The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative
Lecture Series under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and
viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker. We hope you enjoy.
So I'm going to talk about the rights of psychological counseling and the impact
on the self in China today and I'll try not to bore you and keep you from
sleeping so you'll hear some stories, a little bit of theory but some stories,
ethnographic stories so I'll be largely just sort of reading here in the
interest of time. If you have any questions we'll save at the end okay?
So as middle-class Chinese are accumulating material wealth and also
build up the private, so-called paradise in gated communities they also
realized that their gangs do not necessarily endow them with a deeper
sense of fulfillment and happiness so faced with increasing market
competition, rapid social change and the pressure to become successful
- cheng gong - many of them also experiencing different degrees of
anxiety, stress and confusion. Although I think it's very hard to
identify a direct causal relationship between recent transformations and the
rising popularity of psychological counseling and mental health, this is
the broad context in which a new mass counseling movement is unfolding in
China. A new language - therapeutic language - of personal emotions and self
mastery is also being introduced into Chinese society, reshaping the way the
self and the individual psyche are conceived in China today. So this
phenomenon raises a lot of important questions about how Chinese people
manage their mental well-being and understand themselves when family bonds
and social ties have become fragile in the economic reform years. So during the
summers from 2010 to 2016 I went back to the city of Kunming in Southwestern
China - it's also my hometown - to conduct the ethnographic research in order to
understand how this rising psyche fever is transforming selfhood, the
quality of life and also techniques of governing in China. So this is, yes, okay
Kunming, Yunnan province and then Kunming is the provincial city. When I was
there I was affiliated with the Provincial Health Education Institute
and also two private counseling firms. I interviewed many therapists, their
clients and observed several private counseling sessions which is difficult
to do and also participated in a number of therapists training workshops there.
So this is part of a larger project- my book Robyn mentioned. So the book
explores three sets of major questions: the first is the changing technologies
of the self, second - the relationship between cultural and the psychotherapy
and the third - the intersection between emerging therapeutic governing and
post-socialist governing but today I will only focus on the first question of
the self by examining how psychological training and therapeutic interventions
to play a vital part in the urban middle class project of self-making. So here I
just want to mention also the new middle class in China is an emergent, very
fragmented and amorphous social groups are largely defined by their home
ownership and the consumption practices okay so it's a very fluid category
without any fixed boundaries it's very hard to pin down by using any sort of
income criteria so I want to explore how this amorphous group- the middle class-
actually now turn the notion Zi Wo for those of you who understand Chinese
it's Zi Wo - the self - into an object of intense inquiry and how
various therapeutic projects are used to achieve self-development and the
personal fulfillment so this is the focus of my talk today. I will show you
that the newly crafted self here, through psychotherapeutic technologies, continues
however to intersect with and complicate existing notions of the self
in China - the social nexus cultural sensibilities
so the therapeutic self in China is both an individual self but also a
social self. My ethnography focuses on how the therapeutic work contributes
to intricate forms of self-making that challenge such binaries. For example we
know all those binaries - the private versus the social self, the inner versus
outer life, psychological versus social problems so I want to challenge
these binaries here. While this new regime of the self is becoming a very
profitable industry and bears certain key traits of neoliberalism in China for
example you know promoting self-governance and self-reliance it
also does help very well with the post reform regimes project of building a
harmonious society that underscores conflict reduction. So what's emerging
here is not a usual neoliberalism story of self-advancement but a much more
complicated story. Here self practices are very much influenced by global
psychotherapeutics are still very much rooted in Chinese history, in the culture
and have very important political implications so let me just move on.
