This volume ofPsychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China continues the tradition we began last year of featuring cultural issues that confront analysts and therapists as they apply psychoanalytic thinking to their work with Chinese patients and students. Therapy and work with institutions is embedded in the civilization in which we work, so the issues facing China and its people confront us every day that we conduct therapy,consultation, and training there.

The introduction of psychoanalysis to China over the last twenty years brings a clash between Eastern and Western philosophical backgrounds. Chinese patients, therapists and trainees struggle with assumptions inherent in an analytic attitude steeped in Western ideas of individualism that are often at odds with a Chinese Confucian ethic of respect for the family and the work group. The situation is further complicated by the rapid evolution of Chinese culture itself, emerging from years of trauma, new economics, and the one child policy of the last generation that has introduced a new Chinese brand of individualism and new family structure that are not equivalent to those of the West. This volume breaks new ground in exploring these issues and challenges to the introduction of analytic therapies into China, from the viewpoint of Western teachers, and Chinese teachers, clinicians, anthropologists and observers.

Thousands of years ago Indo-European culture diverged into Western and Eastern ways of thinking. Bollas examines how they are converging again in psychoanalysis.

Although Freud makes only occasional, brief references to China and Chinese culture in his works, for almost a hundred years many leading Chinese intellectuals have studied and appropriated various Freudian theories. However, whilst some features of Freud’s views have been warmly embraced from the start and appreciated for their various explanatory and therapeutic values, other aspects have been vigorously criticized as implausible or inapplicable to the Chinese context. This book explores the history, reception, and use of Freud and his theories in China, and makes an original and substantial contribution to our understanding of the Chinese people and their culture as well as to our appreciation of western attempts to understand the people and culture of China. The essays are organised around three key areas of research. First, it examines the historical background concerning the China-Freud connection in the 20th century, before going on to use reconstructed Freudian theories in order to provide a modernist critique of Chinese culture. Finally, the book deploys traditional Chinese thought in order to challenge various aspects of the Freudian project. Both Freudianism’s universal appeal and its cultural particularity are in full display throughout the book. At the same time, the allure of Chinese cultural and literary expressions, both in terms of their commonality with other cultures and their distinctive characteristics, are also scrutinized. This collection of essays will be welcomed by those interested in early modern and contemporary China, as well as the work and influence of Freud. It will also be of great interest to students and scholars of psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, religion, and cultural studies more generally.

This book is a lexical ambassador with the dual responsibility of bridging the West and East and enhancing psychoanalytic conceptualization in the course of such an encounter. By juxtaposing the familiar with the unfamiliar, it seeks to enrich our understanding of both. Within its pages, distinguished psychoanalysts from East and West weave a fine and colorful tapestry of the ubiquitous and idiosyncratic, the plebian and profound, and the neurotically-inclined and culturally-nuanced. They provide meticulous historical accounts of the development of psychoanalysis in Japan, Korea, and China and familiarize the reader with interesting personages, quaint phrases, cultural nuances, founding of journals, and emergence of groups interested in psychoanalysis. The contributors to the book discuss the depth-psychological concepts of amae, Wa, Ajase complex, and the 'filial piety complex,' thus underscoring the intricate interplay of drive and ego development with the powerful forces of ancestral legacies and their attendant myths and fantasies. The reverberations of these aesthetic and relational paradigms in epic love stories, martial arts, and cinema are also elucidated. In addition, the book offers insights into the psychosocial trials and tribulations of the Western immigrant populations from these countries and their offspring. Finally, the implications of all this to the conduct of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are addressed.

The world is looking East. Whilst in the West psychoanalysis is fighting to maintain its position among the other therapies in a society which has less time for introspection and self-reflective thought, in Asia a new frontier is opening up: we are witnessing a surge of interest for psychoanalysis among the mental health professionals and among the younger generations, interest which is articulated and nuanced differently in the different Asian countries. In Asia and particularly in India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, the development of psychoanalysis reflects separate socio-political historical contexts, each with a rich cultural texture and fuelled by the interest of a new generation of mental health professionals for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method.

