Where Is the “I” Born?
Kimura Bin (1931–2021)
A psychiatrist. Starting from clinical work with schizophrenia and depersonalization, he built a distinctive psychopathology centered on aida—the “between.” He studied medicine at Kyoto University and then went to Germany, where his first paper, “The Phenomenology of Depersonalization,” appeared in German; his work drew notice in Europe before it did at home. He was in dialogue with Tellenbach, Blankenburg, and other figures of phenomenological psychopathology, and received the Siebold Prize (Germany) and the Egnér Prize (Switzerland).
Many streams flow into Kimura’s thought. After studying medicine at Kyoto University, he took part in the Japanese translation of the Swiss psychiatrist Binswanger’s Schizophrenie, and in the seminar of Tsujimura Kōichi—who had just returned from studying under Heidegger—he spent eight years reading Heidegger’s Being and Time. Tsujimura was a disciple of Heidegger and, at the same time, a disciple of Nishida Kitarō, and he taught the text by comparing it, line by line, with Nishida. It is here that the tie between Western phenomenology and Nishida’s philosophy begins in Kimura. In later years Kimura looked back and said that he had tried to set Nishida’s philosophy as the foundation of his own psychopathology [note 1]. The influence was not only philosophical. The one Kimura said he was influenced by “beyond anything else” was the neurologist Viktor von Weizsäcker, whose work he himself translated; Kimura even wrote that the Western thinker closest to Nishida might be, rather than Heidegger, Weizsäcker [note 2]. Weizsäcker tried to grasp a living being not as something cut off from the world around it, but as something that takes its shape, moment by moment, in the midst of an unceasing engagement with that world. This way of seeing—life viewed from within relation—Kimura made one of the foundations for grasping mental illness (Aida, The Self as Relation, and elsewhere).
Western phenomenology, and Nishida’s philosophy. Carrying these, Kimura went to the consulting room.
His principal works include The Psychopathology of Self-Awareness: On Being Oneself, Between Person and Person, Aida, and Time and Self.
One of the things that first turned Kimura toward the word aida was a comparative study of depression, carried out during his time in Germany [note 3].
When a person falls into deep depression, they often blame themselves. What Kimura noticed was that the direction of this self-blame differed between his German and his Japanese patients. The German patients blamed themselves, so to speak, upward: before God, before morality—I am sinful. The Japanese patients did not. They blamed themselves toward the people around them—toward family, toward those nearby: I am sorry; I have caused trouble.
The same depression, yet the place where guilt is felt is different. In the one, it is in the space between oneself and something above oneself. In the other, in the space between oneself and the people around one.
Taking the work of Watsuji Tetsurō as his guiding thread, Kimura pauses here at a single word: ningen, “human being.” Originally, in Chinese, this word meant “the world,” “society.” In Japan it came to be used also for “person” itself. The aida—the “between”—of person and person is, just as it stands, ningen [note 3]. Something that appears not inside oneself, but in the between of person and person. Carrying this recognition, Kimura would in time return to his patients with schizophrenia.
Right now, you reach out your hand and take hold of a cup. Beyond any doubt, this is something you did. It was you who meant to take it, you who moved your hand. No further grounds are needed for that. You look around. There is a desk. Out the window, a city. They are certainly there, and you are certainly here. That you are alive, here—such a thing needs no proof. That you are yourself: it is so utterly obvious that it does not even become a question. And yet, that obvious thing can break down.
In Kimura’s writings the term of the time, “seishin-bunretsu-byō” (literally “mind-split disease”), is used. In view of the prejudice such a name carries, it was renamed “tōgō-shitchō-shō” (integration-dysregulation disorder) in 2002, and this text uses the current name, “schizophrenia.” What he pointed to—the blurring of the boundary between self and other (ego disturbance)—is still positioned in present-day psychiatry as the most central pathology (the basic disturbance) of schizophrenia.
The patients whom the young psychiatrist Kimura faced were making appeals like these:
“Even though I did it myself, it doesn’t feel like I did it.”
“Even facing another person, I can’t hold the interval between us. The interval with the other loses its smoothness and its moisture. Natural feeling won’t come. It is only painful.” [note 4]
“Inside me there is another me. That one is watching me, from behind, all the time.” [note 5]
“The center of myself stops being my own. Something takes it over.” [note 6]
Reading these words of his patients over and over, Kimura came to think there might be something they shared. What caught his eye was a word the patients themselves used again and again: ma, the “interval,” the “between.” What they spoke of was, in every case, neither about the other alone nor about themselves alone. What was voiced there was precisely an experience that could not be spoken by separating those two.
