Beyond Love: Rediscovering Tenderness

In 1995, a buried footnote in an obscure book of psychoanalysis, Michael Balint’s The Basic Fault, changed everything for me. I was a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at the time. As part of my professional development I was in the second year of my own intensive psychotherapy. The traditional gold standard for training as a therapist (not widely required today) had three parts: course work, case work with patients under supervision, and a personal psychotherapy with a senior analyst.

I am a person who does my best learning when I am able to relate something to, or filter something through, my understanding of myself. This self-understanding includes where I have been, where I am now, and where I hope to be. Perhaps from a Western point of view this would be seen as narcissistic. But from an Eastern point of view this kind of learning would be considered The Way of the Sage, where “self-cultivation is the method of conducting study.” Indeed, these kinds of tenets appealed to me since I was a teenager, when I had the great good fortune to encounter Eastern philosophical traditions. I spent many hours learning how to be a humanist, ethical and kind, from the great Confucian classic, The I Ching: Book of Changes, and finding beauty and inspiration in the poetry of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse. I learned about compassion and nirvana from Buddhism and how to make every day a spiritual practice from Hinduism. I actually began to practice Transcendental Meditation in high school. My philosophical interests long preceded my professional training in psychology. To this day when someone asks me to remember back to my youth what I wanted to be when I grew up I say with unabashed delight, “I wanted to be a Sage!”

So there I was in the second year of my six years of training to be a Psychologist, feeling very out of sorts with my analyst in my personal psychotherapy. Feelings of anxiety, distress, depression, and consternation had surfaced. Why wasn’t I feeling my usual confidence and joy? I had now been seeing patients for two years– an eye opening, often heart wrenching experience, but one that I felt reverent toward. I knew that the privilege to be part of a person’s authentic journey was not to be taken for granted, just as my analyst, I was certain, sat in loving reverence toward my journey.

I was closer to middle age than adolescence when I embarked on this academic/professional journey. I’d spent years prioritizing family, husband, children, parents, but now my journey was requiring me to make myself and my endeavors a priority.

This was uncomfortable; I remember telling friends that the hardest part of going back to school was trying not to let it interfere in my family life and social obligations. The academics were easy, I told them. Trying to ensure that my husband didn’t suffer the discomfort of having me absent from my usual tending of him and the kids was the hard part.

One winter night we went out to a very fancy NYC restaurant for dinner with my sister, her husband and another couple. I arrived dressed to the nines but was soon discovered by the others peering surreptitiously at a “cheat sheet” in my pocket—studying for a test on the sly. My sister and I still joke about that night. It’s not hard to imagine that some of my discomfort in the therapy room was centered on being the focus, of having my needs and concerns out there, visible to others, on center stage, in another’s careful attentiveness. It was in this atmosphere that I first encountered amae.

At the time, one thing happening to me was a growing attachment to the therapy and to my analyst. I was not prepared for how important the therapeutic work had become for me or how safe and secure I felt with my analyst. I berated myself for having such feelings, discounting them as neediness and part of the grieving process—my mother had died suddenly just the year before.

Once I dreamt of two dancers in a pose on the cover of a book on ballet. Music from a popular song played through the dream images: “Gonna hold your body close to mine, gonna hold you in my arms forever, and this time, I swear, I’m never gonna let you go.” When I tried to interpret the meaning of this dream image and song, I told my analyst, “As long as it is in a book, reading and learning about transference and therapeutic technique, I don’t mind.  But my relationship with you, this “live” relationship, frightens me.” It was humorous but poignant to note that my unconscious had made a wonderful pun: in the dream it was in a book gifted to me that our partnership—our pas de deux—was revealed.

My therapy took on a rhythm: continual dreams expressing the wish for affection and support, followed by my berating myself over what I perceived of as “a weakness” for needing this closeness. It felt characteristic of me and more appropriate to not ask for help and just deal, however resentfully. Nonetheless I returned to the challenge, session after session. The dreams continued. Dreams of being warmly wrapped in blankets, of curling up closely to someone. Dreams showing the difficulties not in giving love and caring, but in receiving.  Dreams of my analyst and me sitting on separate rocks, driving in separate cars, but headed in the same direction.   “Dreamy neediness”  became my description for my feelings during this phase of my therapy.

