It was a long drive back from Minehead, on a wet and windy winter’s day. I’m told I held her on my lap for the best part of a hundred miles. A small, warm, already-opinionated Irish terrier, nine weeks old. I am told I spent much of the journey quietly sobbing “she’s so beautiful”…
Tinker has stayed by my side through a lot since: the chaos of COVID, my wife’s final illness, the long slow business of rebuilding a life. She does this in her own terrier fashion independently minded, occasionally imperious, always somewhere nearby. She doesn’t make a fuss. She just leans in. And if I’m honest, I lean back. Our routines, our walks, the shape of the day often led by her. The shape of my life.
I have been looking for a word for this, this interdependence. English doesn’t really have one that doesn’t sound icky. And that ickiness is a strong tell of a cultural bias.
The Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi did. In 1971 he published Amae no Kōzō (The Anatomy of Dependence), describing a concept central to Japanese emotional life and largely disdained by Western psychology. I have been looking for a word for this, this interdependence. English doesn’t really have one that doesn’t sound icky. And that ickiness is a strong tell of a cultural bias.
Amae (甸え) comes from amai, sweet. It names the pleasurable, unselfconscious presumption on another’s benevolence. The trust already assumed, the leaning already underway before anyone has decided anything. The obvious case is an infant and its mother, but Doi’s point was that it doesn’t stop there it runs through adult friendships, working relationships, the whole texture of belonging. To amae, and to receive another’s amae with grace, is in Japanese culture not immaturity. It is social fluency.
Doi noticed this by absence. Trained in America in the late 1940s, he found that when he felt the impulse to lean, the culture around him didn’t accommodate it. American life ran on a different assumptions: the self is separate, autonomy is the destination and dependence is a problem to be solved. Hence no English word for amae. We didn’t need one. We’d already decided leaning was the thing to grow away from and out of.
That premise built the discipline that followed. The American psychological tradition, itself the root of most Western therapeutic and self-help culture, made independence the measure of health. Dependence became regression, or pathology, or at best a phase you pass through on he way to proper selfhood. Maslow put self-actualisation at the top of the pyramid: the autonomous individual, self-knowing, self-directing, in need of no one in particular.
In his history of the discipline, Robert Farr, the British social psychologist, traces it to the influential Allport brothers in the 1920s who chose to make the individual the unit of analysis and the social world, mere context, rather than constitution. The consequences are everywhere now. In the therapy room, where the goal is separation and individuation. In the self-help aisle, promising you’ll need others less. In the language of resilience, which has quietly come to mean needing no one. In the suspicion that falls on people who lean: enmeshed, codependent, insufficiently boundaried.
What Doi saw, and what the American tradition couldn’t, is that this describes nobody. No human being doesn’t need to lean. The only question is whether the culture gives you a word for it, and whether the word is kind.
Tinker knows none of this. She hasn’t read Doi, hasn’t absorbed the message that needing someone is a failing. She just leans, with the unselfconsciousness of a creature never told leaning is a problem. And I lean back. Sometimes she just stands and stares no demand, no performance, just the terrier look that says: here I am, there you are, this is sufficient.
Dogs lean. Physically, against your leg. Emotionally, into your life. Relish it.
Being connected, having our lives interwoven with one another, is fundamental to what it is to be human. We evolved for a social world one populated with others we depend on, and who depend on us.
Something worth remembering the next time you start to consider somebody else’s behaviour, be it friend, colleague or customer. They lean, just as you do. Who do they lean on? Who leans on them? How does this shape the world they actually inhabit the social world of other leaners?
Watch/ Listen/ Reflect
WATCH
Find someone with a dog. Treat them as two creatures of the same sort. Watch who leans first. Notice your own reaction any faint embarrassment at the neediness of it. That discomfort is where the two cultures meet.
LISTEN
In your next meeting, count how many times someone apologises for presuming on another’s goodwill. That reflex apology before the lean is where amae runs into the wall of Western selfhood.
REFLECT
Who do you lean on without deciding to? And honestly does any part of you feel uncomfortable naming it? That’s the fault line.
References & Further Reading
Doi, T. (1971) The Anatomy of Dependence. Kodansha International.
Farr, R. (1996) The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. Blackwell.
Miyazaki, H. (1988) My Neighbour Totoro. Studio Ghibli. quietly the best film ever made about amae, though it never uses the word.
