Abstract
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 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health clinicians in Beijing. The poem also helps her express the difficulties she faced in presenting a psychoanalytic frame for mental health workers unacquainted with this body of knowledge and this unique way of listening to the unconscious.
According to Yuan, Chinese poets would associate the fragrance of the Mei blossom to kindness, honor, and the “strength to face adversity.” That same cherry blossom also represents, in the author’s words, “that magic instant where Yin touches Yang . . . a threshold that represents a mysterious female, the root that represents Heaven and Earth” (p. 13; all translations mine). With this metaphor, Yuan illustrates the political stratagems she had to employ to gain and maintain support from the institutions that made her work possible. The characteristics of the Mei might also be seen as an expression of Yuan’s skill in building the bridges necessary to turn a seemingly Sisyphean task into a real possibility.
The book is arranged in three parts. The first is an introduction outlining the history of the development of psychoanalysis in China by members of the IPA; the second contains three papers giving an overview of Yuan’s work in China, replete with documents and photographs; the third is a Chinese version of one of those papers, “China in the History of Psychoanalysis, a New Beginning: From the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association to Beijing.”
In the first part, Yuan provides a brief history contextualizing the current state of psychoanalysis in China without taking sides or ruffling feathers. According to Yuan, psychoanalytic thinking was an influence in China as early as 1910, and Freudian ideas stimulated intellectuals to conceptualize the role of family tensions in the political reforms of the civic movement of May 4, 1919. A bit later, Freud’s “An Autobiographical Study” (1925) was translated into Chinese and finally published in 1930. This helped psychoanalytic thought gain traction in Chinese universities. These developments, and intellectual life in China more generally, were impacted negatively by the Communist Party after the 1949 revolution.
The early, somewhat rocky beginnings of psychoanalysis in China came to a halt as Pavlovian ideas brought in from Russia opened the way to acceptance of what Yuan calls “materialistic dialectic applied to mental health” (p. 21). During this period, psychoanalysis was “discredited, censured and labeled as a pseudoscience” (p. 21). A great deal of work was required to recover the lost momentum. Yuan’s perspective in training mental health clinicians was inspired by Jingyuan Zhang’s Psychoanalysis in China (1989). Her work was firmly rooted in his. Psychoanalysis gained ground in China without being disrupted by political movements in the 1990s.
Yuan highlights important differences between Western views of health and the way Chinese culture understands pathology and health. In the Chinese perspective, illness and mankind itself are strongly linked with conceptions of human existence and the natural elements wood, fire, water, metal, and earth, or, more specifically, external climatic factors such as wind-fire and humidity-dryness. In this worldview, for instance, emotions such as rage, wrath, sadness, and fear are considered internal elements intrinsically connected to external climatic factors of this sort.
Yuan provides nuanced examples sufficient to let the reader grasp some of the paradigms informing the psychic experience of Chinese people. These examples highlight the differences between Chinese and Western psychoanalytic culture. For example, Yuan mentions that the term talking cure has been translated into Chinese as “therapy for comprehension and clarification” (p. 23). In the Chinese concept, qualifiers are added to the act of talking. In China, talk therapy is geared toward comprehension and clarification. The word cure is removed from the equation, and the act of talking gets opened up or perhaps directed to provide comprehension and clarification. Yuan suggests that at first glance this definition may seem defective to a Western psychoanalyst holding views regarding psychoanalytic neutrality. She believes that the Chinese translation of talking cure can help a person unfamiliar with psychoanalytic treatment understand better what takes place within the analytic dyad (where the emphasis is on building a therapeutic alliance) and can demystify the act of talking to a psychoanalyst.
Yuan shares her experience of what she calls “the Chinese subject” (p. 25), a subject that learns through a powerful form of curiosity: an availability for acquiring new knowledge. This, to my mind, is one of the most important contributions of Yuan’s book. Her perspective on the “Chinese subject” challenges the ideas fueled by internalized anti-Chinese racism often implicit in Western culture. In her experience as a clinician and as a teacher, she challenges the idea that Chinese people are not open to differences and external influences. She describes the Chinese subject as “available” and open to psychoanalysis. One wonders whether her interest in developing psychoanalysis in China is also a way to communicate the way she has worked through her immigrant experience and how she has attempted to integrate her multilayered identities.
