Chinese Culture and Psychoanalysis*

An emotional and intellectual affinity between Chinese culture and psychoanalysis has surprised and attracted many of us who work and teach in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. A primary motive for seeking analysis and psychoanalytic training is because psychoanalysis serves as an inner resource for modern Chinese to resist the authority and moral coercion from family, repressive institutions, and the state. Despite the current focus on the narcissism of wealth, power, and fame among affluent urban Chinese, the reception of psychoanalysis is conditioned by contemporary and ancient cultural factors. For contemporary Chinese, psychoanalysis is an exciting tool of personal liberation to build a sense of an autonomous self that is not a part of traditional Chinese values and family structures.

This article will focus on the traditional imperatives, suggesting that explicit trends in Chinese culture and philosophical and religious traditions contribute to explaining why there is currently an enthusiastic responsiveness to psychoanalysis in China (Scharff & Varvin, 2014). To those who have worked and taught in China there appears to be a cultural aptitude for the psychodynamic modes of thought, its dialectics, the coexistence of contradictions, the suspension and collapse of linear time categories that allows Chinese students and candidates to “take to” and understand analytic thought and practice. I believe the Chinese will, in the tradition of their rich and ancient intellectual heritage, develop a form of “Chinese psychoanalysis” which will synthesise the Western psychoanalytic “schools” and teachings with uniquely Chinese tempers, flavours, registers, and characteristics (Gerlach et al., 2013).