1 00:00:06,960 --> 00:00:09,820 The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative 2 00:00:09,820 --> 00:00:14,379 Lecture Series under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and 3 00:00:14,379 --> 00:00:19,810 viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker. We hope you enjoy. 4 00:00:19,810 --> 00:00:25,870 So I'm going to talk about the rights of psychological counseling and the impact 5 00:00:25,870 --> 00:00:32,890 on the self in China today and I'll try not to bore you and keep you from 6 00:00:32,890 --> 00:00:37,540 sleeping so you'll hear some stories, a little bit of theory but some stories, 7 00:00:37,540 --> 00:00:44,380 ethnographic stories so I'll be largely just sort of reading here in the 8 00:00:44,380 --> 00:00:49,930 interest of time. If you have any questions we'll save at the end okay? 9 00:00:49,930 --> 00:00:55,120 So as middle-class Chinese are accumulating material wealth and also 10 00:00:55,120 --> 00:01:00,640 build up the private, so-called paradise in gated communities they also 11 00:01:00,640 --> 00:01:06,760 realized that their gangs do not necessarily endow them with a deeper 12 00:01:06,760 --> 00:01:11,560 sense of fulfillment and happiness so faced with increasing market 13 00:01:11,560 --> 00:01:15,780 competition, rapid social change and the pressure to become successful 14 00:01:15,780 --> 00:01:21,479 - cheng gong - many of them also experiencing different degrees of 15 00:01:21,479 --> 00:01:27,090 anxiety, stress and confusion. Although I think it's very hard to 16 00:01:27,090 --> 00:01:32,680 identify a direct causal relationship between recent transformations and the 17 00:01:32,680 --> 00:01:37,810 rising popularity of psychological counseling and mental health, this is 18 00:01:37,810 --> 00:01:43,960 the broad context in which a new mass counseling movement is unfolding in 19 00:01:43,960 --> 00:01:50,740 China. A new language - therapeutic language - of personal emotions and self 20 00:01:50,740 --> 00:01:56,200 mastery is also being introduced into Chinese society, reshaping the way the 21 00:01:56,200 --> 00:02:02,320 self and the individual psyche are conceived in China today. So this 22 00:02:02,320 --> 00:02:08,200 phenomenon raises a lot of important questions about how Chinese people 23 00:02:08,200 --> 00:02:15,730 manage their mental well-being and understand themselves when family bonds 24 00:02:15,730 --> 00:02:24,910 and social ties have become fragile in the economic reform years. So during the 25 00:02:24,910 --> 00:02:32,560 summers from 2010 to 2016 I went back to the city of Kunming in Southwestern 26 00:02:32,560 --> 00:02:41,500 China - it's also my hometown - to conduct the ethnographic research in order to 27 00:02:41,500 --> 00:02:46,660 understand how this rising psyche fever is transforming selfhood, the 28 00:02:46,660 --> 00:02:53,349 quality of life and also techniques of governing in China. So this is, yes, okay 29 00:02:53,349 --> 00:03:00,610 Kunming, Yunnan province and then Kunming is the provincial city. When I was 30 00:03:00,610 --> 00:03:04,900 there I was affiliated with the Provincial Health Education Institute 31 00:03:04,900 --> 00:03:11,230 and also two private counseling firms. I interviewed many therapists, their 32 00:03:11,230 --> 00:03:17,560 clients and observed several private counseling sessions which is difficult 33 00:03:17,560 --> 00:03:23,160 to do and also participated in a number of therapists training workshops there. 