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Led by Eileen Dunn, a seasoned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, The Art of Listening explores the transformative power within the space between speaker and listener. Join us and our guests on this collective journey of self-discovery, as we navigate the depths of human connection and the power of listening.
Koichi: [00:00:01] What I need is to go back to the original point of meaning. It is just a coincidence. Just the constellation of a coincidence. I could have been him. I could have been her. So all human beings, in my understanding, is to be in the same universe.
Eileen: [00:00:30] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth Talk therapy. Joining us today is Koichi Togashi. As each of us maps out our sense of self, who we are, what we feel, where the ends of us meet, the beyond, we are bound to encounter something else, something foreign that will thicken its skin with time. Same as we flesh out the details of who we are. From this peculiar meeting curiosity grows, asking the question of what more could be. Again and again, never quite landing on an exacting truth. Could I grasp what others are living and breathing through? How do I bridge this divide to reach the other shore? Can I unveil just enough in others to find a shared plane of existence? Or as Koichi Togashi likes to put it.
Koichi: [00:01:42] We could go back to original meanings, original point of human encounters in which he and I and she and I were in the same universe.
Eileen: [00:02:00] Our conversation today is an attempt at finding each other. With Koichi we explore how division seeps into language as we seek to tell our individual stories, and we find that even the softest of words like empathy serve to label a contradiction, to be different yet reaching out. Accepting the insufficiency of language, Koichi will revisit moments of deep connection, locating their place of origin, which he calls the psychoanalytic zero. But before we join him in conversation, I ask you once more to consider a few questions throughout the episode. In your heart of hearts. What makes you feel that you belong in the world? Aligned with your surroundings, even as you grow into yourself and further away from all you once knew. What place in your mind or in the world do you return to when you feel a deep longing for connection and understanding? To give us food for thought? Let us speak to our guest, Koichi Togashi, a psychoanalyst practicing in Japan and the United States. He's the author of the Psychoanalytic Zero Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues. The heart of your message as I got it and get it is something about what connects us as human beings. You know what transcends the differences between East and West... And how do we think about ourselves as human beings? You know, in relationship with our patients as human beings. Listening is what connects us with our patients, with each other, and with ourselves as human beings. You know, it's that quality of listening to really, really hear. So in the spirit of all that and my connection I feel I have with you as we come into this, thinking back to growing up, just reaching into your own personhood from the beginning of your lifetime, you know, do you think that the skill of listening, the capacity to really listen, was something natural to you from your youth? Or was it something that you had to work hard to learn.
Koichi: [00:04:35] Thinking back my childhood. I was not the listener... and interested in human beings...But it's very hard for me to listen to people. Then I get a training as a clinical psychologist, and I went to the New York City and I got a training in psychoanalysis. I Learned a lot. I learned a lot how we can diagnose, how we can assess a patient, how we can label a patient as a patient. So I thought I was very good at diagnosing assessing patients, but I did not think I was very good listener because I found myself forgetting how my patients are... Human beings. After I had a session with my patient, I always think I missed something important voice of my patient ... The more I believe I am good analyst and psychologist to label the patient, the more I feel I'm not a good listener. So this is my struggle. I have struggled a long time as a therapist. So this is the one of the reason why I try to have new theory to be connected to a patient. Real human beings.
Eileen: [00:06:12] New theory. Say more.
Koichi: [00:06:15] New theory is a theory which helps me to experience myself and my patients, both as a human being. And psychoanalysis has, you know, several schools of sorts. So I am a self psychologist. I'm self psychological And intersubjective theorist. The self psychology and intersubjectivity focuses on empathy, the term empathy. The empathy is very helpful word a beautiful word which helps me to connect with patients. The patient in mind. But I'm not satisfied with the concept. It is a beautiful word, but to me, when we say we are empathetic to a patient, there is a basic premise that they and I are different. There is a basic premise that I and others are different because, you know, we say we are empathic with them, meaning I know they are a different person from me. I am not them. So we have to transcend and go beyond the self and other differentiation. You know, some people healthy, some people are poor and some people are wealthy. There's many division here. He's a patient... i am not... You know, distinctions.
Eileen: [00:07:49] Dichotomies.
Koichi: [00:07:50] Yeah, dichotomies. But it is just a coincidence. Just the constellation of a coincidence that I... that I was not being abused, but she was. I was not the victimizer, but he was. That's just to me, it's a due to the constellation of coincidence. I could have been him. I could have been her. So all human beings, in my understanding, is to be in the same universe. It's it's it's eastern idea. But the Western people have trained it's like and a training in a New York City for five years. And they gave me the important concept empathy. But. As long as I use the term an empathy. I don't believe that we can go beyond or transcend self and other differentiation. What I need is to go back to the original point. Of meaning. Because it is my belief that we are human beings. So. How we can go back to the original point before we are divided. So this is a theory. I probably need it.
