Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 31 Aug 1993 01:39:15 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 31 Aug 1993 01:39:12 -0400 Message-Id: <199308310539.AA13591@eli.CS.YALE.EDU> Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0204; Tue, 31 Aug 93 01:37:42 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7391; Tue, 31 Aug 93 01:40:28 EDT Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 01:37:01 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: new attitudinals - the source X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Mon Aug 30 21:37:01 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Cowan asked about the 'new' attitudinals, which actually date back to 1991. I suspect that I talked them over with Athelstan, Nora and pc, whcih is why it didn't appear on Lojban List. The article stimulating the attitudinals appeared in "Wilson Quarterly" Winter 1991. WQ is the quarterly journal of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The emphasis of the organization is historio-cultural issues; it isn't likely to be a commonly available journal. The main article in question is "Western Science, Eastern Minds", by Sudhir Kakar, although the focus for us is on a sidebar within: "Psychotherapy in Japan: Hamlet without Gertrude". The article complex in general is discussing what happens when Western psychotherapy models collide with Asian cultures, emphasizing what about those cultures is incompatible with Western psychotherapy and indeed intellectual thought in general. The author is a psychotherapist trained in the US but being Indian is native culture. I will quote extensively: "The goals of Western forms of psychotherapy are then very much related to the individual even in those instances where the therapy, in its techniques, addresses the group. All Western therapies talk, in some fashion or other, about the growth, development, and self-actualization of the individual. They talk of increasing the individual's environmental mastery, his positive attitudes toward himself, and his sensse of autonomy. By contrast, in India I ahd the case of a 28 year old engineer who came to the initial interview accompanied by his father and sister. Bothe relatives described his central problem as one of 'unnatural' autonomy. As one said: "He is very stubborn in pursuing what he wants without taking our wishes into account. He thinks he knows what is best for himself and does not listen to us. He thinks his own life and career more important than the concerns of the rest of the family". Indian patients, lke Chinese and Japanese, have in their minds what might be called a >relational model< of the self, which is quite different from the individual model of the post-Enlightenment West. In Asia, the person derives his nature or character interpersonally. He is constituted of relationships. His distresses are thus disorders of relationships not only within his human - and this is important - but also his natural and cosmic orders. The need for attachment, connection, and integration with others and with his natural and supernatural worlds represents the preeminent motivational thrust of the person, rather than the press or expression of any biological individuality. ... The other set of assumptions, which derives from the relational model and is absorbed in the therapist's very bones from his culture, stresses that surrender to powers greater than the self is better than individual effort. The source of human strength, in the Asian view, lies in a harmonious integration with one's group, in entering into the kiving stream, naturally and unselfconsciously, of the community life, and in cherishing the community's gods and traditions." [From the sidebar, a survey of other scholar's writings on the subject:] "The Japanese ... [who are at least as secular as European cultures] still have a religion - that of the family. Because of the family's sacrosanct character, Freudian investigations into its workings - such as ambivalence toward a parent or a parent's role in a patient's neurosis or especially, the ways in which a maternal figure may not be all-loving and good - are practically taboo. "Such concepts", De Vos writes [George De Vos, anthro. dept at Berkeley], "cannot be pursued by a Japanese who wishes to remain Japanese". ... Even for adults, expressions of individuality are often considered signs of selfish immaturity. Freud's definition of psychological health described an autonomous individual. But for most people in Japan, De Vos writes, "autonomy is anomie - a vertigo of unconscionable alienation leaving life bereft of purpose". Consequently ... A neurosis ... is not the person's inability to achieve 'individuation' but his incapacity to fulfill role expectations. [Alan Roland, author of _In Search of Self in India and Japan_ (1988) says:] ... The all-important Oedipus complex, for example, has been transformed into nearly its opposite - the Ajase complex ...[wherein] the father is absent form the picture - and so is the irreconcilability. Although in adolescence the son may rage over the 'loss' of his mother's unqualified love, he finally repents after realizing her great sacrifices for him. [Takeo Doi, Japan's most famous psychoanalytic theorist has] ... challenged the entire freudian framework, in order to justify dependency. In _The Anatomy of Dependence_ (1973), Doi argued that Western vocabularies lack even the terms to understand, much less to appreciate 'amae' - the healthy Japanese "need" for psychological dependency. Indeed a pathological condition, 'hinikureta' (warping) is produced when one's sence of dependency is frustrated. " [end quoted text] The last paragraph in the context of the rest of the article, triggered me to look at the Lojban vocabulary to see if we could talk about the concepts. In the predicate space there is no real problem - there is no reason lujvo can't handle it. But since we are dealing with emotions here, and their expression, I noted that we have a preponderence of attitudinals that seem strongly tied to just the sort of 'Western' viewpoint that seemed to be challenged by these various authors without the corresponding 'relationship model' attitudes (indeed Lojban has tended to attract a lot of people of libertarian persuasions who tended in discussions of the attitudinal system to favor the individual-oriented ones - in particular, e'e was added at the suggestion of Eric Raymond, and I have thought of it as being especially tied to an individualist perspective. At the time we talked about adding these two new ones, I recall that e'e was discussed as an example of the 'bias'). Hopefully, the ones that I/we proposed will be understood in the relationship model senses: dependency is clearly to be seen in terms of a personal dependency relationship associated with the marked referent, and thus associates with 'amae'. lack could be coupled with this to express 'hinikureta', but is useful in other, 'even' Western mindsets for that kind of longing that isn't loss (i.e. grief), but isn't necessarily 'desire'. The article showed that these concepts are present and vital in intellectual and emotional life in all three cultures, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese (which is covered in least detail in the article set). As two of our six source languages, and observing a likely existing bias in our attitudinal set, it seemed a good idea to patch in what we understood the concepts to be, with possible fine-tuning, and/or others being added if we learned of further biases. I tried to make the emotional concepts expressed as broad as possible, so as to render them usable in Western cultures as well, where we recognize similar concepts and emotions. But the essential concepts are the Asian ones referred to in the article. Hope this ex post facto documentation is worth something. I really wish we had the capacity to seriously evaluate emotional expression in non-English cultures. Chinese, for example, has many monosyllabic 'attitudinals' defined in my dictionary (a large percenatge of the words starting with 'a', which s why I noticed), but with too little defintion to give a real sense of their usage and contrasts. But best to do what we can do when we can do it. lojbab