Dissertation Research: Therapeutic Practice in Modern Japan

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This project supports the dissertation research of a cultural anthropologist studying the changing definition of womens' social and psychological problems in Japan. The changes are from a traditional physical-medical model to one including mental health therapy, specifically dealing with feminist issues. Ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews will be used in three locations, a government-funded comprehensive mental health care center, a social casework department of a hospital, and the Tokyo feminist therapy center. The student will examine how these therapeutic practices provoke women to redefine stresses from marital, child-rearing, and work-related issues as social and political problems, rather then as medical pathologies. This research is important because the insight it will provide about the changing social and psychological issues confronting Japanese women will help us understand why this important society reacts as it does to modern events.