These are the several sections I'm going to go through today - the first part of
therapeutic technologies of the self - I'll quickly review some of the theories
and literatures that animate this research.
so Malcolm the psychological anthropologist had shown that
therapeutic interventions have a significant impact on the conceptions of
personhood and selfhood, identity formation and the politics of
citizenship. For example, well-known medical anthropologist Lawrence Kamiya
offers an insightful analysis of the interplay between therapeutic techniques
and the cultural concepts of the person in specific time and space and also
building on Foucault, some of you may have read him, Foucault's notion of the
generalization of psychiatric power. Nicholas Rose - another well-known
theorist - elaborates on the broad impact of what he calls the psychological
complex in social and the political domains. Rose demonstrates how
psychotherapists offer the technical means to reform the self and promote a
mode of governance premises on self-management but the self is not a
pre-given. Instead it's formed always through social recognition so self
cultivation is a changing process shaped by negotiating with the social
expectations, duties and norms, so it's not a static thing. Drawing on the same
sites here I want to address three questions in this talk. First, why is the
self granted extraordinary salience among China's middle class today and
second what specific projects of self- development and self-care are emerging
in a wake of mass psyche-education training and counseling, third, what new
technologies of the self are created and for what end.
So here quickly I will read this how I define technologies of the self.
It's very much this is a quotation from Foucault's writing okay so
but I would not read here you can take a quick look at it. The question of
selfhood and self cultivation of course has a long genealogy in Chinese history
so this is not the place to kind of launch a detailed discussion but it's
worth pointing out that there are some important continuities and
discontinuities in the way the self is conceived and nurtured in China so the
concern with self-improvement has long being an important element in
Confucianism. For example a central Confucian notion Xiu Shen - meaning
cultivating one's moral characters through embodiment suggests that the
self which includes both the body and the soul is an object that can be worked
on, reshaped and improved over time yet the ethical self is not isolated or
abstract but it's always deeply embedded in multiple social layers and manifested
through bodily conduct so that's very distinct in China. It's not just an
abstract spirit or soul. The Confucian discourse on self-cultivation in the
past also has a clear class and gender dimension because this lifelong project
was primarily for elite men only in the past. Now under Maoist socialism the
concern of selfhood was largely eclipsed by the concern of collective well-being
and the Party-State project. This however does not mean that you know the
self ceased to exist under socialist China rather the exploration of the self
was largely folded into revolutionary causes the collective production and
nation-building so in the post-Mao era after Mao died, we're talking about the
current era, serious increase of the self really
in the realm of literature and literary criticism first. It researches the
recent waves of popular psyche fever - Xin Li Re. The emphasis now in this fever
is on the understanding and mastery of the self through what's deemed as modern
and the scientific psychological methods. The ability to manage the self
through an emerging therapeutic culture now becomes a new criteria to measure
one's worth, social worth. Yet the reconfiguration of self-hood you know
should not be read I think as the rise of an individualistic self against a
collectively oriented self so this is one of the main arguments I want to
make here. It has been widely acknowledged that Chinese notions of
personhood are deeply embedded in larger social relationships including the
family, kinship, neighborhoods and work units. The production of persons is
realized in a relational process by constantly creating and maintaining
social ties as well as cultivating socially accepted behaviors so over the
past two decades however this socially embedded selfhood has been
undergoing profound transformations but it would be a mistake to assume that
recent changes somehow indicate a move toward a discrete self as some people have
suggested. Ethnographic evidence suggests that the search for Zi Wo, for
the self and the personal happiness today is still very much entangled with
the social obligations, socialist ethics and local cultural values. As Nicholas
Rose this scholar I quoted earlier has reminded us in a different context
"Our contemporary regime of self is not antisocial it constitutes the
relationship of the self with lovers family children friends and the
colleagues as central to both personal happiness and social efficacy".
Okay so I propose to move beyond even divided self versus collective by
unraveling the constant articulation and negotiation between the self and the
social. It's this constant you know interaction I'm interested in. In so
doing we need to probe ethnographically how some Chinese people actually
experience the psychologization of the self and negotiate the tensions that
rise in this process so I believe understanding such intimate
experience and the personal struggles will enable us to better grasp the
extent and the cultural meanings of China's broader social transformations I
think a lot of people have written about China's economic changes, reform, political scientists,
economies. We know a lot about the structure changes but we know very
little about their inner landscape how their mind change so this is my aim here.