The patients were not talking about their insides. “I can’t hold the ma“—they were talking about the ma, the between, with the other. From the very start, the patients were pointing to what was broken as lying between themselves and the other. It was only because medicine’s every measuring-stick pointed inward that this could not be seen.
There is, in fact, a strange experience long known among psychiatrists. When you face a patient with schizophrenia, before you have analyzed anything at all, an indescribable, peculiar feeling comes over you. The more seasoned the physician, the more it makes them sense, intuitively, “this patient is one of them.” That feeling does not come out of examining the patient. Nor was it there in the physician to begin with. Only when facing that patient does it arise, with certainty, on the physician’s side [note 7].
That, too, then, is an event that happens only between physician and patient. Kimura had realized that not only the patients’ appeals but also this feeling arising within himself were things that occur precisely in the aida, the between.
What the patient appeals to as broken. And what is, right now, actually happening between Kimura and the patient. Might these be pointing to one and the same place?
Kimura writes: the self, what we call oneself, is not some thing inside us as individuals. It is in the aida—between me and the world, and, more broadly, between person and person [note 8].
But there is still something that will not settle. Granting that what is broken is the aida, why does the patient cease to be themselves?
That relations with another do not go well—that alone happens to everyone. A person you can’t get through to, a person who makes you ill at ease. But at such times we do not feel “I am not myself.” I remain myself; it is only that things with the other don’t go well.
The patient is different. When the aida breaks, they lose their very self. Another self appears behind them, and the center of the self is taken over.
Why is it that when the aida breaks, the self breaks?
Here we have to doubt the order of things. We think that first there is “myself,” then there is “the other,” and between the two a relation is born. And so, if you want to know yourself, you need only dig inward. But no matter how far one dug, the self did not come out.
Let us look once more at what was happening to the patients. “Even though I did it myself, it doesn’t feel like I did it.” Ordinarily, when I do something, I do not go checking, each time, that “I did that.” I do it. And I feel it as my own. These two occur fused into one; they are not divided at all. There is only a single, smooth sense of “I am doing this.”
But in the patient, a gap opens there. They do it—that is a fact. And yet the feeling of “I did that” does not follow along. What should have been one has split into two. The watcher behind them points to the same place. Another self, watching me. The one watched is myself, and the one watching is also myself. Both, unmistakably, are me. But consider: if “myself” were, from the start, one gathered-up lump, this could never happen. One lump splitting into two, one side keeping watch on the other—a lump cannot do such a thing. A lump merely sits there.
It is split. And what is more, both of the split sides are myself. Which means—”myself” was not, from the start, a single gathered-up lump. It was, by continually gathering itself into one, only barely one. When we are well, we are not conscious of this, each time. The gathering is accomplished on its own, ceaselessly, and there is only a single, smooth sense that “I am myself.” When that work of continually gathering falls out of order—the self splits in two.
Kimura did not think of this work of gathering-into-one as a one-time event. It is not that one gathers together once, at birth, and after that it simply stays. We redo it every instant. That I can be myself right now is because, just now, I am accomplishing it. Being oneself is not a finished fact but a work that goes on being accomplished, without rest [note 9].
And so, if the aida breaks, the self breaks too. Schizophrenia is not a malfunction inside the brain. In Kimura’s words, it is a “pathology of the aida“—an event in the world between person and person, of the most direct and unmistakable kind [note 10].
Such a way of seeing is not Kimura’s alone. There is a current in psychiatry that tries to grasp the self not inside the brain but in the shape of the experience a person is living. It begins with Jaspers at the start of the twentieth century, passes through Blankenburg, and has been handed down to researchers of the present day. What they now see at the core of schizophrenia is a weakening of that obvious sense that one’s experience and one’s action are one’s own. And this weakening shows its signs long before symptoms clearly appear. In recent years it has been confirmed by actual data that, by listening carefully for it, one can pick out—at a stage where no diagnosis can yet be made—those who will later move toward onset [note 11]. A view once nearly dismissed as “thought, not science” now works, in the clinical field, as a sure clue. Kimura was one of those who pressed this current forward.
Yet much of this current sees what is broken on the side of the “self.” The sense of “one’s own,” it says, grows thin within the person. What Kimura added was not there. What is broken is not the inside of the self. It is the very coming-into-being of the self as it comes to stand in the aida, the between, with the other—so Kimura saw. To grasp the self not as a closed interior but in the very midst of relation with the other: this is what Kimura, with the word aida, slipped into this current.
Return once more to that obvious thing. You can see yourself. You feel what you are doing, and you care about how you appear. It is so utterly obvious that it does not even become a question.
Then—that watching self, where was it born?
