Psychoanalysis and the Understanding of Chinese Life Experience*

The author shares his observations of the encounter of psychoanalysis with the Chinese mind, based on thirty years of work in China and twenty years training Chinese clinicians. The first trainees experienced the Cultural Revolution as children and often developed coping mechanisms including defensive idealisation and other defences that precluded appropriate working through of aggression towards parental figures. Later generations of trainees did not think of the cultural trauma, and experienced few sibling issues because they have come from the one child generation, but they then have developmental issues frequently resulting in narcissistic personality, often enhanced by special political or familial treatment. The author discusses issues of the improved status of women and the imbalance of male-female ratio among young adults, and illustrates some of the issues through vignettes taken from training experiences. He considers the conflict between Confucian loyalty to family and the emerging entrepreneurial culture in China, as well as the role of wide-spread poverty, and finally poses the question whether there are unique qualities to the Chinese unconscious that correspond to observations by ethnographers.