Now let me talk a little bit about the psyche fever I called some background
information the context in which my project takes place. Since the 1990s a
new psyche fever which includes the learning of psychology, mental health,
education, group therapy, private counseling has been sweeping Chinese
cities. This is in stark contrast with the time under Mao's regime where
research and the teaching of psychology in psychiatry was largely suspended in
mental health and mental illness was regarded at that time simply as a result
of wrong political thinking and at that time also psychiatry was very much
limited to treating acute psychosis in a few mental hospitals so since the late
1990s a popular psyche industry is flourishing numerous books and magazines
on related topics are published you know like this one very popular
Psychologies and the countless websites on psychological well-being in services
are also mushrooming today if you just do a quick search in Google search tons
of them hundreds of thousands of them will show up and international -
this is like in the bookstore now you're walking you have all this huge you know
section on psychology and the International psychic experts are
frequently also invited to lecture in China, often attracting large crowds.
I'm talking about the hundreds of sometimes several thousand people, mostly young
mothers and professional women who are eager to learn how to live a happier
life and also how to educate their children to communicate with their family.
This is a Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar - he is really really popular. He's popular in
Harvard I heard that his class is the largest one five hundred students - called
The Science of Happiness so he wrote this book and being translated into China, one
of the bestsellers in China. Schools, enterprises and the police and even the
military are increasingly keen to incorporate the modern psychological
techniques in creating and maintaining a stable, resilient and productive
workforce. The Chinese state of course has played a very important role in this
psyche fever so I just want to mention two things they did the first that the
state-run Central Chinese Television station CCTV launched a widely watched
late-night show called The Psychological Consultation called Xin Li Fang Tan in 2005.
It has played a critical role in popularizing psychological counseling
and reducing the stigma attached to mental health, mental illness so this is
one of the show's typical - a host and an expert usually psychotherapist with the
client - this is a family here and second, in 2003 the State also
launched a national certification program through which many many young
urbanites of diverse background can finish the required training courses
in two or three months, pass the exam and obtain their counseling license so I was
contemplating taking that that exam but it requires a lot of memorization. It's
actually hard so these are the young people who just obtained their license.
Over the past ten years some 100,000 Chinese have been certified through this
program and this is like what I call the speedy assembly-line like program
right? You go through that very fast but only less than 15% of them actually go
into private practice of counseling so why do so many Chinese people flock to
counseling training yet so few become a full time therapist and what do they
hope to gain from such seemingly impractical training so the answer
actually partly lies in the growing desire among the middle class to
refashion themselves by simultaneously pursuing this notion of self
actualization and redirecting self management in relation to their family
and personal relationships so that's part of that mystery because so
many people got the license but they're not practicing so in the next section
I'm moving so I'm gonna tell you some ethnographic stories. The next
section is called the doing self-work what doing self work is involved here
okay so I first met Zhu Ling at a teahouse near the Green Lake in 2014. She
was a part-time therapist in her early 40s and she has a college degree and
holds well-respected position at the local provincial government agency so
for her entering the psyche sector was very accidental. Yet it was a journey of
life-discovery and self-healing so as we were enjoying
a cup of tea there. She began to tell me her story of personal transformations.
This is a her voice: "Seven years ago one day as I was reading a newspaper
I saw an advertisement on psychotherapist training classes offered
by the Provincial Health Bureau. I had no idea that there existed such a field and
occupation. I had always liked to listen to my
friends' problems but did not know how to help them so I thought I would enroll in
the program and learn something to help my friends. The classes lasted for three
months and I passed the certification exam easily but in this process I began
to realize that I was deeply troubled by many unresolved issues and I myself
needed help". So the program Zhu Ling enrolled in was
very typical - it was a crammed program that involves many topics in a short
period of time so at that time she was facing a set of misfortunes and
challenges in her life. During the two prior years her father had fallen ill
and become bedridden at home. Her daughter was born with Down
Syndrome and her husband's firm - the private firm - went into bankruptcy.
It can't get worse than that. Yet she tried to bottle up all her distress and confusion
inside her by keeping himself busy. In studying psychological theories and
counselling she came to realize that she must do her own homework - it's a very
Chinese expression - zuo zi ji de gong ke> By allowing herself to explore who she was
and what she wanted and and giving the opportunity to clean her mind so after
careful consideration she made a bold decision she hired a living domestic
worker to take care of her father and daughter and then left home with a
backpack and embarked on a two-year journey to Tibet.
