The Japanese Critique of History's Suppression of Nature

If the discipline of history could be persuaded to lie on the analysand's couch, what psychic structure would be revealed?Could Sigmund Freud's theories be useful in uncovering the unconscious of historiography?'Ihomas Mann, it would seem, thought they could.In 1937, Mann delivered a talk to the New School for Social Research which suggested, perhaps unwittingly, that nature is the unconscious of history.Mann's concern is entirely on the side of history's Ego, which is in a "pathetic, well-nigh alarming situation.It is an alert, prominent, and enlightened little part of the Id-much as Europe is a small and lively province of the greater Asia.The Ego is that part of the Id which became modified by contact with the outer world; equipped for the reception and preservation of stimuli."''Mis European Ego faces weighty responsibilities."It is the Ego's task," Mann declares, "to represent the world to the Id-for its good!For without regard for the superior power of the outer world the Id, in its blind striving towards the satisfaction of its instincts, would not escape destruction.The Ego takes cognizance of the outer world, it is mindful, it honorable tries to distinguish the objectively real from whatever is an accretion from its inward sources of stimulation."'On the other hand, the vast primal mass of Asia and the Unconsciousness Id, Mann tells us, "knows no time, no temporal flow nor any effect of time upon its psychic process."Asia therefore is without time and thus without modernitys history.This neat dichotomy, which pits History, Ego, Consciousness, and the West against Nature, Id, the Unconscious, and the East, is in Manr~s words, "a very perspicuous biological picture indeed."And it is also the structure that Japan faced as it tried to develop its own modern history.What follows is an analysis, somewhat in Mann's terms, of history's development, its suppression of nature, and the response of Japanese authors to that fundamental structure.