CHINESE CULTURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Peter Loewenberg
Peter Loewenberg, Ph.D., chaired the IPA China Exploratory Committee and IPA China Committee, 2007-13; is past dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; professor of history and political psychology emeritus, UCLA; North American representative on the IPA Board.
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 among affluent urban Chinese on the narcissism of wealth, power and fame, 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 (David Scharff and Sverre 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 co-existence 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 synthesize the Western psychoanalytic “schools” and teachings with uniquely Chinese tempers, flavors, registers and characteristics. (Alf Gerlach, et al, 2013).
Time: Chinese and Psychoanalytic
The Chinese Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist traditional world views and psychoanalysis share an ancient ethos of self-cultivation (xiuyang) that is congenial to a psychoanalytic view of what we do clinically. They also share a concept of time as a relative aspect of human experience, in distinction to the natural sciences of the pre-quantum era, which conceive of time in a regular linear construct of discrete quantifiable units used for scientific analysis and for commercial and daily life. Our subjectivity and historicity are relative and in dialectical tension with the demands of our functional operations in the daily chronological linear time of business and social life.
There is universal recognition that certain events occurred in China at discrete points in time, 1644, 1911, 1919 and 1949. However, history is a dynamic development marked by preparations, buildups, intense climaxes and resolutions—as is clinical work. The establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese Revolution and Republic, the treaties after World War I, the founding of the People’s Republic, are culminations of developmental historical processes that are not linear, much as the process of a psychoanalysis is not linear, but blocked by resistances, circumlocutions and transformed by new emotional insights. The Chinese people have known the massive historical trauma of invasion, conquest, rebellion, flood, earthquake and famine throughout its history, and most recently in the War against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Memory…is not a psychical property among others; it is the very essence of the psyche.
—Jacques Derrida (1978)
Just because I can’t explain it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
—Paul Ekman (2016)
Working through the Cultural Revolution is now becoming a theme in contemporary Chinese literature and in psychodynamic conceptualization and treatment (Tomas Plaenkers, 2014). Youthful Red Guards publically stigmatized and humiliated their elders and teachers, in fact generationally enacting the classical Western Oedipal drama (Rolf Haubl, 2014; Antje Haag, 2002). The Cultural Revolution meant personal fear, public denunciation and abasement, including within institutions and families (Yu Hua, 1995, 2003). The traditional Chinese vertical generational order of respect and honor for age and seniority was reversed in the Cultural Revolution. Currently the psychoanalytic commitment to inner freedom, confidentiality and the value of free association is seen as a liberating potential. Psychoanalysis is both past oriented, relative, limitless and flexibly here and now focused. C.G. Jung said: “While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment (1949).” This cannot help but bring to mind Freud’s fundamental rule of free association: “Say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside (1913).”
Chinese traditional time is not linear; it is moral time, religious time, that looks to the glories of the past. Chinese culture is patient—there is no rush, we can wait; and China can wait. The traditional Chinese cultural orientation to time in Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism is of incredible duration, yet relative and subjective. In the greatest transmigration of religion in the history of humankind, Buddhism moved from its origin in north India in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE through Afghanistan and Central Asia to Tibet and China in the first century CE, then to Korea and Japan, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Indonesia (Neville Agnew, Marcia Reed and Tevvy Ball, 2016). The psychoanalytic unconscious is timeless, as Freud said: “The processes of the system are timeless. They are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all.” (1915)
The Buddhist time dimension is also eternal, unlimited and infinite. The individual human being is only a momentary link in the eternal stream or chain of being made up of parts that have always existed. Death is not the end; it is the separation of the parts which may later be reunited by the transmigration of the soul at death to reincarnation in human, animal or inanimate form. The life of any individual, given the sum of his or her rebirths, spans vast reaches of time. Rebirth means that things not achieved in this birth may be accomplished in another life, suggesting “I’ll have a chance to do so next time” (Melford Spiro, 1982). The Chinese traditional family system also provides a form of immortality. “When one dies, one does not die, but one’s self lives on in the great stream of the family life” (Lin Yutang, 1935).