The choice of a destination was not accidental - Tibet in many Chinese
people's mind stands for a place of unworldliness and purity. She also
describes this journey as a spiritual, physical and a psychological expedition.
Her goal was to disentangle herself temporarily at least from the web of
family and other social obligations in order to reclaim a more resilient self
capable of accepting life as it is. So she explained to me: "No therapist can
heal others if she cannot heal herself first. Her mind must be like a body of
lucid tranquil water in order to reflect upon other people's lives and help them
untie the knots of the soul". So two stories- narratives of self care and
self development widely shared by those who are drawn to counseling.
during my research countless informants recounted the moments of their
self- enlightenment brought by their work on the self.
They eagerly explained to me how they find the clarity in their mind, how
their depression was lifted and how their anxiety decreased. They tend to attribute
these positive changes to therapeutic work on the self and saw it as a pivotal
healing project so this work of course involves both psychological work
but also physical activities so this is also very distinct in China
people believe you cannot just talk and work on your mind, that you have to
also involve physical regimens you know works so as a self-fashioned counselor
and educator told me his journey of self-discovery and struggle over
depression consisted of two intertwined parts - psychotherapy training and daily
long-distance walking, so he said "I have been walking over 20 kilometers
every day between my home and work for several years. This journey, along with my
therapeutic experience, has not only strengthened my physical body but also
more important, transformed my psyche". So you can see the relationship
there right so that physical well-being and mental well-being cannot be
separated reflects a common view shared by many in Chinese. So rather than
focusing on somatization - this is a term Harvard
anthropologist used meaning you attribute all your physical illness
I mean psychological illness to physical problems. So rather than doing that now
urban Chinese increasingly emphasizes the mutually constitutive processes of
the physical and mental health. So American writer Barbara Ehrenreich once
depicted the new psychology that gained wide popularity in 1970s America as
"both an industry and a kind of a secular religion enlisting hundreds of
thousands of middle-class Americans in the project of self-improvement through
psychological growth" so this observation is quite telling about
what's happening in China today, why the teaching of self-growth and
self-improvement is becoming a popular profitable industry catered to
middle-class Chinese. It also carries a very strong flavor of religious, almost zeal
in pursuit of self-salvation so this industry combined any therapeutics,
secular, religious spirit and business operations sometimes literally they've
run like a business like a McDonald franchise - some of the counseling firms
is expanding like a wildfire so for example this is a self-growth workshop
held at a local resort I attended. I attended
several of those and also advertisements on workshops by psych experts are also
mushrooming for example you know these are typical advertisements you will see
on the website and the workshops. The emphasis is all on the self, working
on the self, self-growth, self-fulfillment.
So although the psyche fever foregrounds self-queries and self-improvement,
the ultimate goal here is to create and enhance the self that can handle family
relations and social relations better and thus live a good life so it's not
actually all about just retreating back to the self it's about being more
capable of dealing with also social relationships so the new self is not an
assertion of individualism but the refashioning of a person who is better
at managing one's own emotion and the social nexus right so I call this two
simultaneous processes as disentangling and re-embedding which I will explain
next through a story. In a July morning of 2010 I was sitting in a small
conference room with three men and five women all in their 20s and 30s at a
three-day intense workshop on Sand-Play therapy organized by a local training
center called Xin Ling so this was created by a private vocational school
specialized in training people for obtaining various kinds of certificates
so it provides post-exam advanced training for those who obtained
their certificate but you know if you want to have more advanced training this
is a Sandplay therapy I don't know any of you have seen those - if you have
ever - it's very popular in China.
Yeah I attended all those workshops. Now this young man and woman had recently
passed the certification exam after taking the prep classes there. Now
during the self-introduction period I had learned that all of them there
actually had a regular job: three school teachers, one policeman, two state agency
employees and two private firm employees so they were not there looking for a job.
During the long tea break we engage in animated conversation. I asked why
they were there and what they hope to achieve through this program so I
quickly learned that most of them sought psyche-training as a form of self-development
to improve their life quality and the chance to succeed.
