some people. Besides
the relative absence of girls may show sex discrimination. And in those pictures father
figures are absent. The fact that buyers, sellers and artists were all men distorted thecontent of pictures and therefore virtually almost all of the child characters wereboys, with whom men identified themselves, and that the parental figures werepainted as mothers whom babies want to see.
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Ⅲ. RESEARCH RESULT(1) Classification
Bearing in mind those artificial distortions, when classifying the mother-childrelationship described in these pictures, I tried to be careful about the sexual
meaning. And, I paid more attention to visible things such as objects which mediate
the adult woman and child as well as the distance and the posture between the
two. The eight categories I used in classification are as follows:・Coherence
・“Viewing together” with body contact
・“Viewing together” without body contact
・Face to face・Parallel・Support
・No relationship・Others
Although you may grasp the meaning of this classification by looking at thenames above, let me supplement with some explanations. “Coherence” is the casewhen mother and child physically merge. “Support” is when the woman supports aninfant who plays with an object. In this picture, the object is a cat and we can callthis a variation of “Viewing together” because this woman physically shares the catwith the child. In a “Parallel” relationship, the mother works with one object while thechild plays with another object in parallel. This parallel relationship may imply a
psychological connection which could also be a developmental variation of“Viewing together.” In this picture (by Tamagawa Shucho), it is clearly expressed
when the child plays with rice powder and the mother makes dumplings from it
while they sit in “Parallel.” The child works with powder and the mother works with
dumplings; and both are members of the same family.
Based on this classification, I conducted a survey of 350 Ukiyo-e prints
portraying the mother-child relationship. The result was that the percentage of theappearance of what I call “Viewing together” was more than 30%. If we add“Parallel” and “Support” to this, we can say that approximately half of the mothers
and children in these pictures have relationships through a certain medium of abridging object(s) in terms of “Viewing together”. This ratio is quite high.
(2) Emotional Transience
Next, I'd like to discuss an emotional characteristic of the objects which themother and the child view together. There often appeared objects which may bedescribed by expressions such as “floating away”, “transient” or “unstable anduncertain.” Concrete examples are a hazy moon like this, a swaying fish,
cherry-blossoms symbolizing short lives, faces reflected on the water, and fireflies
lighting and dimming. These objects are likely to appear quickly and fade awaysoon. They are not only Fort/Da but also Da/Fort, and their state of going on and off,3

appearing and disappearing, conveys a sense of transience (Kitayama 1998). The
snow rabbit is sure to melt and disappear as time goes by.
This (by Suzuki Harusige) is an excellent piece. The artist precisely seized themoment when the object is about to disappear. The important point is that the soap
bubble is blurred and we can see the empty space after the bubble disappears.
The sense of transience is the important meaning of the disappearing bubble in thispicture.
Although transition and transience go together quite often, psychoanalysts
usually discuss transition rather than transience. Winnicott. in his discussion(1956) oftransitional objects wrote, “Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected, sothat in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated tolimbo････It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning････” (p.5). He, I
think, was describing the feeling of transience as well as transitional movement.
Those which I mean here by “transition” and “transience” in English are
different concepts in everyday language in Japan, as “hakanai”(adj.) or“hakanasa”(n.), which we usually think to be equivalent to “transient” or“transience,” clearly means emotions and sentiment referring to “mortality;transiency; evanescence; emptiness; frailty” (NEW JAPANESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY,Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1954, p.371) .
If I may simplify matters, these objects are transitional in space, and transientin time. I want to differentiate them clearly for transition is phenomenologicaldescription of movement while transience is mainly an emotional state although
they usually go together. I think that if it is mourned, the transitional object becomes
emotionally transient rather than just transitional. In my opinion, transition can be just
joyful but it is often accompanied with a sense of transience or transiency which ismore or less painful sentiment sometimes involving even an artistic sense of beauty
as well as senses of sadness, emptiness and depression.
In passing a Japanese word Arigatou, which is almost equivalent to “thankyou” in English, literally means “difficult to exist,” so it is extremely important toappreciate the transience of things. In Japan there is a concept of Monono-Aware
which is a literal and aesthetic ideal in Japan and which, at its core, refers to “adeep, empathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifest in nature andhuman life, and it is therefore usually tinged with a hint of sadness; under certain
circumstances it can be accompanied by admiration, awe, or even joy” (Japan:
An Illustrated Dictionary, Tokyo:Kodansha, 1993,p.1002).