Values: Classical Chinese and Psychoanalytic
The sage Confucius (551–479 BCE) is iconic for China; today the government of the People’s Republic uses him as a cultural symbol for the PRC, as the Italians invoke the image Instituto Dante Aligheri and the Germans use the symbol Goethe Institutes for cultural representation. The PRC has established Confucius Institutes all over the world. Confucius had a retrospective focus on a “Golden Age,” an idealized past a century before he was born. He sought his models of virtuous life and state in the past, saying: “I love antiquity and have faith in it.” The Confucian ethical core, “Li,” sought graceful and civilized manners as practiced in the Zhou dynasty, which was built on the ethics of the preceding dynasties of Xia and Shang. There is a profound synchronicity of psychoanalytic moral values and the classic Chinese view that the purpose of life is not to prepare for a hereafter; rather, the good life is to enjoy the simplicity of being, family and harmonious social relationships here and now in this world, that moments of happiness are precious because they are so transient. Freud resonates with these values: “Of what use to [men] is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them” (1927). The Confucian tradition holds that moral self-cultivation is a critical part of the good life (Philip Ivanhoe, 2002).
Mencius [Mo Tzu] (372-289 BCE), Confucius’ leading disciple and a humanist, developed the theme of self-cultivation: “In judging others, I am being judged. The only way to rise above…potential errors is to cultivate oneself. The deeper my own reservoir of resources, the better I can live ethically.” (Jiuan Heng, 2002). Mencius speaks of communication by words, which is the primary psychoanalytic mode, and by the body, “An understanding of speech enables one to know others; speech enables others to know oneself.” Mencius further seeks to know the symbolism and signals of the body beneath words and the surface, which analysts are acutely aware of, in a diagnostic mode that Freud and Wilhelm Reich would later advocate: Of all the parts of a man’s body, there is none more excellent than the pupil of the eye. The pupil cannot be used to hide man’s wickedness. If in the breast, all be correct, the pupil is bright. If within the breast all be not correct, the pupil is dull. Listen to a man’s words and look at the pupil of his eye. How can a man conceal his character? (James Legge, 1935)
Mencius said: “What is within must manifest itself without.” He instructed us to look closely at the body: “The countenance, a rich fullness in the back, and the character imparted in the four limbs. Those limbs understand to arrange themselves, without being told.” (Legge, 7:21:4). Compare this to Sigmund Freud who two millennia later observed: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
Oedipus, Authority and Power
Mencius was logically and sensitively aware of Oedipal conflict between fathers and sons, and how infallibly and meticulously children expose the hypocrisy of parents. Therefore, he recommended that fathers not instruct their children but leave that to more neutral others, much as for the same reasons clinicians know not to attempt to treat their own families:
Why is it that the superior man does not himself teach his son?… The circumstances of the case forbid its being done. The teacher must inculcate what is correct. When he inculcates what is correct and his lessons are not practiced, he follows them up with being angry. When he follows them up with being angry, then, contrary to what should be, he is offended with his son. At the same time the pupil says, “My master inculcates on me what is correct, and he himself does not proceed on a correct path.” The result of this is that father and son are offended with each other. When father and son come to be offended with each other, the case is evil.
The ancients exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another. (Legge)
The Chinese classical tradition is often represented as exclusively paternalistic, and hierarchical. Although some modern interpretations of Confucius perceive him as patriarchal and authoritarian, stressing obedience to the ruler and state, it is important to remember the Confucian tradition of the Analects is deeply committed to the ethics and responsibility of leadership as reciprocal: Children obey their parents, but parents must have a caring attitude to their children; subjects obey their rulers, but rulers have responsibilities to their people. While most teachings blame policy failures on inadequate ministers and advisers, the teachings of Mencius allow a due place for the right of remonstrance and rebellion. He speaks of “restraining” the ruler and even countenances killing a ruler on the grounds that he no longer functions as a true ruler. (E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, 2002).
A bad ruler may be replaced—he has lost the mandate of Heaven. Mencius affirms the people as the basis of state power 1800 years before the French and American Enlightenments: “The people are [the state’s] most valued possession, the altars of the soil and crops its next, and the prince its least. Therefore, he who has the confidence of the people may become Son of Heaven.…When a Feudal Lord endangers the altars of the soil and crops, he is replaced.” (W.A.C.H. Dobson, 1967). The voice of the people is the voice of Heaven: “Heaven sees according as my people see; Heaven hears according as my people hear.” (Legge)
Confucius recognized and worked with the essential psychoanalytic clinical principle of ambivalence. …
Listening, Empathy and Binaries
There are significant ways that the psychoanalytic clinical technique of emptying the mind and listening to the analysand with what Freud, in 1912, termed: “evenly suspended attention…. simply listen and not bother whether he is keeping anything in mind” has a striking affinity with Buddhist meditation and contemplation. Indeed, my experience with analysands who practice Buddhist meditation is that they take to free association beautifully.
