Psychoanalysis in China

Dear Sirs,

There has been a widespread welcome and interest in psychoanalysis in China during the past decade. I would appreciate being able to communicate something of this to our international colleagues through your kind agency. I shall summarise some landmarks concerning the history of our science in China.

The first writings based on Freud's ideas entered China during the second decade of the last century through scholars who strove to employ the new cultural conceptions of science within the context of the social crisis prevailing in China at the time. The social reformer Zhang Shizhao, an intellectual who held important positions in the government both before and after the Revolution , was the only Chinese scholar to correspond with Freud (there is a letter dated 27 May 1929).

The first translations into Chinese of Freud's works date back to about 1920. An Autobiographical Study was translated from German by Zhang Shizhao and published in 1930. Dr Bingham Dai, a psychiatrist who trained under Harry Stack Sullivan in the US, taught psychotherapy at the Beijing Union Medical University from 1935 to 1939, but had to go into exile after the Japanese army's invasion.

In the beginning, Freud's thought was used to bolster social reform ideas. Psychoanalysis's early impetus decreased prior to the 1949 Revolution and it was proscribed during the Cultural Revolution. In spite of this it remained alive if latent, emerging once again in recent years. Psychiatrist Professor Zhong Youping applied the technique based on the analysis of unconscious conflict, and described this in his book Psychoanalysis in China, written in Chinese and published in 1988.

Since the opening up of China in 1978, reports by psychoanalysts who visited China have been published in scientific magazines. However interesting and original these reports were, they provided a limited perspective based as they were on isolated impressions and opinions, and they did tend to reveal a lack of knowledge of Chine