This book is exciting, original, and above all accessible–a rare combination for a text which deals in depth with psychoanalytical theory. Non-analysts are frequently both baffled and alienated by the jargon and the complexity of works which extend psychoanalytical thinking, but Ogden is revealed in this book as an outstanding communicator as well as a major theoretician. The book's subtitle is a guide to the main focus of the work, which reinterprets the work of Melanie Klein, with its focus on phantasy, in relation to the biological determinants of perception and the meaning and organization of experience in the interpersonal setting of human growth and development. Ogden re-interprets Klein to illuminate Freudian instinct theory, using the contributions of Bion, Fairbairn, and particularly Winnicott–British object relations theorists–to clarify and extend aspects of their work and to move towards an impressive exposition of the way in which the human mind develops." –Pamela M. Ashurst, The British Journal of Psychiatry A Jason Aronson Book

Informed by Erik Erikson's concept of the formation of ego identity, this book, which first appreared in 1961, is an analysis of the experiences of fifteen Chinese citizens and twenty-five Westerners who underwent "brainwashing" by the Communist Chinese government. Robert Lifton constructs these case histories through personal interviews and outlines a thematic pattern of death and rebirth, accompanied by feelings of guilt, that characterizes the process of "thought reform." In a new preface, Lifton addresses the implications of his model for the study of American religious cults.

In Intimate Relationships in China in the Light of Depth Psychology: A Study of Gender and Integrity, Huan Wang presents an overview of Jungian ideas as they apply to gender roles and relationships in contemporary Chinese culture. Moving beyond a Western interpretation of key concepts, Wang attempts to understand and deal with the difficulties of contemporary marriages in a rapidly changing society, investigating how young Chinese couples have been affected by traditional values, Westernisation, and the one-child policy. Wang also discusses how depth psychology has developed and been applied in China, highlighting how it differs in Chinese and Western settings and the problems and achievements Chinese people have faced. She concludes that the Chinese psyche today is experiencing a transition from the compliance of collectivism to the awareness of individuation, and that the rediscovery of the notion of integrity will help Chinese therapists to find their way, make young Chinese people independent individuals, and bring a new approach to their marriages. This is the first time such issues have been profoundly and comprehensively discussed in a Chinese context. It will be an invaluable resource for analytical psychologists, psychotherapists, and marriage and family and couple therapists working in China or with Chinese clients. It will also be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies and to anyone interested in the psyche of contemporary China.

How is it possible that a phenomenon like psychoanalysis, which has dominated the cultural and intellectual life of the last century in Europe, North and South America, has seemingly had little-to-no resonance in Hong Kong? This book attempts to explain this phenomenon. Addressing the subject from an East to West approach, this book proposes an experience of displacement, as it is argued that the opportunity for psychoanalysis today is not just to be exported to the East, but rather to be re-invented after an encounter with a radically different culture. This encounter allows the Western practitioner to question their experience and highlights the assumptions of Western thought and knowledge. Following this, what remains of psychoanalysis as we know it? How can psychoanalysis be re-thought and re-formed today in a format independent of different theoretical orientations and schools? The book addresses key issues such as: Is there psychoanalysis in Hong Kong? How does one do research on psychoanalysis in Hong Kong? Why was the Freudian Unconscious not discovered in China? How can we describe the core of psychoanalysis and how can this description be understood in different cultural contexts? Can psychoanalytic research be led by adopting a quantitative or statistical methodology? Founded on the belief that psychoanalysis should be re-invented in light of its encounter with non-Western cultures, this book highlights an opportunity to undertake this as an intellectual, cultural and artistic challenge. It will enrich researchers’ and students’ understanding of psychoanalysis and inform broader views of psychoanalysis in non-Western contexts. Practicing psychoanalysts, students of psychoanalysis and those seeking to understand psychanalysis in different cultural contexts will be particularly interested readers.