“Is this attachment to my analyst negative?” was the big question I struggled with. I certainly felt that was the case.  Yet the warm feeling in my dreams and in the therapy room itself had me wondering. And although I was frightened by my feelings of longing, for dependency and affection, I stuck with it, determined to be brave.

Slowly, I began to notice a shift. I went from being angry at myself for having such feelings to being hypersensitive to any behavior on my analyst’s part that I thought revealed him as being inattentive. I was angry when he answered a phone call during a session; I was furious that he wasn’t friendlier to me when I ran into him in the market. I accused him once of being sleepy, and also berated him for insincerity. “How could anyone running a psychotherapy factory be true to me and my needs,” I snarled at him one day. Maybe I should just quit!  But I knew that once I got his undivided  attention I was going to fiercely protect it.

That summer I traveled to Bermuda with my husband and some close friends. Instead of vacationing I was furiously reading, pretending to be studying but actually trying to make intellectual sense of my discomfort in therapy. Sitting outside my cottage, perched above the Atlantic, the air heavy with humidity, I was deeply into a chapter called, “Primary Love” from Michael Balint’s The Basic Fault (1968). In it I learned of Balint’s theoretical interest in infant experience, and his therapeutic interest in regression. This is where a patient’s infant experiences are relived.  His investigation led him to claim that newborns live in a condition of relatedness to objects—people—that is influenced by the undifferentiated quality of fetal existence. He referred to this condition as life in the “harmonious mix-up” of baby in mother, like fish in water.

The first relationship bonds that occur after birth, Balint claimed, are ones in which we have no sense that others might have wishes and expectations that are not our own, so there is no need to seek power or make any effort: A newborn is in a harmonious condition of passive expectation. However, if this unconditional dependence on primary love is disturbed more than it normally would be by the demands of living and growing, the baby responds with desperation. Hatred is born, aggression springs up. This failure to feel primary love, or an unrepaired, even irreparable rupture of it, becomes a “basic fault.”

While reading I was allured by phrases such as, “The aim of all human striving is to establish—or, probably, re-establish—an all-embracing harmony with one’s environment, to be able to love in peace.” Suddenly I was stopped cold by a passage—actually an aside that Balint whispered to his reader in a footnote. He wrote:

Before going further, I wish to refer here to some clinical and linguistic observations of T. Doi (1962). According to him, there exists in Japanese a very simple, everyday word, amaeru, an intransitive verb, denoting ‘to wish or to expect to be loved’ in the sense of primary love. Amae is the noun derived from it, while the adjective amai means ‘sweet.’ These words are so common that ‘indeed the Japanese find it hard to believe that there is no word for amaeru in the European languages.’ Moreover, in Japanese there is a rich vocabulary describing the various attitudes and moods that develop if the wish for amaeru is frustrated or must be repressed. All these attitudes are known in the West, but they cannot be expressed by simple words, only by complicated phrases like ‘sulking or pouting because he feels he is not allowed to show his wish for amaeru as much as he wants to, thus harboring in himself mental pain, possibly of masochistic nature’, etc.

Two phrases by this unknown Japanese theorist, this Takeo Doi that Balint referenced, jumped off the page and seared themselves into my heart: The one that translated amaeru as “to wish or to expect to be loved,” and the one about frustration of this expectation as “sulking and pouting because he feels he is not allowed to show his wish to amaeru as much as he wants to, thus harboring in himself mental pain, possibly of masochistic nature.” I could see myself in the mirror of these phrases that came from the East, where there are everyday words for a baby’s deepest wishes.

During the rest of my Bermuda  vacation I was preoccupied with thoughts about my expectation to be loved and how it had sometimes been thwarted when I was a child, leaving me in a state of anxiety, and sometimes sulky. I realized that this grievance was still with me as an adult, and at the present juncture in my therapy my expectation to be loved, and the frustration of this expectation, were all transferred onto my analyst. That state of dreamy neediness was my transference to him of my amae, and I was hatefully angry at feeling so needy.