So I have to quote Sigmund Freud in his well-known essay “Vergänglichkeit(On transience)” (1916) here. He wrote, “Aber ich bestritt dem pessimistischen
Dichter, daß die Vergänglichkeit des Schönen eine Entwertung desselben mit sichbringe. Im Gegenteil, eine Wertsteigerung! ” (Freud, 1916). (I did dispute thepessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its
worth. On the contrary, an increase in worth!) (p.305). We, West and East, aremeeting here in terms of transient beauty.
4(3) Two Ways of Communication
Furthermore we have found two types of communications in the “Viewing
Together.” The first category of communication we see between them is a verbal
one and this concerns the linguistic use of symbols. In the area of language
acquisition, developmental psychologists emphasize the transition from mutuallyshared experience between mother and child to the use of language. From thispoint of view, J. Brunner (1975,1995) stressed the importance of “joint attention.” Thechild follows mother's eyes and looks at what the mother is looking, and vice versa.
As you can see even in this case of frightened child, the united mother and child
may be talking about the same object to which they are paying attention together.
It makes us feel as if we can hear their voices when we look at the picture. This very
primitive triangle relationship, formed by mother, child, and object, becomes thefoundation to discover, share, and use the symbol, which will be repeated countlesstimes throughout life.
The second type of communication is a non-verbal one, that is, anemotional communication often accompanied by a bodily contact. As theclassification of “Parallel” indicates, it is important that the two people are viewing
an object side by side, with their shoulders abreast, not staring at each other. I havefound that people tend to feel emotions such as warmth, trust, joy, fear, hopefulness,sadness and transience which they communicate in such a side-by-side position.
Yoko Yamada (1987), a Japanese developmental psychologist, calls thiskind of human, or mother -child, relationship as “abreast relationship.” She found that
we tend to remember our mother-child relationship like this illustration drawn by oneof her girl students. The popularity of side-by-side relationships has been also pointed
out with regard to Japanese human relationships often shown in movies directed by
Yasujiro Ozu, a Japanese great movie director. This elderly couple in the plate isviewing the sea(taken from “Tokyo Story”), while the lady is going to die as the story
develops although they do not know it yet.
This is my favorite. The couple of a mother and child is staring at a hole of anumbrella, but what is more important is the emotional relationship with a bodily
contact between the two people, painted in the center, viewing the hole together
rather than the seemingly meaningless hole. We do not know whether the child istalking or not, and we are not sure what the child is looking at. But we see here therich non-verbal communication, which is emotional and bodily. So, what do you feelthey communicate non -verbally?
Endo, my colleague psychologist, has suggested to me that intra-dyadic
communication is more important than extra-dyadic communication in Japanesenursing couples. The latter, extra-dyadic communication refers to the verbal
communication in which they talk about a third object outside the dyad while theformer, intra-dyadic communication, mainly refers to the non-verbal emotional one,which is sometimes bodily communication in which they communicate warmth,
safety, interest, sadness and transience too.
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So I would like to show you many more examples of “viewing together” inother artistic categories outside Ukiyo-e. Uemura Shoen(1875-1949) had madecomplete replicas, seemingly unconsciously, as she was not only a female painterbut also a mother. In one picture we cannot see what they are looking at while thebond of intra-dyadic communication in it is a central figure.
Ⅳ. COMPARISON(1) Figures of the Holy Mother and ChildIn Western art, mainly in Italy, we can find much more figures of the Holy
Mother and Child than those of an ordinary mother and child which Western
painters somehow did not draw. Although we can't make a precise comparison
since Western art doesn't have a genre of Ukiyo-e, the mother and child mediatedby some objects is seldom produced and the ratio of its appearance in my samples
is approximately 5%. In this relatively rare picture (by Leonardo da Vinci), they aresharing little flowers. In many cases of the Holy Mother and Child, the two don't seem
to share real, visible objects, but they appear to share something more eternal orabsolute, that is the land of God.
Besides, it is notable that they are already separated and have begun to live
individually. The baby in those picture, as you know, almost always looks strong andvery independent.
I, however, have found many examples of interdependency and emotionaland bodily communication in Christian reliefs and sculptures maybe because of their
merging nature of mediums. These pictures have been taken from a book,published in Germany, “Madonna und Kind: Das haeusliche Andachtsbild im Florenz
des 15. Jahrhunderts” (R.G.Kecks, 1997). Here the mother and child are sharing thesame world. The baby or the child in reliefs looks more emotional and dependent on
the mother. I think that as artists or craftsmen have to create two characters fromone piece of medium, psychology of Amae(Takeo Doi), that is, a Japaneseconcept of dependency, or mutuality between them is naturally induced in theirworks because of this oneness of the medium. The concept of Amae roughly refers
to “needs to be loved” or dependency need, which is accepted more in Asia thanin West where you tend to think that dependency is a sign of weakness or pathology
so that this is usually suppressed.