Eileen: [00:09:17] Instead of being about. The fact that we're different is something about what we share or what makes us connected most fundamentally.
Koichi: [00:09:30] Yeah, don't like the word connection because connection means. Two different people are connected.
Eileen: [00:09:38] Okay, right. You're that sensitive, right?
Koichi: [00:09:41] Yeah. So what I'm thinking is it's related to my background. You know, I've grown up in this. You know, in Japan, I always feel I am alien, I am... and I am not connected to the community. I know I'm a Japanese, I speak Japanese, but my way of thinking. Is sometime criticized by the people around me. And you are not Japanese. Your way of thinking is so different from them. There is one of the reason why I decided to go to New York. I looked for the place in which I feel more secure and connected. New York City is very wonderful city to me because there are people so different. I don't have to be worry about my, you know, myself. I am me and it's so obvious that they and i are different. But same time. I went to New York. I entered in the United States. July 30th, 2001. It's one month earlier than 9/11 attack. Wow. And I lived in the 46th Street in the Midtown of Manhattan and very close to in the downtown. But it's, you know, it is interesting experience to me. The night of attack. I was very shocked by the terrorist attack. But same time, the 911 helps me. To accommodate or, you know, connect it to the New York people. The first one month after I entered into the United States, I suffered from deep, deep culture shock.
Koichi: [00:11:36] I found myself feeling alone and lonely and disconnected to the people because then I left everything behind in Japan. I quit my job. I leave my friends or, you know. But after September 11th, I sensed that all New Yorkers are, you know, get connected, get together. We are all survivors or we are victimized. So that's helped me to adjust myself to the new city. But a few months after I recognized that I am a Japanese, east Asian. Heritage. So I feel safe in the New York City. But how, you know, Arab people experience this incident, how Islamic people experience the kind of, you know, environment. So it means that to me, we create connection by. Dumping out other people... If we create division. Then we try to survive in this world. The human connection is very helpful. It's important. But at the same time, human connection creates division. That's maybe big experience to me and it's motivated me to seek a new theory. So what I'm thinking is how we could go back to original meanings, original point of human encounters, in which he and I and she and I were in the same universe. I could have been him and he could have been me.
Eileen: [00:13:38] Listening to Koichi, I am struck by the resilience and the plasticity of his thinking. Amongst the rubble of a city torn by tragedy. He finds trauma exposed anew as a place of connect and disconnect. What a fascinating discovery. On the one hand, bearing the brunt of tragedy brings us together, submitting to its weight. We lose the same. We grieve the same. We survive the same. On the other hand, trauma hinders our ability to reach further than what we can see. We grow defensive, territorial, defining with a rigidity. We mistake for strength. Who is allowed to share our sorrow? We push away whoever is left beyond these limits. The borders of our understanding. Like both sides of a picture laid flat in a diptych. Trauma lets us in on a hidden place. Wherein lies the original point of connection. But this shared humanity is not contained in trauma. If anything, trauma is only a door we step through to access it. Hence, for Koichi, the tragic events of 911 were a passage, a route through which he caught a glimpse of something new, a different kind of thinking. It really was just that moment when you came to this country, in that moment in your lifetime, and it contributed to your experience of connecting, but also the launch of the thinking that you've been doing since then. I could be you. You could be me, right? Is that what you mean by the psychoanalytic zero? Yeah. Yes.
Koichi: [00:15:29] It is the original point we can go back to. To me, it a trauma point. Trauma. Some people believe trauma destroy and the human world. And some people believe the trauma creates a human division, human divide. But I don't believe trauma creates something. A human being creates trauma because we have to label. We have to name. he, she and I. And this is you. This is me. We human being. Name it. That's create the trauma to me. So my challenge is how we therapist go back to the original point before we name the word... Am I crazy?!
Eileen: [00:16:27] No, I mean... I think again, I think that what you're putting words to and words are labels which again have their function but also their limit. But in an effort to communicate and share your thought that it's just profoundly fundamental that there's something much bigger and original. And enduring that we share. Then what distinguishes us or comes to apparently separate us or distinguish us.
Koichi: [00:17:07] Yeah, but I'm not saying that the concept of zero or the player witness is an idea which should praise the empathy or other psychoanalytic term. And also, I don't think we can become our patient. The patient and I are different. It's obvious to me. And he or she is a patient, I am therapist. We can we can deny the difference. But to me, through the concept of analytic zero or the sense of being player witness. We can remember. How we miss the basic human being. You know, the concept reminds me how we forget about. We are born as a human being.