34 00:03:23,160 --> 00:03:31,330 So this is part of a larger project- my book Robyn mentioned. So the book 35 00:03:31,330 --> 00:03:36,220 explores three sets of major questions: the first is the changing technologies 36 00:03:36,220 --> 00:03:40,900 of the self, second - the relationship between cultural and the psychotherapy 37 00:03:40,900 --> 00:03:45,930 and the third - the intersection between emerging therapeutic governing and 38 00:03:45,930 --> 00:03:53,650 post-socialist governing but today I will only focus on the first question of 39 00:03:53,650 --> 00:04:01,090 the self by examining how psychological training and therapeutic interventions 40 00:04:01,090 --> 00:04:07,900 to play a vital part in the urban middle class project of self-making. So here I 41 00:04:07,900 --> 00:04:12,400 just want to mention also the new middle class in China is an emergent, very 42 00:04:12,400 --> 00:04:18,850 fragmented and amorphous social groups are largely defined by their home 43 00:04:18,850 --> 00:04:24,940 ownership and the consumption practices okay so it's a very fluid category 44 00:04:24,940 --> 00:04:29,380 without any fixed boundaries it's very hard to pin down by using any sort of 45 00:04:29,380 --> 00:04:39,120 income criteria so I want to explore how this amorphous group- the middle class- 46 00:04:39,120 --> 00:04:44,409 actually now turn the notion Zi Wo for those of you who understand Chinese 47 00:04:44,409 --> 00:04:49,539 it's Zi Wo - the self - into an object of intense inquiry and how 48 00:04:49,539 --> 00:04:55,599 various therapeutic projects are used to achieve self-development and the 49 00:04:55,599 --> 00:05:00,699 personal fulfillment so this is the focus of my talk today. I will show you 50 00:05:00,699 --> 00:05:07,409 that the newly crafted self here, through psychotherapeutic technologies, continues 51 00:05:07,409 --> 00:05:13,539 however to intersect with and complicate existing notions of the self 52 00:05:13,539 --> 00:05:16,979 in China - the social nexus cultural sensibilities 53 00:05:16,979 --> 00:05:25,090 so the therapeutic self in China is both an individual self but also a 54 00:05:25,090 --> 00:05:31,930 social self. My ethnography focuses on how the therapeutic work contributes 55 00:05:31,930 --> 00:05:39,580 to intricate forms of self-making that challenge such binaries. For example we 56 00:05:39,580 --> 00:05:44,080 know all those binaries - the private versus the social self, the inner versus 57 00:05:44,080 --> 00:05:48,939 outer life, psychological versus social problems so I want to challenge 58 00:05:48,939 --> 00:05:54,219 these binaries here. While this new regime of the self is becoming a very 59 00:05:54,219 --> 00:06:02,830 profitable industry and bears certain key traits of neoliberalism in China for 60 00:06:02,830 --> 00:06:07,210 example you know promoting self-governance and self-reliance it 61 00:06:07,210 --> 00:06:13,779 also does help very well with the post reform regimes project of building a 62 00:06:13,779 --> 00:06:20,830 harmonious society that underscores conflict reduction. So what's emerging 63 00:06:20,830 --> 00:06:27,909 here is not a usual neoliberalism story of self-advancement but a much more 64 00:06:27,909 --> 00:06:33,639 complicated story. Here self practices are very much influenced by global 65 00:06:33,639 --> 00:06:40,479 psychotherapeutics are still very much rooted in Chinese history, in the culture 66 00:06:40,479 --> 00:06:47,349 and have very important political implications so let me just move on. 67 00:06:47,349 --> 00:06:51,940 These are the several sections I'm going to go through today - the first part of 68 00:06:51,940 --> 00:06:57,789 therapeutic technologies of the self - I'll quickly review some of the theories 69 00:06:57,789 --> 00:07:02,010 and literatures that animate this research. 70 00:07:02,010 --> 00:07:05,650 so Malcolm the psychological anthropologist had shown that 71 00:07:05,650 --> 00:07:11,050 therapeutic interventions have a significant impact on the conceptions of 72 00:07:11,050 --> 00:07:15,280 personhood and selfhood, identity formation and the politics of 73 00:07:15,280 --> 00:07:21,330 citizenship. For example, well-known medical anthropologist Lawrence Kamiya 74 00:07:21,330 --> 00:07:28,450 offers an insightful analysis of the interplay between therapeutic techniques 75 00:07:28,450 --> 00:07:34,630 and the cultural concepts of the person in specific time and space and also 76 00:07:34,630 --> 00:07:39,090 