At that time, I began to have a strong intuition that there was a deep connection between Doi’s amae, this expectation for sweet love, which sits like a pulsing need in everyone’s self, and the curative dynamic of psychotherapy. I kept thinking that somehow therapy– the tie between the patient and the analyst–has to reach down into that core, beneath all of the defenses erected around it, and release it in some healing way.

Such a liberation, I imagined, would turn a person into a confident expector of love—first from the therapist, and, slowly, more generally, from those in their real life. Psychotherapy, I became convinced, could turn what appears frightening, even at times malevolent, into something benign, and sweet: the fear and fury of dependency transformed into feeling treasured, cherished.

Not long after my Bermuda revelations, I was in Widener University’s library using the Psych Lit database for a research paper. The internet and Google didn’t exist yet. The words amae, amaeru, amai, floated softly up into consciousness and I put them into my search. I did not expect to find anything, so it was all the more surprising when the search yielded a small body of work known as “amae psychology.” It was then and there that my dissertation, The Amae Environment: Theory and Therapy took shape.  Based on this work, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and I later co-wrote the book Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart.

The Words To Say Amae

Now that you’ve heard about my first encounter with amae, how my own world view was changed from the shock of amae, as I came to know about this hidden emotion in myself, let me tell you about Takeo Doi’s first encounter with amae  — as an idea, for he had obviously encountered amae  all his life as an experience. Doi’s recognition of amae also came through  shock — culture shock!

After some twenty years of reflection and writing short essays on amae, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi published his Amae no kozo (1971), which was translated into English as The Anatomy of Dependence (1973). This book  became an instant best-seller, going through an astonishing twenty-five printings in its birth-year. However, the appeal of the book was not to psychiatrists and psychologists as he had intended, but mainly to anthropologists, who wanted to understand more about Japanese identity and the cultural divide with the West he so aptly described.

In 1950, Doi left Japan for the first time to go to America to study psychoanalysis. While visiting an American colleague he was asked if he was hungry, and if he wanted some ice cream. He found these seemingly innocuous questions disconcerting. He recalls feeling hungry, but finding himself asked so directly,  and by someone he was visiting for the first time, he could not admit to it. Secretly hoping that the host would press him again, he later felt regretful that he had not been honest. This incident led him to think that a Japanese host would never ask a guest if they were hungry, but would simply serve them something.

In another home, he was asked before dinner what he would like to drink, and then, when he answered, how he would like his drink mixed. After the meal, which he was so relieved involved no decisions, he was asked whether he would like coffee or tea, with milk or without, with sugar or without. Again, a Japanese host would simply have served his guest.

The Americans, eager to please, wanted Doi to make himself at home and to help himself to whatever he needed. But the cascade of trivial questions instead exhausted Doi. A feeling of anxiety and displeasure rose up in him and  made him feel uncared for. Although intellectually he understood that his host’s gesture meant to “please take what you want without hesitation”, the feeling of the gesture had the flavor of, “nobody else will help you.”. He felt that his hosts were not as considerate nor as sensitive to others as were the Japanese. “As a result, my early days in America, which would have been lonely at any rate, so far from home, were made lonelier still, ” he writes.

If you’re an American reading this, you might be baffled by the anecdote.  What was wrong about being asked?  What if Doi was allergic to gluten, lactose intolerant, or had any other particular food allergy? What if he was served a beer or glass of wine and was in recovery? Doi’s American colleague was unaware that he was pushing an agenda, the independence of choice, which is ingrained in most Westerners’ social manners.  But take this anecdote out of the realm of food and drink preferences. Think of the many times you’ve felt hurt, neglected, or insignificant?  If you dig deep and honestly you’ll discover that your feelings are typically a reaction to not receiving what you were most needing or wishing for at the moment, even if you weren’t fully aware of what that was at the time.   It’s a wish that our partner, friend or colleague had simply read our minds, known exactly what we needed — a hug, an invitation to come along to a party, an offer to read an essay and give feedback — and provided it.  The essence of amae is about not having to ask or put forth effort, but to simply be warmly and sweetly attended to and fulfilled.

