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Psychoanalysts are interested in China. Or at least in Chinese therapists. Chinese therapists are interested in something they call “psychoanalysis,” which may be similar to what Western psychoanalysts call psychoanalysis, to the degree that there is any consensus about what that is. Western analysts should therefore be interested in learning about Chinese psychotherapy, or psychiatry, or mental institutions (or what Chinese have called “mental health”). Emily Baum's book is a contribution to the history of psychiatry and mental ailments in China. Her premise is this: until the early twentieth century, Chinese kept their insane at home, where they were “treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge …”; per Baum, this changed in the period between the early 1900s and 1937, as “psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill”; madness, she argues, “was transformed in the Chinese imagination into ‘mental illness‘” (back cover blurb).
This book comes with impressive credentials, including the author's Fulbright, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, as well as publication by the University of Chicago Press. She is knowledgeable about Chinese medicine. We, a native Chinese psychologist trained in England (YW) and a psychoanalyst/psychiatrist (NS), however, are writing for psychoanalytic/psychiatric audiences and will speak to those readers. Baum purports to demonstrate that “madness” is a Western construct that was used by the Chinese government out of a “political desire for sovereignty, strength and social control” (p. 45). But we will use her data and data from other China historians to show that these do not support her hypotheses. Further, we will argue that to understand the sociopolitical milieu of her starting point, 1907, one must be
familiar with the political/historical events in the sixty years before Baum's account begins.1
We wish to make four majo