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In this essay, I would like to revisit a subject I started two years ago in Beijing, when I had the pleasure of presenting a paper to the IPA Asia congress. At the time, while I was telling the story of Matteo Ricci, also known as Li Madu, I dwelled on the difficulties that the Jesuit missionary encountered in his attempts to evangelise in China. I believe that we face similar difficulties today in our efforts to introduce a Western discipline, such as psychoanalysis, to a different culture, such as the millennia-old Chinese culture. I do not want now to dwell on the difficulties inherent in this exchange, but I would rather like to look into the shared aspects of Chinese and psychoanalytic thought and culture. These shared parts are hidden in apparent differences, but once discerned can provide a more solid base for our encounter. These deeper similarities contrast with superficial and deceptive similarities which can obscure differences, and obscure the originality of the thought that defines them.
We are lucky that in this undertaking we can resort to a precious text that illustrates concepts familiar to Chinese culture, concepts that can be usefully integrated into psychoanalytic theory, and that can provide a bridge, a two-way passage, open to both sides. I am referring to François Jullien's (2010) book Five Concepts Proposed to Psychoanalysis translated by Sonja Janacek. François Jullien is a French philosopher and sinologist, the author of many books that compare Chinese and Western thought. Eight of his works have been translated into Chinese (1998, 2002, 2004a,b, 2005, 2006a, 2009b, 2011).
In his juxtaposing of Western and Chinese cultures, Jullien contrasts different choices that are at the root of Chinese and Western thought. In the West, choices stem from Greek philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle. These are the roots of “the invention of the ideal”, which give rise to spiting the world into mental categories that in the eyes of the West seem completely na