Eileen: [00:18:05] That's it. So you're saying it doesn't preclude empathy or these other levels of thought about theory and technique and the roles of our work and relationship... There's a point to all that, it's not a problem. But it's something about that fundamental reminder that we are human beings, and it's a thing to remember that affects everything we do and how we do it in the work. I'm thinking about the patient you described who had the disfigurement of her face, let's say, and how you talked about... You both knew it. So little was said directly, explicitly. I understood that to be timing and process and sensitivity in that until there came a time where there was a crisis moment where she said, "am I ugly?" And the delicate way that you responded in saying in responding and nodding. And not saying more as I recall and understood it. It was like a moment of I want to say contact. Between you. And shared encounter. That was maybe the moment you had been living in the work, preparing for all the time. That, then, was the turning point in the work where that which she had suffered, you know, being patronised by the world or feeling judged and distanced, etcetera, and then fighting within herself, she had a different encounter with you. And could leave the treatment feeling herself differently in the world, knowing that feeling the zero. I want to say that somehow she got the message herself. It could have been you. Koichi instead of herself.
Koichi: [00:20:00] Yeah. Thank you for reading carefully my book. Thank you so much. I think it is a very moment that we share what kind of world we live. So. And at this point, I no longer feel that she is a patient. I have to be empathic. She is no longer the poor patient she is. She's just human beings. And because I could have got scar in my face in another universe. So the reason I believe why this idea is very important is because it helps me to understand why we therapists want to treat our patients. It's not easy job. We spend a lot of energy to be with them, to listen to them. Why we want to do you know, is it because we they are poor victims that we want to spend the time to listen to them? It is because we want we have professional grade skills that we spend our energy being with the so-called difficult patient. My answer is no. We are willing to do such hard work because we know that somewhere along with the way, we have been in the same universe.
Eileen: [00:21:25] This sounds like your answer to the question. You know, what's the understanding you believe to be integral to all professional listeners success with our patients... This sounds like your answer. Yeah. Freed from the need to identify with theory, Koichi roots his practice in a bare pre liminal space wherein all life is shared. This makes knowing others intrinsically valuable. Natural even. But his approach is as simple as it is deceptive. For it takes time, trials, errors, and numerous humbling things to peel back the layers. So, Koichi, I you know, I have the sense that you've been on your own real journey over the course of your lifetime, since your youth and your young adulthood in the profession, through the academics that are necessary to come into, you know, these capacities. I wonder how you think of yourself growing over time, from what you know about your own experience of living into the limit of what the textbook could tell you and what launched your own learning, your own growth coming into your beliefs. Was there a pivotal moment where you said, that's it, burn the books? It's up to me. Well.
Koichi: [00:23:11] There's a huge ambition in my mind still and in the psychoanalytic world. I want to be famous or I want to be. I want to get some kind of, you know, prize, or I want to have some kind of reputation from my community. I'm still very narcissistic and grandiose. I not able to leave the grandiose fantasy, but but the one of the important experiences I had is, you know, my, my practice in in Hiroshima. I'm practicing now in Hiroshima and Kobe. I had no connection with the Hiroshima city. But when I graduated from the Psychoanalytic Institute in New York City, I got a position at the university in Hiroshima. It's just a coincidence that I started my practice in the Hiroshima city. Because I was born in Tokyo and growing up in Tokyo area, I have no idea what kind of trauma the people in Hiroshima have. But as soon as I started seeing the patient in the city, I realized that every patient there has a piece of trauma. You know, the piece of trauma from A bomb. Atomic bomb or Pacific war. It was almost 80 years ago. 80 years ago. Most of my patients are second or third generation of atomic bomb survivors, or some patients are not directly related to atomic bomb in any of their generations, but they they can see trauma in their mind. For example, some patients show less or no emotional responses to natural disaster, war, and terrorism. Some patients are very highly sensitive to these events. I think the city of Hiroshima itself was traumatized. In a sense. They believe even small children need to witness A Bomb disaster. Elementary schools in Hiroshima City take even children as young as 6 or 7 years old to the Peace Memorial Museum, which shows people grotesque and miserable and painful pictures and films of atomic bomb.
Koichi: [00:25:56] The children often suffer from the secondary trauma because they are, you know, exposed to the kind of films. What is even more interesting to me is that. By showing such a painful and hurtful. Photos and films of Japanese people. They are trying to let children know that the Japanese are terrible. Perpetuators Victimizers. I don't deny that Japanese are guilty. It is an undeniable fact that Japan started a terrible war and destroyed many Asian cities and kills a lot of people in Asia, in America and other region. But the problem is, they proved their guilt by showing many injured, killed Japanese people and then I question and keep questioning. How we can differentiate between. Victimizer and victims in the Pacific War. I believe Japanese people are victimizers as well as a victim. How I can, you know, walk out the kind of distinction. That's very important question to me because I'm a therapist. So in my practice, I believe that we are sometime. Stay in the kind of division because we. Say. He or she is a patient. I am not a patient. I am a therapist. He was. She is, you know, pathological. And I'm not. So you know this type of division. Also, we can see the kind of division all over the world. It's not on the social trauma, social problems, but also our clinical practice. So we cannot completely forget the kind of division. But I believe that there is a way that we can work out this divide.
