The Psycho Boom

This article provides a historical overview of the development of Western psychotherapy in China based on existing scholarship and my own ethnography. I describe a meandering trajectory embedded in the shifting political, social, and economic circumstances: the tentative beginning in the Republican period, the transmutation and destruction in the Maoist period, the relatively slow recovery and progress in the earlier reform period, and the eruption of the psycho-boom in the new millennium. Emphasis is placed on the reform period that began in the late 1970s, but by incorporating the previous periods I intend to show that the long-term process is highly relevant to the current psycho-boom. I further reveal that the development of psychotherapy in China has involved a dual processboth the building of this new profession and the infiltration of related ideas into the broader society-and that this duality is particularly evident in the recent psycho-boom. Finally, I discuss the implications of the new Mental Health Law and the preliminary signs that psychotherapy as a profession is taking root in urban China.

PubMed, 1994

Since the end of the cultural revolution (1966-78), China has opened itself to Western influence and ideas, including those of Western psychotherapy theory and practice. The faster pace of life under the new market economies has been associated with increased psychological problems and a greater need for psychotherapy. Psychotherapy integration, which fits well both with basic Chinese beliefs and the collectivist orientation, is likely to continue to grow in influence and importance in China. Remaining obstacles to the development of psychotherapy in China include lack of psychotherapy skills within the medical profession, lack of potential profit from doing psychotherapy, stigma attached to mental problems by the masses, and failure to define basic requirements for psychotherapy training and practice.

This article focuses on the psychotherapy debate in China that was triggered by the country’s mental health legislation. Seeing the release of the draft Mental Health Law in 2011 as a “diagnostic event” (Moore in Am Ethnol 14(4):727–736, 1987), I examine the debate in order to unravel the underlying logic and ongoing dynamics of the psycho-boom that has become a conspicuous trend in urban China since the early 2000s. Drawing on my fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, I use the two keywords of the debate—“jianghu” (literally “rivers and lakes”), an indigenous term that evokes an untamed realm, and “profession,” a foreign concept whose translation requires re-translation—to organize my delineation of its contours. I describe how anticipation of state regulation prompted fears and discontents as well as critical reflections and actions that aimed to transform the field into a profession. The efforts to mark out a professional core against the backdrop of unruly jianghu further faced the challenge of an alternative vision that saw popularization as an equally noble cause. The Mental Health Law came into effect in 2013; ultimately, however, it did not introduce substantive regulation. Finally, I discuss the implications of this debate and the prospects of the psycho-boom.

Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 2023

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a boom of popular participation in psychotherapy and training in urban China, which has attracted the attention of anthropologists who called this phenomenon a "psycho-boom" or "psy fever." This article is a review of anthropological studies on this issue and discusses how psychotherapeutic knowledge and practice with western origin has been indigenized by Chinese psychotherapists as well as the emergence of a new form of self in this psycho-boom. Critical anthropologists tend to emphasize the connection between this psy fever and governmentality. This article shows the insights and blind spots of this perspective, calling for attention to the heterogeneity and agency of participants in this psy fever as well as the potentiality of psychotherapy as both expression and intervention for sufferings in the context of drastic social transformation.

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2020

This article provides an overview of the development of psychoanalysis in China based on literature and personal observations. We situate this history in the context of the cognate disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, all of which are shaped by the massive political and social transformations of modern and contemporary China. Our account starts with a preliminary beginning prior to 1949, which fell largely outside the clinical domain. What follows is a brief description of how this nascent development was extinguished under three decades of radical socialism. The main part of the article deals with the post-reform period that began in the late 1970s, as the introduction of Western psychotherapy and psychoanalysis became possible again after the Cultural Revolution. Emphasis is placed on the past 15 years or so, a period known for an explosive growth of professional and popular interests in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology in China’s major cities.

