Psychoanalysis in China

This collection offers instructive glimpses into the founding foreign and local psychoanalytic and psychodynamic training initiatives in China. Essays are presented predominantly by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists from Austria, China, Norway, Taiwan, the USA and other locales who participated in the foreign trainings as teachers or students, including graduates who developed the first local training programs in China.

The book opens with “structures of mutual obligations and responsibilities lying in ruins” since “the dismantling of state collectives and the collapse of socialist morals in the 1990s (that) left young Chinese villagers in an ideological vacuum” (Hanson and Cuiming, p. 3). Researchers and clinicians offer compelling examples of how “the logic of capital” employs and disturbs cultural logics that long shaped family life, gender roles and family relationships in China.

In this “free market” context, young people in China experience social and psychological conflict between “collectivism” and “individualism.” Hanson and Cuiming found that while young men report seeking not marriage but “free love,” the responsibility of caring for elders has increasingly fallen to young women, who long for the “freedom” of lateral economic mobility: the freedom to leave one factory job for another and avoid binding job contracts.

Layers of political history undergird these “modern problems.” Following the birth of the Chinese republic in 1912, decades of devastating internal and international military conflict ensued, starting with the Chinese civil war and the near-simultaneous Sino-Japanese war. Plänkers (p. 33) summarizes:

During [these two wars, from 1927 to 1949], three million soldiers lost their lives, more than nine million civilians died in the crossfire and over eight million civilians died in non-military incidents. Ninety-five million people were exiled or fled the country. When the People’s Republic of China was established after a communist vic