When Doi returned home from America after two years,   he was preoccupied with trying to understand what it was that made the Japanese what they were. He began to think about how his patients differed from American patients, imagining that perhaps there was something that would also make them feel out of their element.  Were they like Japanese travelers in an emotional America, he questioned?

As his preoccupation continued Doi’s first major challenge was to accurately record his patients’ communications in Japanese. He needed to make this shift because Japanese psychiatrists were trained to listen to their patients in Japanese, but to take their notes and make their diagnoses in German!  It was when he was in America that he discovered that American psychiatrists both listened to and recorded their patient’s material in their own language.

When Doi began to work fully in Japanese, he wondered if the special qualities of the Japanese psychology were rooted in the Japanese language. Specifically, the unique implications of the word amaeru began to occupy his thoughts, percolating out of his culture shock in America, followed by work with large numbers of patients at the University School of Medicine in Tokyo.

One day, Doi recalled, he approached the head of psychiatry, Professor Uchimura Yushi, remarking that the concept of amaeru seemed distinctive to the Japanese language. The professor mused for a few moments and then said, “I wonder, though—why even a puppy does it.” Amaeru-ing– presuming on someone’s love–seemed to the Psychiatrist-in-Chief so universal a phenomenon that it would be strange if only the Japanese had a word for it. But this was precisely Doi’s point—the peculiarity of the Japanese is not that they amaeru, as do all humans, indeed all animal species, but that they have a word for it. It is in the lives of the Japanese in a way that has a language. They value it.

Definitions at a Glance

Amae (ah-mah-eh).  Noun: A wish for sweet love or tenderness.

Amaeru (ah-mah-eh-ru). Verb: To depend on, presume upon or bask in another’s sweet indulgent love.

Amai. Adjective: the Japanese word for sweet.

Amae is associated with infancy, and the root experience of getting cherished is preverbal. Even before a baby can fully identify its mother and father cognitively, the baby seeks their sweet indulgence. And getting cherished retains this early ego, preverbal quality in the sense that there is no amae vocabulary for saying “I love you.”  The Japanese do not think that the deepest connection between a lover and the one they love, be it a lover, infant or family member, needs a verbal declaration.  Instead, amae is a silent emotion that communicates an unquestionable understanding between two people that they expect to lean on one another.

Doi felt that amae’s silence might explain why so many languages have no word for it. Getting cherished is done, not spoken about. Similarly, responding to a baby’s or an adult’s need for tenderness  is essentially a matter of picking up on silent and sometimes symbolic cues, not hearing them ask  for it with words. You have to intuitively,  if not intentionally,  “get it.”

The common Western attitude toward babylove—that it is babyish and even pathological if it appears in adult love—is reflected in the various efforts that have been made to translate amae and amaeru. Most of them sound dismissively negative. One scholar catalogued a number of English vernacular possibilities for amaeru: “to be babied, to act like a spoiled child, to coax, to be coquettish, to request favors, to avail oneself of another’s kindness.” Another suggested “to desire to be pampered,” and another “to seek the goodwill of others… flirt with, take advantage of, or butter up.”  Being a  baby who is  getting cherished  seems so hard to talk about that one translator even suggested that amaeru should be rendered “to play baby!”

In the West we do not have a word that specifically designates this babylove. In fact, we would find it strange to be reminded of babylove while speaking of love between adults, whether in relationships of mentorship,  friendship, romance, or marriage. If we think of babylove at all, we do not understand it as the ever-present foundation of all love. Rather, we conceptualize babylove as the love left behind by adolescents in their first excursions outside of the family, transcended by adults in both their passions and their family bonds. The idea that an adult’s capacity to love might require a capacity to re-experience babylove would seem shocking. But Doi went even further, declaring that people in the West are “so anxious to banish dependency needs from the adult world that they have almost succeeded in banishing it from the child world as well.”

Back in his consulting room, Doi came to believe that the concept of amae was extremely useful in understanding his patients. He also recognized that there was a rich vocabulary for expressing amae states of mind; in particular those pathologies of mind when amae is thwarted, when the desire to amaeru is frustrated.  In the next chapter we will delve more deeply into frustrated amae/tenderness  and how it manifests in our lives.