The breathless pace of market reform in China has brought about profound ruptures in socioeconomic structures and increased mental distress in the population. In this context, more middle-class urbanites are turning to nascent psychological counseling to grapple with their problems. This article examines how Chinese psychotherapists attempt to ''culture'' or indigenize (bentuhua) three imported psychotherapy models in order to fit their clients' expectations, desires, and sensibilities: the Satir family therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and sandplay therapy. It addresses three interrelated questions: What is the role of culture in adopting, translating, and recasting psychotherapy in contemporary China? How is cultural difference understood and mobilized by therapists in the therapeutic encounter? What kind of distinct therapeutic relationship is emerging in postsocialist China? Data presented here are drawn from my semistructured interviews and extensive participant observation at various counseling offices and psychotherapy workshops in the city of Kunming. My ethnographic account suggests that it is through constant dialog, translation, and re-articulation between multiple regimes of knowledge, cultural values, and social practices that a new form of talk therapy with ''Chinese characteristics'' is emerging. Finally, I reflect upon what this dialogic process of transformation means for psychotherapy as a form of globally circulating knowledge/practice.

Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 2021

This chapter examines the notion of therapy and its growing significance in the social, political, and affective life in China during the last four decades. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the languages, ideas, and practices of psychology have been applied to various domains for different purposes and imperatives including addressing the current mental health epidemic. This therapeutic ethos acts as both a mode of thinking and imagination. Since therapy suggests an illness or disease and it encompasses a dual process that both diagnoses (identifies an issue) and prescribes (offers solutions), this understanding can thus be easily appended to governance, problematizing (pathologizing, thus individualizing) social issues, and then proposing solutions. This mode of therapeutic governing involves a unique mode of psychologization in China, in which psychological expertise can be dispensed by non-experts with real consequences. It centers on the management of subjectivity. This mode of therapeutic governing accesses people's subjectivity through "care" and "permissive empathy" that renews the government's role as the "guardian of the people". This chapter contends that the ways this therapeutic ethos involved in Chinese society manifest the implicit complicity among therapy, the state, and market.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017

In China: A New Beginning for Psychoanalysis, Teresa Yuan, an Argentinian training and supervising analyst of Chinese heritage, narrates her efforts to support the development of psychoanalysis in China. Her journey spans more than two decades, during which she has been a driving force behind the acceptance of psychoanalysis in some of the most important mental health centers and hospitals in China. She was actively developing psychoanalytic training programs at a time when psychoanalytic private practices in psychotherapy were unknown in the country. Yuan's book is testimony to the pioneering work of IPA psychoanalysts in China since the 1980s, work supporting the growth of what soon will be the fourth region of the IPA. Yuan was born in Argentina of Chinese and Syrian immigrants. Her father, a Chinese immigrant, instilled in her a passion for her Chinese roots. Her identification with the paternal side of her family led her to embark on a journey to spread psychoanalytic thinking by teaching in China. As a candidate, her passion for psychoanalysis and for Chinese culture drove her to sit on several IPA committees promoting the development of psychoanalysis in her father's homeland. Yuan, a psychologist trained at the University of Buenos Aires, has published extensively at the intersection of psychoanalysis and Chinese culture. In her writing, Yuan integrates Chinese folk tales, philosophy, and fables to creatively illustrate the different nuances in the way Chinese culture represents, understands, and treats mental health. She opens the book with the evocative poem "Ode to the Cherry Tree Blossom," by Mao Tsetung. She describes the Mei, a variety of cherry tree that bloooms in the winter. She links this poem to her experience helping psychoanalysis flourish in China over the winter months through her work in training 712705A PAXXX10.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021

The rise of psychological counseling, 心理咨询, as part of China's unfolding psy-boom has brought with it a new discourse of distress. In particular, this article will look at the concept of 心理困扰/困惑, which I translate as "psychological troubles." By identifying psychological troubles the psy-boom is providing a discursive space for people in China to discuss issues that distress them which sits in between the medicalized realm of DSM-category illnesses like depression and the language of activism and social justice. This ethnography shows how psychological troubles are understood by some therapists as "blockages" to freely flowing emotions. Drawing on the scholarship of affective contagion, a link is drawn between the unsticking of emotions within persons and the inability of freely flowing emotions to "stick" to wider social issues due to the constraints placed on civil society and free speech by the Chinese Communist Party. The apolitical and nonmedicalized language of the psy-boom is, therefore, a reflection of the social function of this particular form of therapeutic care.