Eileen: [00:28:29] Overcoming our divisions is a process that brings us face to face with our deepest contradictions. This task is as intuitive as it is taxing. It's necessary, yet it relies solely on our goodwill. And while we know it is the work of the impossible, we strive for it no matter what, and so exerting our desire to transcend difference will leave us strained. Taking us to a place of pain which can be a vector of connection, as we have seen. But as we etch this process deeper into who we are, let us also learn a new way to meet to cross paths at the junction of our human experiences. Let us rest and connect through surrender. You know, I read your description and discussion of. Am I pronouncing it correctly? Makoto. Makoto. Makoto. Makoto. I wonder if you could say something more about that. It just really struck me, as I want to call it a beautiful aesthetic, the way you described it in the midst of all of what we've been talking about together.
Koichi: [00:29:52] Yeah. Makoto in Japanese is a controversial term. It's good and bad. Sometimes very good, sometimes very bad. Makoto means surrendering our self to the big flow of the universe. It's very eastern, you know? More narrow meaning is to be honest with my mind. Honest with myself means surrendering ourselves to the the big flow of the universe because they, and I believe that individual is a part of the universe. There's no distinction between, you know, big society and the big universe and individual. Individual is always part of the flow of the universe. So sometimes Japanese people surrender ourself to big movement of society by using the term of Makoto. This word more negative form. It's suicide attack. You know, in Japanese people, the young people believe that killing themselves is to help the world. Because, you know, there's no question about their individual life, because the flow of the universe require them to kill themselves. It's very negative form. It is a pure it is honesty for these people. That's what I said, that it is very controversial, but we can use this word in a positive way. To me, so surrendering our self to be with the environment as a conditions, just to be with patients, storing up all of the idea of theories and techniques and skills. So we just forget about all things, then we surrender ourself to the place. This is the way I supposed to do this. This is a sense of Makoto. We are human beings always have some preoccupation. It's pretty hard for us to. You know, get rid of the preoccupation. Maybe it's impossible, but we may be able to get the moment in which we get rid of all of the artificial theories or understanding or preoccupation.
Eileen: [00:32:44] I totally appreciate your, you know, spelling it out. And nothing is simple. It makes me think that it really does come back to, I want to say, our intention, but I wonder, by way of pulling ourselves to a close here, this is a different medium than writing a paper and delivering it, you know, before a group of colleagues. This is a different medium. It's very intimate. It's just you and me here, really. But I wonder how it's been for you. What do you notice when you pause? How has it been to be here with me and see what has happened?
Koichi: [00:33:18] I enjoy talking with you and being with you, but what I feel a little bit sad is that this is not my first language. You know, this is my second language. It's pretty hard for me to describe what I'm thinking. But maybe even in Japanese. I'm always feel the difficult, you know, to describe what I'm thinking. But second language is more difficult for me to use to describe the kind of complicated and sensitive ideas. And also, we are preoccupied with language, as many philosophers says. Talking about my sensitivity and talking about eastern concept in English, it's sometime very difficult because the basic philosophies are so different. But but you know, I'm so happy to be with you and wish I could connect it to each other with that language.
Eileen: [00:34:26] You know, I really appreciate your honesty and your candor here. I think you come to life here. Koichi, I think we come to life here different when we try to talk to each other with and without words. Yeah. Your language and mine, you know, and that might sound a little idealistic, but that's how it works for me. And that's how I feel it. As our conversation with Koichi comes to a close, I am reminded of why we choose to come together. Withstanding our contradictions, the search for others begins with a desire to understand their difference. To overcome a divide. As we dive in looking for our shared humanity, language no longer suffices. It fails to capture who we are beyond duality. Instead, experience must take the lead, tearing us apart only to reunite us at a starting point. The psychoanalytic zero. As I begin to understand Koichi, this is the place of connection for us all. Through tragedy, we cross a threshold, returning to a space of belonging, of togetherness, where we only need to surrender. To Koichi. This is an eastern idea, but one that unfolds universally. We find each other because we float in the same sky.
Eileen: [00:36:07] All of us in constellations. It is a truth as simple as it is bewildering. The idea that I could have been you and you could have been me. That we are cut from the same cloth. When we let go of ourselves into our profound nature, something emerges out of the deep. The understanding that being together requires no flow of words or finite, all encompassing knowledge. In the end, true understanding is not our ability to morph into what is other, to adhere to it at every point of contact. Instead, it is the conscious act of seeing, of listening, of witnessing the existence of something else and saying, let it be. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for the next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and a five star rating. It helps us grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. And we'll see you next time.