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“WHY DO YOU CHINESE NEED PSYCHOANALYSIS?” The question came from my instructor at the Chicago Institute, delivered not with malice but with genuine curiosity. “Don't you have Buddhism, Taoism, all these ways to regulate mental health?”
I remember the silence that followed. The other Chinese trainees and I exchanged glances across the Zoom screen—yes, we were among the first to train remotely, Chicago being notorious for its large Chinese population. The question hung in the virtual air like smoke, and I found myself nodding slowly, thinking: He's right. He's absolutely right.
Years later, as a psychoanalyst in training myself, that question has become a companion—sometimes a comfort, sometimes a torment. It follows me through sessions with Chinese patients, through supervisions with Western analysts, through the peculiar space I now occupy between worlds. Why do we Chinese need psychoanalysis?
The answer, I've learned, is both simpler and more complex than any of us imagined that day.
Psychoanalysis is hot in China. Not just psychotherapy—though that's certainly booming—but specifically psychoanalysis. Among all the schools of psychological treatment, psychoanalysis has captured the Chinese imagination like no other. We have CAPA training programs, David Scharff dedicating his career to cultivating Chinese analysts, and hundreds of candidates pursuing certification. The enthusiasm is palpable, almost infectious.
But there's something unsettling beneath this heat, something I've only begun to
understand through my own discomfort. Part of this fervor, I've realized, stems from what I can only call a postcolonial wound—an idealization of the West that makes my skin crawl.
I used to feel it too, this sense that psychoanalysis was Western and therefore we must go West to learn it properly. But the more I trained, the more I realized that precisely because psychoanalysis is Western, it doesn't always fit Chinese reality. The Oedipal complex has different resonances in a col