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Reports from the last 10 years on the ‘discovery’ of psychoanalysis in China - whether excited or sceptical, and whether counting the onset from the pre-Tiananmen 1980s era of ‘Freud fever’, or (more frequently) the ‘explosion of professional and popular interests in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology in China's major cities’ since the early 2000s (Huang & Kirsner, 2020, p. 3) - have been fraught with all the generic difficulties of conceiving ‘international’ psychoanalysis.
In the background, for one, is the perennial dispute over whether, and in what form, psychoanalysis presents a universal psychology, or at least a therapeutic technique capable of transcending local cultural dimensions. ‘Nowadays, we accept the universality of the psychoanalytic theory on the structure of the human mind’, observed Anne-Marie Schlösser in 2009, reflecting on her experience of teaching psychodynamic psychotherapy to psychologists and psychiatrists on a two-year training programme in Shanghai, adding that ‘Chinese society will probably take over the theory of neurosis because the psyche seems to work on ubiquitous principles’ (Schlösser, 2009, pp. 223-4). By contrast, Antje Haag five years later emphasizes the need for ‘transcultural discussion […] in order to develop a deeper understanding of the structures of the human psyche as it is shaped by the different cultures’, and distinguishes western from eastern forms of self, noting that ‘the drama of Oedipus in western myth would not be imaginable in a Confucian society’ (Haag, 2014, pp. 21, 30).1