Doi  returned  to America for 14 months in 1961 as a visiting scientist at the  National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda,  Maryland.  While there, he frequently observed many therapy sessions in rooms with one-way mirrors. What continuously disconcerted him as he watched the dynamics in these rooms was how the well-meaning psychiatrists nonetheless appeared to be extraordinarily insensitive to the feelings of helplessness in their patients. He saw this as both the doctors’ inability to detect the concealed amae in the patients and a discomfort when their patients expressed this need more openly.  Surprised, he puzzled over how these specialists in depth psychology were unable to locate their patients’ distress, which to him was clearly based on their need for tender care that festered in the deepest parts of their hearts and minds.

In an attempt to explain this failure of empathy Doi reasoned that when one,  or more likely both, parties have been conditioned to disavow, deny, hide in shame, this part of themselves they cannot participate in a “heart to heart” emotional communication that is “telepathic, pre-linguistic, and does not need the medium of language.”  Using the lens of amae, Doi was not only making observations about American psychiatry but in truth taking a critical stance toward Western civilization, which he felt fostered insensitivity to human helplessness.

Doi believed that even in therapy the Western notion of “God helps those who help themselves” played a central role. The stance of the therapist may be described as, “I will help you if you help yourself.” This notion only increases a person’s helplessness, according to Doi. Such a conflicting message creates a double-bind: People would not seek therapy if they felt they could help themselves.

Taking all this into account, Doi posed a new description for the ideal process of psychotherapy: The helpless patient seeks help. Seeking help is the most vulnerable, most tender of all positions, and very difficult to admit. Therapy is intended to resolve this bind, and the doctor is there to give the kind of help that helps the patient not need help.

For Doi, finding the appropriate measure and means of helpfulness for  each patient is a crucial therapeutic task.  To me it sounds like a clarion call to all mental health practitioners, and indeed all those in helping professions, to get in touch with their own amae in order not to miss it in their patients.

This wonderful personal anecdote from Amer-Asian Clinical Psychologist, Carla Bradshaw (1990), shows how, after struggling for ways to describe amae, found the words to say it in this example from her own life:

During her childhood in Japan, Carla was taken by her Japanese grandmother to early morning public calisthenics sessions. As is customary, she was carried on her grandmother’s back. But one morning a friend of the grandmother’s said mockingly: “Such a big girl to be on the grandmother’s back! Look! Your feet nearly touch the ground.” Carla became suddenly aware that she, at age five, was almost as tall as her diminutive grandmother. “I had felt so nurtured by her that I had indulged in a fantasy with her of still being nearly an infant. It was not until this friend mocked me in her kindly but critical way that I realized what a comical scene we must have presented. I do not recall that my grandmother was shamed or embarrassed by her friend’s comment. Rather it was I who felt some shame and stopped indulging myself in this way. I do not know when I would have stopped riding on her back or when she would have begun to object, but I suspect that she would have allowed this until I was ready to stop on my own.” In the West, a five-year-old might be carried as a special treat or game, but if a parent or grandparent made the ride a matter of course, alarms about “developmental arrest” would sound.

It is in such anecdotes that the importance and power of amae can be understood. So with that in mind I’d like to ask you to pause right now and do what I ask my students to do when I first give a class in the material you have just read. Take out an old fashioned 3 x 5 card –or your 21^st century cell phone –and write down the first thing that comes to mind when you think of amae, amaeru, or amai.

Don’t think too long or too hard. Just let something gently surface up from your subconscious and jot it down. Hold on to this: in the next chapter we will hear some of my student’s responses to this assignment, which may trigger even deeper understanding of why amae–and our American word for it, tenderness– is in such short supply and what we each need to do to bring more of it into our lives.  More tenderness will enrich you and your connections to each other, I promise.

The culture shock that Doi had felt in America allowed him to come into a new sensibility — the sensibility of amae.  Once home, he began to see amae everywhere — in himself, in his patients, in books, in movies.  And that is exactly what happened to me and what I hope happens for all of you, Dear Readers.  I believe we can collectively unleash more  of the consciousness of amae into our desperately tenderness-deprived world, and in so doing alleviate much of the unnecessary pain, suffering and alienation we see all around us.  Together we can make this the best of times, and not the worst.