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Christopher Bollas titles his book China on the Mind, not The Chinese Mind because this book is not just about Chinese culture but also an invitation for psychoanalysts to (re)activate a different state of mind that has been largely neglected in psychoanalysis since its inception. Bollas introduces cultural differences to advocate a need for psychoanalysis to integrate more fully both the maternal and the paternal, the presentational and the representational, the form and the content, or, to put it in the Eastern way, the yin and the yang ways of being and relating. By analyzing classic texts and poetry from China, Korea, and Japan, Bollas goes to great depth to explore Eastern culture without ever leaving the central theme of connecting it to psychoanalytic thinking.
In the introductory chapter, Bollas reveals the main premise of the book:
Historically, Eastern thinking has tended towards forms of thought that are based on “the maternal order” while Western thinking reflects forms of thought derived from “the paternal order.” (p. 2)
He develops this idea in the subsequent chapters with repeated efforts to draw attention to the mother-infant relationship, which he contends was first neglected by Freud and later repressed within the psychoanalytic movement. Bollas postulates that “the hermeneutically-bound, causal-inclined paternal focus” (p. 14) within the psychoanalytic discourse can be explained by Western culture's preference for logic and rationality in thinking and lucidity and explicitness in communication, whereas Eastern culture's preference for co-constructed and correlative ways of thinking as well as non-verbal and implicit communication resembles closely how a mother relates to an infant.
To demonstrate this point, Bollas surveys three of the five Chinese classic texts (commonly believed authored or edited by Confucius) in Part 1 of the