Introduction East Asian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis— Theoretical and Political

In a recent issue of Concentric entitled “Asia and the Other,” editors Jung Su and Frank Stevenson rightly point out that “Asia” can no longer be regarded as the “Orient” was imagined in the 19th century. The images that continue to capture international attention in popular films today—for instance Kazuo Ishiguro’s film The White Countess (2005), Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007)—are thoroughly immersed in a nostalgic and romanticized “Oriental” atmosphere, for all these films are quite self-consciously located in a time and cultural horizon that is irrecoverably past, and whose passing is in fact witnessed by them.