A conversation with Shin’ichi HisamatsuIn 1958, three years before his death, Jung was visited by Shin’ichi Hisamatsu (1889–
1980), a Japanese Zen philosopher who was on his way back to Japan after lectures
in America. The protocol of their conversation is the subject of Chapter 7 in this
volume. Historically speaking, the late 1950s were the time that saw the first
worldwide increase of an interest in Zen Buddhism. For example, in 1957 D.T.
Suzuki, Fromm and DeMartino (1958) held a symposium on Zen Buddhism and
psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In the same year, Sato began to publish
Psychologia, an English journal from Kyoto University providing a medium for the
international exchange of ideas about psychology East and West. Hisamatsu’s lectures
in America and the conversation with Jung took place in this historical context.
From the dialogical viewpoint, this conversation would be assessed as a failure
because it failed to meet the most important condition for dialogue: each party’s
readiness to open his heart to the partner’s view and to make his standpoint relative
in search for a common ground. Neither Jung nor Hisamatsu was willing to free the
other from his stereotypes. Hisamatsu, showing little interest in the difference in the
character of psychology between Freud and Jung, wrongly called the latter the founder
of psychoanalysis, and only wanted to know whether or not the psychologist believed
that his psychology could and would transcend its alleged limitation. Sensing that
the Zen philosopher regarded him as a mere psychologist, Jung returned to the
characteristically agnostic stance he would take whenever he faced someone with firm
religious beliefs. The two men’s reactions after the conversation were very different.
Hisamatsu, on one hand, was satisfied with it because he had succeeded in finally
forcing Jung to say something beyond the assumed limitation of psychoanalysis,
which was akin to Hisamatsu’s own philosophy. Jung, on the other, was not content
with the conversation because he felt misunderstood and so did not give Sato
permission to publish the conversation in Psychologia. He ascribed the failure to the
difference in language and ways of thinking between the East and the West, as he
had done before, and proposed that each party be involved in the other’s practice, a
plan which he was too old to materialize and in which Hisamatsu is supposed to have
been hardly interested.
This conversation, however, was a challenge to both Hisamatsu and Jung. For
Hisamatsu, it was to be an invitation to modify his stereotype of psychology as a
superficial treatment of mental problems without any spiritual element. For Jung,
the encounter with Hisamatsu provided him with an opportunity of facing and
reexamining the basic premise of his psychology, a problem he had always struggled
with throughout his life.
The question on liberation from the collective unconsciousAfter a series of Hisamatsu’s somewhat aggressive primary questions like whether
psychotherapy could liberate us from suffering in one fell swoop, and Jung’s
hesitations to answer them directly, the conversation reaches the climax with
128 JUNG AND BUDDHISM