Notes
[note 1] Kimura Bin, From Psychiatry to Clinical Philosophy (Minerva Shobō), pp. 69, 130.
[note 2] Kimura Bin, “Nishida’s Philosophy and My Psychopathology” (lecture transcript), section 5. Kimura states that he was influenced “beyond anything else” by Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis (trans. Kimura Bin and Hamanaka Toshihiko, Misuzu Shobō, 1975), and suggests that the Western thinker closest to Nishida may be Weizsäcker rather than Heidegger.
[note 3] Kimura Bin, “Nishida’s Philosophy and My Psychopathology” (lecture transcript), section 3. The theme of Kimura’s first study period in Germany was a “comparative study of the experience of guilt in German and Japanese patients with depression.” Taking Watsuji Tetsurō’s climatology (fūdo-ron) as his guiding thread, he discussed the tendency of German patients to bear a “vertical” guilt before God and morality, and of Japanese patients to bear a “horizontal” guilt toward the people around them (“I am sorry for the trouble I have caused”). The etymology of ningen (a word that in Chinese meant “the world/society,” which the Japanese also came to use for the individual person) is likewise from this section. — Note: the contrast drawn here rests on this limited clinical comparison that Kimura made (the guilt-experience of patients with depression); it is not an assertion about Japanese people in general.
[note 4] The description of patients appealing that “the interval cannot be held,” that “the interval with the other loses its smoothness and moisture, natural feeling will not come, and it is only painful,” is from Kimura Bin, Aida (Kōbundō, 1988 / Chikuma Gakugei Bunko), chapter 16, “Schizophrenia as a Pathology of the Aida.”
[note 5] On the split self in which “one subjective self continually observes, from behind, another self no less subjective,” see Kimura’s theory of schizophrenia (Kimura 1992, cited and discussed by James Phillips: Phillips, J., “Kimura Bin on Schizophrenia,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8(4), 2001, p. 118).
[note 6] The description of the experience in which “the central part of the self is usurped by the other” is from Kimura Bin, Aida, chapter 16, and from “The Pathology of the Self and the ‘Absolute Other'” (in Schizophrenia and the Other, Chikuma Gakugei Bunko). Kimura held that this other appears not outside the self but in the self’s most inward, central part—something he took to be specific to schizophrenia.
[note 7] On the peculiar feeling that arises on the examiner’s side when meeting a patient with schizophrenia (the Praecoxgefühl), see Kimura Bin, “A Self-Awareness-Theoretical Consideration of the Praecoxgefühl,” in The Phenomenology of Schizophrenia, New Edition (Chikuma Gakugei Bunko), and the lecture “Nishida’s Philosophy and My Psychopathology,” section 4. The concept originates with H. C. Rümke (c. 1941). Kimura stressed that this feeling arises between examiner and patient and is necessarily felt by both—an intersubjective event. The text describes it as a phenomenon without using the technical term.
[note 8] “The self, or oneself, is not something inside me, but is in the aida—between me and the world, and, in sum, between person and person”—the sense of this is from Kimura Bin, The Psychopathology of Self-Awareness: On Being Oneself (Kinokuniya Shoten, 1970 / later On Being Oneself, Chikuma Gakugei Bunko).
[note 9] The view of the self not as something that, once established, persists, but as a work that continually realizes the individuation of the self each time, is from the gist of Kimura’s theory of schizophrenia (Self, Aida, Time; Schizophrenia and the Other; and elsewhere).
[note 10] The formulation of schizophrenia as a “pathology of the aida” is from Kimura’s English paper, “The Phenomenology of the Between: On the Problem of the Basic Disturbance in Schizophrenia” (in Phenomenology and Psychiatry, 1982), pp. 178–179. This paper is the first appearance of aida (“the between”) as a term in the title of a scholarly article by Kimura (its first appearance in a Japanese book is the 1970 The Psychopathology of Self-Awareness).
[note 11] This refers to the lineage, in contemporary phenomenological psychopathology, of the “basic self-disturbance” or “ipseity-disturbance model”: the position that sees at the core of schizophrenia a weakening of the sense of first-personal “mineness” of experience and action. The assessment instrument EASE (Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience, 2005), developed by J. Parnas, L. Sass, B. Nelson, and others, has shown empirically that this self-disturbance appears before psychotic symptoms manifest and can contribute to predicting onset (Parnas et al. 2005; Sass & Parnas 2003; Nelson et al. 2012, and others). This lineage, however, chiefly describes disturbance on the side of the self; while it points in the same direction as Kimura’s aida (the pathology of the self’s coming-into-being as it stands in relation with the other), it does not derive from Kimura as its direct origin.
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