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Sex in China, or a more appropriate name, in my opinion, Sex in Modern China, is a very important book for people to get a whole picture of marriage and sex in modern-day China. The book has eight chapters and covers topics on attitudes towards marriage and divorce, and how they have been shifted by the changes of regulation of government, the one-child policy and its effects, the status of LGBT groups, commercial sex and relevant legal issues, sexually transmissible infections and how they have been regulated and prevented in China, and sex studies from Chinese scholars. It covers the most important topics which facilitate our understanding of sex-related issues in China, particularly for psychotherapists who work with Chinese patients and clients.
Scharff and Scharff (2014) applied the term of “social unconscious” to understand a Chinese couple they had been working with in their couple therapy and defined it as:
a constellation of social, cultural, and communicational arrangements of which people remain unaware, because they do not want to know about the social force-field in which they live, may not admit to what they know, or may not accept its impact in order to avoid feeling helpless in the face of influences too sweeping to control. (p. 286)
In this case, to explore the social unconscious is essential for therapists to understand the roots of relationship difficulties of their patients. Based on my observation, even for the patients coming to us not for relationship issues or for couple therapy, intimate relationships and sexual issues have never been the topics we could avoid discussing, even for the patients in their adolescence or puberty. The book is a great tool for such work because it offers the context of such a constellation and through reading it, people would understand why the patients have certain concerns on their relationships and make certain choices for their sex-related issues from a broader perspective covering social influence on individuals