Xiao Wang, a female middle school teacher, put it this way: "For me, studying
psychology and counseling is a way of understanding myself and my own
issues better so that I can understand the social world around me and of
course financial consideration was also another factor so even though the fees
for enrolling in the classes and exams are not small generally- it costs about
three to four thousand yuan - so the exchange rate is about one to six with
US dollars and for Chinese people that's a lot of money. That's about a
highschool teacher's monthly salary, right. They reason that they could master
the tool of solving one's own problem and gain a deeper understanding of oneself
through systematic learning better and this is cheaper than going for
professional counseling which costs about 300 to 400 yuan per session so if
you need ten sessions that's there right. So then our conversation turn to the
question of Zi Wo - the self. I asked them to explain what this concept
meant to them and whether and how their understanding of it had changed over
time. Here I will briefly discuss three cases for you. The first one is a woman
Wan Ting. She is a divorced mother in her thirties with an 8 year old daughter. She
used to work for real estate firm selling housing units. Although the
income was not bad the work was highly demanding so after she got divorced she
decided to quit the real estates job so she could spend more time
with her daughter. She implied that she had saved enough money and got some
money from the divorce. Two years ago she started an after-school care program at
home helping eight children with their lunch and homework. This is a popular
practice in China due to parents' busy work schedule so this homecare
brought in enough income for her while allowing her to spend more time to take
care of her daughter. The reason why she was studying psychology in the
counseling she said is to help myself and guide my child to grow
better and she was quite confident in articulating her understanding of the
self so you listen to her view - it's very different from the next two so she
said that Zi Wo is like a circle demarcating the boundary between one's
own self and others. I try to teach my eight-year-old daughter how to draw this
line and respect the boundary. For example she likes to go through my purse
for fun, she said so I'll tell her that a purse is a private belonging and she
must get my approval before handling it. She must know the boundary between to
the world herself and others and this is the first step towards personal growth
and I was like well yeah my daughter go through my purse all the
time. Anyway her view of the self as a demarcated entity was intriguing because
most people I met in China did not speak in this term. She also placed great
importance on the notion of boundaries between the self and others. Now her
interpretation of a private self formed a sharp contrast with another trainee there -
Lu Ming Xing - a 25 year old temporary junior high school teacher and
a former Army soldier. Within the workshop Lu was the one most concerned
about social acceptance. He passionately declared to the group
"Anyone who enters the world must be recognized and accepted by
society. Only when the society acknowledges me there can exist the self.
if you are not connected with the society and the people around you how
can you have a true self, true Zi Wo?", but he also admitted that he was
fascinated by the psychological exploration of the self, but focusing on
one's feeling and reflecting one's own inner experiences was very unsettling
and difficult to him. So he told us: "I came from a mountainous village in
Guizhou province. My family was poor and I did not have much education. In the
military I always felt inferior to others so I tried to follow the orders
and win the recognition and the approval of others. When I first began studying
psychological counseling my goal was to obtain the skills to help my students
and improve my teaching but soon I realized that I wanted to understand
myself even though the concept of Zi Wo is quite alien to me and sometimes I
just cannot focus on myself". So he had a lot of difficulty
narrating his feeling during the workshop. He constantly referred to how he
might be viewed and judged by his fellow soldiers and co-workers and
was very disturbed by the fact that he was often uncertain whether his behavior
was acceptable by others. So he reminded me of my parents' generation that grew up
under socialism and largely sought social conformity so conformity was more
important. Yet another part of him also wants to explore this domain
inside him right so he hoped that self work somehow would enable him to craft a
new person, a new kind of person capable of engaging the social world better. Now
the most intriguing case is my encounter with Feng Gang - a 33 year old city
police officer. So he was a bit shy with a touch of melancholia. We met at the
workshop and later became good friends because we shared a special
moment when I was assigned as his therapist and he was the client and we
had to do this role-playing back and forth. So that was a very special moment.
