 A final strategy for approaching the word-thing relation is to turn the usual Western assumption upside down and claim that there are no things (mono) at all until language fixates events (koto) by imposing names on them. That is, words do not refer to pre-existing things, but rather, words create things. The psychiatrist-philosopher Kimura Bin (1931– ) has analyzed the human compulsion to stabilize and reify the flow of events as an effort to reinforce our sense of a discrete ego (JPS 958–72).