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Christopher Bollas's China on the Mind caught my eye because I have an interest in the application of analytic therapies in mainland China and, with much less experience, Taiwan. I have been teaching object relations psychoanalysis in China since 2007 and, most recently, psychoanalytic couple therapy in Beijing to students from all over China. I have become interested in the problem of how our Chinese colleagues experience psychoanalytic ideas, and especially how they put them into practice. There are practical issues involving the prior lack of training, the fact that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are foreign imports with no history in China before 1929, eradication of what little had begun between 1949 and 1976, and new importation beginning in the 1980s. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party had launched an all-out war on everything Western from 1949 on, while also eradicating, with seeming success, the philosophical underpinnings of traditional Chinese culture. Because Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism all but disappeared from sight in those years, it was assumed by many that their contribution to the structure of Chinese morality and psychological structure had also disappeared.
However, many of us have found that this appearance is deceptive. Mao was not so different from many Chinese emperors of the last twenty-five hundred years. He was both more successful and more destructive than many, and he did transform many Confucian deep assumptions, but fundamentally he built on them to fashion the well-known cult of his personality that bound the Chinese people of the Communist era to him. He used Confucian morality, which begins with loyalty to the emperor, to his advantage, and he elevated the idea of loyalty to the group to the next highest principle. Loyalty to the party expressed as fidelity to the “people” came now before loyalty to the family and the father, but the criterion of correct thought was fealty to Mao and his ideas of the moment. It was distort