building on Foucault, some of you may have read him, Foucault's notion of the 77 00:07:39,090 --> 00:07:45,130 generalization of psychiatric power. Nicholas Rose - another well-known 78 00:07:45,130 --> 00:07:51,670 theorist - elaborates on the broad impact of what he calls the psychological 79 00:07:51,670 --> 00:07:58,770 complex in social and the political domains. Rose demonstrates how 80 00:07:58,770 --> 00:08:04,300 psychotherapists offer the technical means to reform the self and promote a 81 00:08:04,300 --> 00:08:11,860 mode of governance premises on self-management but the self is not a 82 00:08:11,860 --> 00:08:19,900 pre-given. Instead it's formed always through social recognition so self 83 00:08:19,900 --> 00:08:25,360 cultivation is a changing process shaped by negotiating with the social 84 00:08:25,360 --> 00:08:33,490 expectations, duties and norms, so it's not a static thing. Drawing on the same 85 00:08:33,490 --> 00:08:41,410 sites here I want to address three questions in this talk. First, why is the 86 00:08:41,410 --> 00:08:47,040 self granted extraordinary salience among China's middle class today and 87 00:08:47,040 --> 00:08:53,110 second what specific projects of self- development and self-care are emerging 88 00:08:53,110 --> 00:09:00,370 in a wake of mass psyche-education training and counseling, third, what new 89 00:09:00,370 --> 00:09:05,430 technologies of the self are created and for what end. 90 00:09:05,430 --> 00:09:12,430 So here quickly I will read this how I define technologies of the self. 91 00:09:12,430 --> 00:09:18,160 It's very much this is a quotation from Foucault's writing okay so 92 00:09:18,160 --> 00:09:23,470 but I would not read here you can take a quick look at it. The question of 93 00:09:23,470 --> 00:09:28,180 selfhood and self cultivation of course has a long genealogy in Chinese history 94 00:09:28,180 --> 00:09:33,220 so this is not the place to kind of launch a detailed discussion but it's 95 00:09:33,220 --> 00:09:37,300 worth pointing out that there are some important continuities and 96 00:09:37,300 --> 00:09:44,140 discontinuities in the way the self is conceived and nurtured in China so the 97 00:09:44,140 --> 00:09:49,120 concern with self-improvement has long being an important element in 98 00:09:49,120 --> 00:09:56,170 Confucianism. For example a central Confucian notion Xiu Shen - meaning 99 00:09:56,170 --> 00:10:01,209 cultivating one's moral characters through embodiment suggests that the 100 00:10:01,209 --> 00:10:07,390 self which includes both the body and the soul is an object that can be worked 101 00:10:07,390 --> 00:10:15,760 on, reshaped and improved over time yet the ethical self is not isolated or 102 00:10:15,760 --> 00:10:22,060 abstract but it's always deeply embedded in multiple social layers and manifested 103 00:10:22,060 --> 00:10:27,160 through bodily conduct so that's very distinct in China. It's not just an 104 00:10:27,160 --> 00:10:33,700 abstract spirit or soul. The Confucian discourse on self-cultivation in the 105 00:10:33,700 --> 00:10:40,690 past also has a clear class and gender dimension because this lifelong project 106 00:10:40,690 --> 00:10:49,630 was primarily for elite men only in the past. Now under Maoist socialism the 107 00:10:49,630 --> 00:10:55,779 concern of selfhood was largely eclipsed by the concern of collective well-being 108 00:10:55,779 --> 00:11:01,420 and the Party-State project. This however does not mean that you know the 109 00:11:01,420 --> 00:11:07,990 self ceased to exist under socialist China rather the exploration of the self 110 00:11:07,990 --> 00:11:15,120 was largely folded into revolutionary causes the collective production and 111 00:11:15,120 --> 00:11:20,709 nation-building so in the post-Mao era after Mao died, we're talking about the 112 00:11:20,709 --> 00:11:24,589 current era, serious increase of the self really 113 00:11:24,589 --> 00:11:30,949 in the realm of literature and literary criticism