Career
Doi was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tokyo and a medical adviser to St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo. He was also Director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Japan. He taught at the University of Tokyo (1971-1980) and at International Christian University (1980-1982). He wrote numerous books and articles both in Japanese and in English.
Doi was best known for his influential explanation of contemporary Japanese society in the work The Anatomy of Dependence, published in 1971, which focused extensively on amae inner feelings and behaviors that show individuals innate desires to be understood and taken care of -- as a psychoanalytical concept and theory. The Anatomy of Dependence was described by Harvard professor emeritus Ezra Vogel as "the first book by a Japanese trained in psychiatry to have an impact on Western psychiatric thinking." Others critiqued Doi's theories as merely a variety of nihonjinron.
In 1986, Doi published a further book, The Anatomy of Self, that expanded on his previous analysis of the concept of amae by a deeper examination of the distinctions between honne and tatemae (inner feelings and public display); uchi (home) and soto (outside); and omote (front) and ura (rear) and suggests that these constructs are important for understanding the Japanese psyche as well as Japanese society.
Doi died aged 89 in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Takeo Doi
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)