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I can't help it, I'm so anal.
Could the founder of psychoanalysis have been an Asian?
As interest in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy expands into Asian cultures, and especially since the IPA plans to include this area of the world as a new regional member, we in the West wonder what an Asian population will make of this Western invention. How will Asians, East Asians in particular, embrace our export?
One of the enduring tensions in psychoanalysis, both as a model of mind and as a therapeutic technique, is the extent to which it represents universal aspects of human experience as against particularly Western attitudes claiming to be universal. When I began training, I imagined that I was undertaking the study of psychoanalysis as a repository of universal truths, but my years spent treating and supervising East Asians has convinced me that this is not the case. I have come to believe that the basic assumptions and goals of psychoanalytic theory have a distinctly Western flavor, that they are undergirded by values that are anything but universal.
The following paper, submitted by two Chinese authors, Zhengjia Ren and Zhongyao Xie, takes up this issue, that is, the challenge of introducing a Chinese population to some basic psychoanalytic assumptions: the notion of unconscious processes and content, defenses against strong affects, the importance of an interior life and the capacity to mentalize others, the tension between autonomy and relatedness, notions of authority, and the oedipus complex, especially as these contradict the East Asian emphasis on filial piety. Ren and Xie interview Chinese patients and describe their experience of being treated in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy by Western psychoanalysts.