first. It researches the 114 00:11:30,949 --> 00:11:38,329 recent waves of popular psyche fever - Xin Li Re. The emphasis now in this fever 115 00:11:38,329 --> 00:11:44,870 is on the understanding and mastery of the self through what's deemed as modern 116 00:11:44,870 --> 00:11:52,160 and the scientific psychological methods. The ability to manage the self 117 00:11:52,160 --> 00:11:57,860 through an emerging therapeutic culture now becomes a new criteria to measure 118 00:11:57,860 --> 00:12:04,639 one's worth, social worth. Yet the reconfiguration of self-hood you know 119 00:12:04,639 --> 00:12:12,160 should not be read I think as the rise of an individualistic self against a 120 00:12:12,160 --> 00:12:15,920 collectively oriented self so this is one of the main arguments I want to 121 00:12:15,920 --> 00:12:20,499 make here. It has been widely acknowledged that Chinese notions of 122 00:12:20,499 --> 00:12:25,819 personhood are deeply embedded in larger social relationships including the 123 00:12:25,819 --> 00:12:33,410 family, kinship, neighborhoods and work units. The production of persons is 124 00:12:33,410 --> 00:12:37,339 realized in a relational process by constantly creating and maintaining 125 00:12:37,339 --> 00:12:44,420 social ties as well as cultivating socially accepted behaviors so over the 126 00:12:44,420 --> 00:12:49,250 past two decades however this socially embedded selfhood has been 127 00:12:49,250 --> 00:12:56,809 undergoing profound transformations but it would be a mistake to assume that 128 00:12:56,809 --> 00:13:02,240 recent changes somehow indicate a move toward a discrete self as some people have 129 00:13:02,240 --> 00:13:07,610 suggested. Ethnographic evidence suggests that the search for Zi Wo, for 130 00:13:07,610 --> 00:13:12,949 the self and the personal happiness today is still very much entangled with 131 00:13:12,949 --> 00:13:21,139 the social obligations, socialist ethics and local cultural values. As Nicholas 132 00:13:21,139 --> 00:13:25,640 Rose this scholar I quoted earlier has reminded us in a different context 133 00:13:25,640 --> 00:13:32,600 "Our contemporary regime of self is not antisocial it constitutes the 134 00:13:32,600 --> 00:13:37,980 relationship of the self with lovers family children friends and the 135 00:13:37,980 --> 00:13:43,190 colleagues as central to both personal happiness and social efficacy". 136 00:13:43,190 --> 00:13:53,700 Okay so I propose to move beyond even divided self versus collective by 137 00:13:53,700 --> 00:13:59,730 unraveling the constant articulation and negotiation between the self and the 138 00:13:59,730 --> 00:14:05,070 social. It's this constant you know interaction I'm interested in. In so 139 00:14:05,070 --> 00:14:10,140 doing we need to probe ethnographically how some Chinese people actually 140 00:14:10,140 --> 00:14:15,090 experience the psychologization of the self and negotiate the tensions that 141 00:14:15,090 --> 00:14:20,460 rise in this process so I believe understanding such intimate 142 00:14:20,460 --> 00:14:25,590 experience and the personal struggles will enable us to better grasp the 143 00:14:25,590 --> 00:14:30,120 extent and the cultural meanings of China's broader social transformations I 144 00:14:30,120 --> 00:14:34,620 think a lot of people have written about China's economic changes, reform, political scientists, 145 00:14:34,620 --> 00:14:38,490 economies. We know a lot about the structure changes but we know very 146 00:14:38,490 --> 00:14:45,320 little about their inner landscape how their mind change so this is my aim here. 147 00:14:45,320 --> 00:14:51,960 Now let me talk a little bit about the psyche fever I called some background 148 00:14:51,960 --> 00:15:00,090 information the context in which my project takes place. Since the 1990s a 149 00:15:00,090 --> 00:15:05,780 new psyche fever which includes the learning of psychology, mental health, 150 00:15:05,780 --> 00:15:11,100 education, group therapy, private counseling