(2) Individual Experiences
It is said that most of the works in Western art have been produced toachieve eternal value, probably because of the fear of transience, but I have foundsome pictures in Western art that do contain transience in their themes.
For instance, J.-B. Simeon Chardin, a French painter in the 18th century,
found values and beauty in materials and foods in daily life rather than in invisible
worlds or abstract and metaphysical ideas. Appreciating his picture of a boy playing
with a soap bubble, it seems that he is experiencing the object by himself, not clearlyshared with someone. And he looks very lonely.
6In his another work which also shows a soap bubble as a theme, an infant isplaying with a soap bubble using the water while a woman is doing laundry, looking
away or watching out. So, I see this child here is experiencing maybe a sense oftransience, an emotion of loneliness and a dependency on his own.
(3) Clinical Tragedy
You may say that the dependency or interdependency is too idealized inJapan. As a psychiatrist I must say you are right as far as this may cause us tragic
disillusionment from any idealized interdependency, and traumatic maternal
deprivation, as we see many clinical cases which are fairly similar to your cases inwhich you are suffering from any sudden loss of love object. That is why we arelearning a lot from psychoanalysis you have developed.
Furthermore we have many clinical cases of “primal scenes” while someJapanese children also suffer from complicated involvement with the parental
sexual intercourses. In Japan, there also exist numerous woodcut prints called
Shun-ga, which portray comically a variety of sexual activities of adults. As we usually
sleep in the same room, those pictures, which are full of exaggerations, testify theexistence of some children’s sexual involvement. It is only psychoanalysts who can
detect and prove its pathological possibilities in infancy which are usually suppressed
and artistically denied sometimes with laughter. I am sure he is showing surprise andmaybe mockery.
Ⅴ. CONCLUSION
It is suggested to me that particularly a sense of transience anddependency needs are being experienced individually in West while they are“consensually validated” in Japan. Here seems to be a relative difference between
West and East.
But I have found one German artist who is very exceptional at this very
important point. Casper David Friedrich(1774-1840) made the famous works which I
had been looking for and found at last. We could enjoy here the sharp sense oftransience and even beauty of loss shared in a shoulder-to-shoulder relationshipalthough you sometimes have to be all alone.
The Ukiyo-e pictures show how the sophisticated sense of emotionaltransience develops into our cultural entertainment. By having gone through an
illusory tie with mother and its consequent disillusionment, we now can appreciatecherry blossoms, enjoy moon-viewing, snow-viewing, and often view objects
appearing and disappearing, and fireworks together with others. Even here in the
middle, we find a child and a mother figure supporting him. Through these pictorial
experiences, we can learn a sense of mortality and enjoy the transience of life.
In the end, if I were to inquire the today’s significance of this study, I willanswer firstly that it would be beneficial for mutual understanding. Whether we like itor not, as far as we live in a certain culture, I believe that these cultural factors havean influence on goals and processes in our everyday life as well as clinical practice.
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It seems to me that even the rabbits viewing together the moon in this picture areappreciating the theme of transience as well as warmth, maybe friendship. From myclinical experiences, I can say the therapist and patient in analytic therapy often
start working together to grasp this mature sense of transience towards and throughthe termination phase, like we here are all together watching and enjoying thosebeautiful pictures coming here and going away now.
Lastly I would like to show you a few Japanese picture-postcards in which I
am now interested.
[REFERENCES]• Bruner,J. (1975). The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant. Nature,
253,265-266.
• --------- (1995). From joint attention to the meeting of minds: an introduction. In
Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, ed. C. Moore & P. J.
Dunham. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.1-14.
• Doi, T. (1973). The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo: Kodansha.
• Freud, S. (1916). On Transience. S. E. 14.
• Kitayama, O.: Transience: its beauty and danger. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, vol.79, part 5, pp. 937-950 (1998)．
• Kitayama, O.: Prohibition and transience. In: Mankind’s Oedipal Destiny, ed. P.
Harrtocollis. Madison: International Universities Press, pp. 251-269 (2000).
• Kitayama, O.: Japanese mothers and children in pictures of the floating world;
sharing the theme of transcience. In: Psychoanalysis and Art, eds. E. Blum, H.
Blum, & J. Amati-Mehler. Madison: International Universities Press, pp.289-299(2003).
• Kumon Children's Research Institute (1993). Children in Pictures of the Floating
World. Osaka: Kumon Institute of Education.
• Yamada, Y. (1987). Kotobanomaeno Kotoba. Tokyo: Shin-yosha.
• Winnicott, D. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,34,89-97.

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