Certainly Wilfred Bion’s injunction that the analyst should suspend “memory and desire” in order to fully focus on the lively, fresh experience near, person in the present is concordant with Buddhist insight meditation and may well have been influenced by Bion’s first eight years of life in India. Some Buddhist meditation masters claim the mind controls the body. The late anthropologist/psychoanalyst Melford Spiro, in 1982, perceptively notes: “I gained the strong impression that, among other factors involved in the meditators’ improvement, there was a strong transference relationship with the meditation master.”
Confucius recognized and worked with the essential psychoanalytic clinical principle of ambivalence of feelings, the idea that we may, and often do, have both loving and hostile feelings toward people close to us with whom we interact, which was first developed in the West by Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). Confucius wrote: “When you like a person, you want him to live. When you dislike a person, you want him to die. To wish him to live at one moment, and to wish him to die at the next, this is clouded judgment.” Confucius was well aware of what in psychoanalysis we call the ambiguity of reality, the ability to not know—the world is complex, answers are not simple, and may, as in analysis, be unique to each case.
With earthy direct imagery such as Freud used, he said: “Do I possess an all-knowing cognizance? I do not. If a simple fellow asks me a question, my mind at first is a complete blank, and I have to knock at both sides [of the question] until everything has been considered [and some clarity begins to emerge.]” Confucius was a practitioner of the art of empathy, which has been developed in contemporary psychoanalysis as a critical clinical instrument by Heinz Kohut. “The Master’s way consists of doing one’s best to fulfill one’s humanity [zhong] and treating others with awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity [shu].” He taught, with apt imagery, that “a single thread runs through” humanity and one should use oneself as a measure for gauging other people.
Psychoanalytic object relations theory postulates we all have good and bad internal objects and that our lives oscillate in a tension between them. W.R.D. Fairbairn, in 1958, wrote: “the chief aim of psychoanalytical treatment is to promote a maximum synthesis of the structures into which the original ego has been split….” As psychoanalysis is dialectical in its logic, so Taoism is holistic and dialectical, viewing life as a balance of opposites, between the receptive functions of yin and the creative role of yang. The Taoist “good” and “bad,” the “exciting” and “rejecting,” internal objects of our personal world form a natural and compatible binary in psychoanalytic object relations theory and in Taoism. The dialectic dualism of yin (female) and yang (male), in each person, in each of us, and in the world, is also strikingly concordant with Freud’s bisexual gender theory: “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” (1905).
Taoism emphasizes the relativity of time and cultivating the unique Chinese carefree temperament, flexible manner of spending time, and life style. The charming Chinese greeting on sitting down to eat is: Man man chir! [Slowly, slowly eat!] Lin drew the contrast between authoritarian patriarchal superego oriented Confucianism and the permissive temper of Taoism: “Confucianism, through its doctrine of propriety and social status, stands for human culture and restraint, while Taoism, with its emphasis on going back to nature, disbelieves in human restraint and culture.” Thus, Taoism represents a healthy reduction of the power of superego restraints and inhibitions (Franz Alexander, 1925; Otto Fenichel, 1945). Lao Tzu (601–531 BCE) valorized the simple rural life. To the dualism of yin and yang, Taoism added supernatural mysticism, spirits, legends and the mysteries of nature.
The enthusiastic absorption of psychoanalytic teaching and clinical practice in contemporary China is not a random coincidence. It reflects a receptive ancient culture of nuanced time sensibility, Buddhist belief system, Confucian realism, Taoist dialectic and binary thought, indirection, political experiences on both sides of the Oedipal conflict, and a profound depth of contextual emotional exploration. When serious psychoanalytic training appeared in China in the early years of this century, it found a fertile ground prepared by ancient Chinese cultural traditions that resonated with the structure of psychodynamic thought. This has facilitated the hospitality of China to psychoanalysis.
I acknowledge the helpful critiques of an earlier version of this essay by Shan Xiaochun and Hermann Schultz of Shanghai, D. J. Fisher of Los Angeles, and Alf Gerlach of Saarbrücken.
Editor’s Note:
For more information on reference sources in this article, contact the author at peterl@ucla.edu.