has been sweeping Chinese 151 00:15:11,100 --> 00:15:18,120 cities. This is in stark contrast with the time under Mao's regime where 152 00:15:18,120 --> 00:15:23,970 research and the teaching of psychology in psychiatry was largely suspended in 153 00:15:23,970 --> 00:15:29,340 mental health and mental illness was regarded at that time simply as a result 154 00:15:29,340 --> 00:15:34,350 of wrong political thinking and at that time also psychiatry was very much 155 00:15:34,350 --> 00:15:40,920 limited to treating acute psychosis in a few mental hospitals so since the late 156 00:15:40,920 --> 00:15:46,710 1990s a popular psyche industry is flourishing numerous books and magazines 157 00:15:46,710 --> 00:15:51,420 on related topics are published you know like this one very popular 158 00:15:51,420 --> 00:15:57,270 Psychologies and the countless websites on psychological well-being in services 159 00:15:57,270 --> 00:16:01,710 are also mushrooming today if you just do a quick search in Google search tons 160 00:16:01,710 --> 00:16:11,730 of them hundreds of thousands of them will show up and international - 161 00:16:11,730 --> 00:16:15,750 this is like in the bookstore now you're walking you have all this huge you know 162 00:16:15,750 --> 00:16:20,160 section on psychology and the International psychic experts are 163 00:16:20,160 --> 00:16:21,420 frequently also invited to lecture in China, often attracting large crowds. 164 00:16:21,420 --> 00:16:30,390 I'm talking about the hundreds of sometimes several thousand people, mostly young 165 00:16:30,390 --> 00:16:36,900 mothers and professional women who are eager to learn how to live a happier 166 00:16:36,900 --> 00:16:44,060 life and also how to educate their children to communicate with their family. 167 00:16:44,060 --> 00:16:52,170 This is a Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar - he is really really popular. He's popular in 168 00:16:52,170 --> 00:16:56,700 Harvard I heard that his class is the largest one five hundred students - called 169 00:16:56,700 --> 00:17:02,070 The Science of Happiness so he wrote this book and being translated into China, one 170 00:17:02,070 --> 00:17:08,130 of the bestsellers in China. Schools, enterprises and the police and even the 171 00:17:08,130 --> 00:17:11,850 military are increasingly keen to incorporate the modern psychological 172 00:17:11,850 --> 00:17:18,000 techniques in creating and maintaining a stable, resilient and productive 173 00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:23,130 workforce. The Chinese state of course has played a very important role in this 174 00:17:23,130 --> 00:17:27,750 psyche fever so I just want to mention two things they did the first that the 175 00:17:27,750 --> 00:17:33,510 state-run Central Chinese Television station CCTV launched a widely watched 176 00:17:33,510 --> 00:17:38,280 late-night show called The Psychological Consultation called Xin Li Fang Tan in 2005. 177 00:17:38,280 --> 00:17:46,560 It has played a critical role in popularizing psychological counseling 178 00:17:46,560 --> 00:17:51,720 and reducing the stigma attached to mental health, mental illness so this is 179 00:17:51,720 --> 00:17:58,530 one of the show's typical - a host and an expert usually psychotherapist with the 180 00:17:58,530 --> 00:18:04,270 client - this is a family here and second, in 2003 the State also 181 00:18:04,270 --> 00:18:09,340 launched a national certification program through which many many young 182 00:18:09,340 --> 00:18:13,420 urbanites of diverse background can finish the required training courses 183 00:18:13,420 --> 00:18:20,020 in two or three months, pass the exam and obtain their counseling license so I was 184 00:18:20,020 --> 00:18:25,180 contemplating taking that that exam but it requires a lot of memorization. It's 185 00:18:25,180 --> 00:18:32,220 actually hard so these are the young people who just obtained their license. 