As mentioned earlier, the books’s second part presents three papers documenting Yuan’s experience in China. In the first, “Other Realities: China, a Dream of a (Female) Analyst,” published in 1995, Yuan narrates her experience working with an interpreter who was her principal communication resource during her first go at training Chinese professionals. Besides solidifying her sense of being in another reality, this experience was important in clarifying the concepts she had to absorb in order to translate that experience to her readers. The paper is a beautiful description of Yuan’s arrival in Beijing. She describes her reaction to the exquisite scents of Chinese food. Her reacting with pleasure to these scents reminded her of the reactions of Westerners who find those same scents disgusting. This contrast made her more aware of the internalized racism toward Chinese people often found in Western culture. Like an analyst using countertransference, she used her experience to form a greater awareness of the cultural differences that allowed her to design psychoanalytic trainings that were culturally responsive.
She describes her journey in introducing Chinese mental health professionals to fundamental psychoanalytic concepts such as Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, free association, and transference. Yuan used a Chinese fable from 300 b.c. called “The Cure,” in which the patient’s trust in the healer drives the therapeutic action and positively influences the treatment’s outcome. Thus Yuan uses Chinese folklore to show how transference emerges in the analytic dyad, and how the place of the analyst is established in the beginning stage of the treatment.
In the second paper, “About Myths and Legends: Oedipus and Sun Wukong,” published in 2005, Yuan highlights the importance of myths and legends, which as part of the culture help symbolize, condense, and communicate intrapsychic conflict. This paper is based on the story of Xiyouji, a novel by Wu Cheng written in the sixteenth century and translated into English as Journey to the West. The author underscores the importance of the concept of Xiao, loosely translated as “kinship” or “filial piety.” This concept explains the duties that children have toward their parents and elders, and how this may play a role in the structuring of sibling rivalry, oedipal conflicts, and envy. Yuan reminds the reader of the importance and contrasting role of the mother in the oedipal configuration for Chinese people. According to her, in Chinese culture the mother is the one who pushes for individuation and forbids incest, in contrast with Western culture, where the father is seen to serve this function.
The third paper, “China in the History of Psychoanalysis, a New Beginning: From the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association to Beijing,” was presented in 2010 at the first IPA congress to be held in Asia. Here Yuan provides a brief description of her work in China, framing it with the concept of Xiao (filial piety or kinship). She links this concept to the kinship that can exist despite linguistic and physical differences. Yuan focuses on the importance of language and translation. She explains how English became a sort of official language used to help patients and clinicians make sense of the clinical material that emerged in the “multilingual” encounters she coordinated (p. 71). She illustrates this by describing an interview that initially was conducted with the help of a translator. The twenty-year-old patient, “Mrs. T.,” who was struggling with bulimia, opened up about her sexual life only when they switched the language they were using to English, no longer needing the translator’s help. At the end of the interview, which flowed naturally, Yuan wondered why the patient had preferred to speak to her in English. In their second meeting, they again spoke in English. In this instance, English might well have served as a “third language,” with the implications suggested by Benjamin (2004), “the third” providing an intersubjective space facilitating an encounter between two others.
I found Yuan’s question (“Why does Mrs. T. prefer to speak to me in English?”) most useful as a segue to finishing this review. We English-speaking analysts need access to the work of psychoanalysts in other areas of the world and to other psychoanalytic cultures. It is unfortunate that psychoanalytic papers are not more widely translated, a situation limiting their potential to reach larger audiences. Yuan’s work provides evidence of the importance of cultural sensibility and shows how psychoanalytic technique can be culturally responsive. It provides a model for analysts attempting to work institutionally with different cultures to increase access to psychoanalytic treatment and training. Lastly, it attests the passion for psychoanalysis that we can see in Latin American countries, in particular Argentina, where strong psychoanalytic communities keep psychoanalysis not only alive, but thriving and growing.