The sandbox - you have to make arrangement, free play, whatever you want
to do - so the sandbox arrangement he created was remarkably telling. It was a
desert scene with a red snake right here stranded the kind of like in Scent
nearby there was a cluster of green some kind of a green he said cactus and a
jade horn it's a jade horn. It took me a long time like 22 minutes you know to
put this very simple scene together and then there was dead silence. For five
minutes we were sitting there face-to-face.
Finally he murmured: "I feel that the snake is very lonely and stuck there.
He is trying to move forward towards the green plants perhaps an oasis in the
desert but it's very dry but he's very tired and will probably never get there."
So at that time I did not know much about his personal circumstance but
I could sense a great deal of emotion and tension so I asked: "Does this scene
speak to your current situation?" He nodded and tears came rolling down so
it was the first time I played in this role it was very shocking and I didn't
know what to do that's part of the training is you don't know how to do
when people actually open up to you and then cry and he said: "This snake is
just like me. I never had a chance to look at myself like this before."
I learned later that he was a plain-clothed policeman catching pocket-pickers
on city buses. This work was highly demanding and sometimes dangerous yet
his supervisor did not trust him and accused him of slacking off. He was under
a great deal of stress and felt resentful and when he began to take
counseling classes in his spare time, his parents in-law who also lived with
his family could not understand why a man like him - a policeman - would need to
study psychology and complained frequently. His wife, a full-time office
worker, was supportive of his study but also needed his help in taking care of
their infant baby so he said: "I come home after work feeling exhausted but I'm
expected to help my wife wash baby diapers and do housework. My
parents-in-law think I'm just lazy if I needed some rest. They also believed that
studying psychological counseling was impractical, a waste of time. I was under
so much pressure at work and home and I do not have a moment for myself. I'm
stuck and feeling very lonely." So he then commented on how much he
cherished the moment he had recently crafted for himself to look deeper into
his own psyche through all the counseling training and attending to his
anguish and opening up his feelings to others in this kind of a therapeutic
setting was the first step towards healing for him even though this was
often a very painful experience as a police officer he was often expected to
be strong and not to talk about his feeling but the therapy training gave
him a safe space to explore his inner fear and desire so he was able to look
into himself deeply while reaching out for help from the mentor and the fellow
trainees so this provides a nice social space for him. At the end of our
session he told me that the green plants he placed there represented hope and
the faith: "I'm not sure where it is yet but I have a feeling
that I have begun to see sparks of faith in this rather despairing situation
and that's why I keep crawling like the snake." So later on Feng Gang also
articulated his view of the self in this way to me so he said: "Zi Wo-the self-
has two layers of meaning: one is a Dang Xia - the self that's
living in this moment and it's deeply embedded in the complex nexus of the
family, kinship and society. The other is the primeval self detached from the
reality and can only emerge from time to time when I'm alone in meditation. I'm
longing for the disentangled self but at the same time cannot abandon the
socially embedded self because both together make me human". I thought
it was a really powerful statement there. So this statement that highlights, this
statement highlights the complexity of the self as a relational and dynamic
process constantly being constituted and reconstituted through different
layers of sociality and desire. So two years later I revisited him and found
his personal situation improved greatly. He continued to study psychological
counseling in spare time and engaged in the self project. So he said: "I have
learned to adjust my mindset constantly which helped enhance my family and work
relations. Even though I cannot change the reality, I'm much better at seeing
different options and deciding how to respond". So he was also at that
time volunteering at a small private counseling firm to offer free service to
students with psychological troubles and he find their work very fulfilling.
So these three cases illustrate the heterogeneous ways of conceiving the
self through therapeutic work in urban
China so the first one Wanting stressed the importance of the private self and
maintaining the boundary yet she was also aware that the formation of this
private self was relational and thus could not be isolated from the social
world. The second, Lu Ming Xin, had advocated a
model of selfhood as one deeply rooted in and shaped by interpersonal dynamics
and social norms. Disentangling the self from others even for a moment was
unsettling to him. The third one, Feng Gang's notion of self work, is more
sophisticated. First it requires the act of disentanglement so that the inner
self can find a space of healing and regain clarity. Yet the work does not
stop there. The new self cultivated by psychotherapy needs to be re-embedded
back into the social world. So from this perspective the social and the self, the
inner and outer, constitute a dialogic relationship that strengthens one
another rather than opposes one another. Yet all three of them have faith in
psychological work, seeing it as am effective tool for reforming
yourself. Thus self-efficacy and social efficacy
here become one and the same project that promises to bring happiness,
success and fulfillment. So many of my informants echo this view as they
witnessed the therapeutic work on the self producing positive effects on
their family and social lives. So let me offer a few final remarks, kind of a
concluding remarks here. So for many urban Chinese, Zi Wo is becoming an
object that one can adjust and improve with the psychotherapeutic technologies.