186 00:18:32,220 --> 00:18:37,780 Over the past ten years some 100,000 Chinese have been certified through this 187 00:18:37,780 --> 00:18:44,080 program and this is like what I call the speedy assembly-line like program 188 00:18:44,080 --> 00:18:50,980 right? You go through that very fast but only less than 15% of them actually go 189 00:18:50,980 --> 00:18:56,170 into private practice of counseling so why do so many Chinese people flock to 190 00:18:56,170 --> 00:19:01,600 counseling training yet so few become a full time therapist and what do they 191 00:19:01,600 --> 00:19:06,370 hope to gain from such seemingly impractical training so the answer 192 00:19:06,370 --> 00:19:11,920 actually partly lies in the growing desire among the middle class to 193 00:19:11,920 --> 00:19:17,440 refashion themselves by simultaneously pursuing this notion of self 194 00:19:17,440 --> 00:19:26,470 actualization and redirecting self management in relation to their family 195 00:19:26,470 --> 00:19:34,930 and personal relationships so that's part of that mystery because so 196 00:19:34,930 --> 00:19:40,930 many people got the license but they're not practicing so in the next section 197 00:19:40,930 --> 00:19:45,490 I'm moving so I'm gonna tell you some ethnographic stories. The next 198 00:19:45,490 --> 00:19:49,000 section is called the doing self-work what doing self work is involved here 199 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:55,330 okay so I first met Zhu Ling at a teahouse near the Green Lake in 2014. She 200 00:19:55,330 --> 00:20:00,280 was a part-time therapist in her early 40s and she has a college degree and 201 00:20:00,280 --> 00:20:07,750 holds well-respected position at the local provincial government agency so 202 00:20:07,750 --> 00:20:13,390 for her entering the psyche sector was very accidental. Yet it was a journey of 203 00:20:13,390 --> 00:20:18,880 life-discovery and self-healing so as we were enjoying 204 00:20:18,880 --> 00:20:24,690 a cup of tea there. She began to tell me her story of personal transformations. 205 00:20:24,690 --> 00:20:30,309 This is a her voice: "Seven years ago one day as I was reading a newspaper 206 00:20:30,309 --> 00:20:34,780 I saw an advertisement on psychotherapist training classes offered 207 00:20:34,780 --> 00:20:41,049 by the Provincial Health Bureau. I had no idea that there existed such a field and 208 00:20:41,049 --> 00:20:43,929 occupation. I had always liked to listen to my 209 00:20:43,929 --> 00:20:49,540 friends' problems but did not know how to help them so I thought I would enroll in 210 00:20:49,540 --> 00:20:54,160 the program and learn something to help my friends. The classes lasted for three 211 00:20:54,160 --> 00:21:00,970 months and I passed the certification exam easily but in this process I began 212 00:21:00,970 --> 00:21:06,690 to realize that I was deeply troubled by many unresolved issues and I myself 213 00:21:06,690 --> 00:21:11,679 needed help". So the program Zhu Ling enrolled in was 214 00:21:11,679 --> 00:21:17,200 very typical - it was a crammed program that involves many topics in a short 215 00:21:17,200 --> 00:21:22,210 period of time so at that time she was facing a set of misfortunes and 216 00:21:22,210 --> 00:21:28,419 challenges in her life. During the two prior years her father had fallen ill 217 00:21:28,419 --> 00:21:34,600 and become bedridden at home. Her daughter was born with Down 218 00:21:34,600 --> 00:21:35,840 Syndrome and her husband's firm - the private firm - went into bankruptcy. 219 00:21:35,840 --> 00:21:48,330 It can't get worse than that. Yet she tried to bottle up all her distress and confusion 220 00:21:48,330 --> 00:21:54,250 inside her by keeping himself busy. In studying psychological theories and 221 00:21:54,250 --> 00:21:59,530 counselling she came to realize that she must do her own homework - it's a very 222 00:21:59,530 --> 00:22:05,230 Chinese expression - zuo zi ji de gong ke> By allowing herself to explore who she was 223 00:22:05,230 --> 00:22:11,650 and what she wanted and and giving the opportunity to clean her mind so after 224 00:22:11,650 --> 00:22:18,100 careful consideration she made a bold decision she hired a living domestic 225 00:22:18,100 --> 00:22:23,110 worker to take care of her father and daughter and then left home with a 226 00:22:23,110 --> 00:22:27,870 backpack and embarked on a two-year journey to Tibet. 