Thoughts on Kintsugi as a parable for human development.
If you take part in the wider western culture, I am sure you are aware of Kintsugi, the traditional japanese technique of repair of ceramics or porcelain with a gold-infused lacquer. Of course, being a japanese craft, there’s way more in it—it being a part of a reaction to a specific trend in japanese society of its time, and then a skill that has been refined over quite a while, as the Japenese do. But that is not where we need to be going.
Pictures of Kintsugi-fixed bowls have become iconically synonymous with mental health or personal healing. And I feel that this parable is off, in more ways then one.
For one, there’s the objectification. I am not a bowl. I am not an immobile object, waiting to be filled by something else. I am not a piece of pottery, shaped for a specific purpose.
Another way in which I am not a bowl is this: I do not shatter like one. Neither my body, nor my psyche, nor my soul. The physical aspect being glaringly obvious, let’s look at the mental one. We do know that severe early childhood abuse may, in fact, cause the psyche to shatter and split up in different parts. Science calls that Dissociative Identity Disorder. For those so affected, it makes life complicated to navigate and there is no real, reliable therapy.
And that’s another aspect that so irks me: the magical thinking.
For a shattered psyche, there is no gold lacquer that you can apply to the edges to glue them back together. In therapy, nobody comes with fairy dust and makes it all be good again. People have to do the work themselves. Therapy, as we know it, only has a chance of alleviating issues when the person seeking it understands the therapist to be a guide, a companion, but not the one to provide the sought-after relief.
And then, there’s the point about vanity. When the human body—and one could argue, the human psyche—suffer wounds, what we develop are new connections: scars. They are different from the surrounding tissue. They are, often, quite obviously different and recognizable as scars. People often say they remind them of specific events or on how to change their behaviour. But their purpose is not to make us functional again. To bring us back, in many ways, to be as useful as before—and in quite some cases, we just are not as before. But one things scars certainly aren’t: Golden. They are not ugly by themselves, either. But they are not something to be standing out, highlighting the places that we were wounded. They just are part of us. They do not define us, either. More often than not, people don’t want to see them highlighted or described as a special feature of theirs.
Comparing mental health and Kintsugi, to me, feels like lazy thinking. Using something that feels aligned, but never really thinking deeply about it. And the irony about that is that so much of Japanese culture is about being mindful, and making sure things are done properly. So even in this way, the parable is being untrue to the story that it tells.