The relationship between the self and the social nexus remains a key
problematic one must tackle. It's not easy to negotiate
this relationship. I have identified that distinctive dual-process here,
I call it disentangling and re-embedding as central to the working of this new
therapeutic self in China but here let me just briefly mention three important
features about this new emerging therapeutic culture in China. First there
exists multiple notions of the self here right -
traditional, socialist, neoliberal - whatever you want to term them but you
can see clearly there are different orientations here and they are very much
co-existent and entangled with one another so individuals in China today must
navigate through this plurality and try to make sense of all these different
forms of the self that coexist so people often have get very confused actually
especially young people there. Moreover therapeutic engagement with
self-work is becoming an important tool for enhancing one's self-worth and
well-being as well as a promise for living the good life so while in the
early reform years 1980s to 1990s material wealth was the prominent marker
of status today I say health and well-being are becoming much more
important register now second personal narratives of feelings and life
histories also essential in cultivating the new self
here as Bradley Lewis the psychiatrist actually puts it the quote these
culturally located stories, self- stories and their priorities within these
stories combined with other cultural stories to scaffold our
narrative identity and provide us with a compass for living so these
narratives here, I'm telling you, people's stories are actually a very important
part of their compass for living. A common theme that emerges
in all these narratives is that individuals often started to engage in
psychotherapeutic work out of curiosity or the need to help others right but
then discovered that they themselves need to do self-work so talk-therapy
training is conducted in China mostly in this kind of a small group fashions
offer a unique opportunity for participants to share self-stories and
experiment on self-remaking but the overall emphasis here as you can see I
think those very interesting to China's is not to treat mental illness here but
to enhance well-being and the quality of life although you know some people do
use their to treat mental illness but that's actually not the majority of what
people are doing there with psychology and the counseling and the third this
regime of self work has a clear class and gender character. The primary
consumers of this new industry are members of the urban middle classes and
a large portion of them are women. The working class, the poor, all those on
the margin of the society are largely left out because they either do not have
time or money to embrace this new experiment. It's striking, you know, that
women take up nearly 80% of the participants at the self-worth
workshop and training classes I've attended and many Chinese therapists I
interviewed also reported a very very high percentage of female presence
perhaps this is partly due to the lasting gender expectation that women
are primarily responsible for taking care of the emotional and the family
life and family relations. So what's new here is that urban Chinese women
today somehow have the possibility of a acquiring professional almost like a
toolbox they are learning in a toolbox here and not just their instinct to take
charge of their own emotion and their family life. While the new therapeutic
culture provides a unique and safe space for self exploration its impact
goes far beyond the personal realm. I don't have time to go into that but it
certainly has very very important political implications here too so while
my research shows that this culture of self engagement is emerging outside your
American societies. It takes a distinct form in a context that has its own
deep cultural and historical understanding here so they don't
just embrace the psychotherapy, Western psychotherapy, wholeheartedly but really
try to integrate them adapt them to the Chinese cultural context and finally
this new self work dovetail I mentioned with the party-state project of
building a socialist, a harmonious society so in this context government
officials and social scientists have also come to embrace what's called the
positive psychology I don't know where they yeah some of you have heard of that
positive psychology. Despite the critique of its lack of some moral map
and reluctance to tackle structural problems such self work regarded by many
Chinese experts to have the potential to broaden social interventions by
improving citizens emotional outlook and fostering a sense of satisfaction so
with the help of psych experts, Chinese people today are told it is possible to
turn their social problems and suffering into a technical matter of sound
personal choice and self-management so yeah, thank you.