227 00:22:27,870 --> 00:22:32,550 The choice of a destination was not accidental - Tibet in many Chinese 228 00:22:32,550 --> 00:22:38,580 people's mind stands for a place of unworldliness and purity. She also 229 00:22:38,580 --> 00:22:44,810 describes this journey as a spiritual, physical and a psychological expedition. 230 00:22:44,810 --> 00:22:50,460 Her goal was to disentangle herself temporarily at least from the web of 231 00:22:50,460 --> 00:22:56,490 family and other social obligations in order to reclaim a more resilient self 232 00:22:56,490 --> 00:23:02,850 capable of accepting life as it is. So she explained to me: "No therapist can 233 00:23:02,850 --> 00:23:08,550 heal others if she cannot heal herself first. Her mind must be like a body of 234 00:23:08,550 --> 00:23:14,810 lucid tranquil water in order to reflect upon other people's lives and help them 235 00:23:14,810 --> 00:23:22,590 untie the knots of the soul". So two stories- narratives of self care and 236 00:23:22,590 --> 00:23:27,870 self development widely shared by those who are drawn to counseling. 237 00:23:27,870 --> 00:23:28,370 during my research countless informants recounted the moments of their 238 00:23:28,370 --> 00:23:37,190 self- enlightenment brought by their work on the self. 239 00:23:37,190 --> 00:23:43,470 They eagerly explained to me how they find the clarity in their mind, how 240 00:23:43,470 --> 00:23:50,610 their depression was lifted and how their anxiety decreased. They tend to attribute 241 00:23:50,610 --> 00:23:56,850 these positive changes to therapeutic work on the self and saw it as a pivotal 242 00:23:56,850 --> 00:24:05,430 healing project so this work of course involves both psychological work 243 00:24:05,430 --> 00:24:12,570 but also physical activities so this is also very distinct in China 244 00:24:12,570 --> 00:24:17,400 people believe you cannot just talk and work on your mind, that you have to 245 00:24:17,400 --> 00:24:24,300 also involve physical regimens you know works so as a self-fashioned counselor 246 00:24:24,300 --> 00:24:28,350 and educator told me his journey of self-discovery and struggle over 247 00:24:28,350 --> 00:24:35,930 depression consisted of two intertwined parts - psychotherapy training and daily 248 00:24:35,930 --> 00:24:41,720 long-distance walking, so he said "I have been walking over 20 kilometers 249 00:24:41,720 --> 00:24:47,990 every day between my home and work for several years. This journey, along with my 250 00:24:47,990 --> 00:24:54,280 therapeutic experience, has not only strengthened my physical body but also 251 00:24:54,280 --> 00:24:59,300 more important, transformed my psyche". So you can see the relationship 252 00:24:59,300 --> 00:25:03,230 there right so that physical well-being and mental well-being cannot be 253 00:25:03,230 --> 00:25:08,470 separated reflects a common view shared by many in Chinese. So rather than 254 00:25:08,470 --> 00:25:14,750 focusing on somatization - this is a term Harvard 255 00:25:14,750 --> 00:25:16,540 anthropologist used meaning you attribute all your physical illness 256 00:25:16,540 --> 00:25:25,190 I mean psychological illness to physical problems. So rather than doing that now 257 00:25:25,190 --> 00:25:30,230 urban Chinese increasingly emphasizes the mutually constitutive processes of 258 00:25:30,230 --> 00:25:40,700 the physical and mental health. So American writer Barbara Ehrenreich once 259 00:25:40,700 --> 00:25:47,350 depicted the new psychology that gained wide popularity in 1970s America as 260 00:25:47,350 --> 00:25:53,960 "both an industry and a kind of a secular religion enlisting hundreds of 261 00:25:53,960 --> 00:25:59,210 thousands of middle-class Americans in the project of self-improvement through 262 00:25:59,210 --> 00:26:04,550 psychological growth" so this observation is quite telling about 263 00:26:04,550 --> 00:26:09,500 what's happening in China today, why the teaching of self-growth and 264 00:26:09,500 --> 00:26:15,290 self-improvement is becoming a popular profitable industry catered to 265 00:26:15,290 --> 00:26:24,680 middle-class Chinese. It also carries a very strong flavor of religious, almost zeal 266 00:26:24,680 --> 00:26:32,800 in pursuit of self-salvation so this industry combined any therapeutics, 267 00:26:32,800 --> 00:26:38,420 secular, religious spirit and business operations sometimes literally they've 268 00:26:38,420 --> 00:26:43,310 run like a business like a McDonald franchise - some of the counseling firms 269 00:26:43,310 --> 00:26:50,780 is expanding like a wildfire so for example this is a self-growth workshop 270 00:26:50,780 --> 00:26:54,320 held at a local resort I attended. I attended 271 00:26:54,320 --> 00:27:01,370 several of those and also advertisements on workshops by psych experts are also 272 00:27:01,370 --> 00:27:06,430 mushrooming for example you know these are typical advertisements you will see 273 00:27:06,430 --> 00:27:11,660 on the website and the workshops. The emphasis is all on the self, working 274 00:27:11,660 --> 00:27:14,090 on the self, self-growth, self-fulfillment. 275 00:27:14,090 --> 00:27:19,520 So although the psyche fever foregrounds self-queries and self-improvement, 276 00:27:19,520 --> 00:27:26,120 the ultimate goal here is to create and enhance the self that can handle family 277 00:27:26,120 --> 00:27:30,320 relations and social relations better and thus live a good life so it's not 278 00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:34,910 actually all about just retreating back to the self it's about being more 279 00:27:34,910 --> 00:27:40,760 capable of dealing with also social relationships so the new self is not an 280 00:27:40,760 --> 00:27:46,010 assertion of individualism but the refashioning of a person who is better 281 00:27:46,010 --> 00:27:51,410 at managing one's own emotion and the social nexus right so I call this two 282 00:27:51,410 --> 00:27:58,610 simultaneous processes as disentangling and re-embedding which I will explain 283 00:27:58,610 --> 00:28:05,990 next through a story. In a July morning of 2010 I was sitting in a small 284 00:28:05,990 --> 00:28:12,170 conference room with three men and five women all in their 20s and 30s at a 285 00:28:12,170 --> 00:28:18,470 three-day intense workshop on Sand-Play therapy organized by a local training 286 00:28:18,470 --> 00:28:24,310 center called Xin Ling so this was created by a private vocational school 287 00:28:24,310 --> 00:28:30,940 specialized in training people for obtaining various kinds of certificates 288 00:28:30,940 --> 00:28:37,910 so it provides post-exam advanced training for those who obtained 289 00:28:37,910 --> 00:28:41,720 their certificate but you know if you want to have more advanced training this 290 00:28:41,720 --> 00:28:46,610 is a Sandplay therapy I don't know any of you have seen those - if you have 291 00:28:46,610 --> 00:28:50,260 ever - it's very popular in China. 292 00:28:50,530 --> 00:28:57,320 Yeah I attended all those workshops. Now this young man and woman had recently 293 00:28:57,320 --> 00:29:02,630 passed the certification exam after taking the prep classes there. Now 294 00:29:02,630 --> 00:29:07,250 during the self-introduction period I had learned that all of them there 295 00:29:07,250 --> 00:29:14,570 actually had a regular job: three school teachers, one policeman, two state agency 296 00:29:14,570 --> 00:29:19,150 employees and two private firm employees so they were not there looking for a job. 297 00:29:19,150 --> 00:29:24,350 During the long tea break we engage in animated conversation. I asked why 298 00:29:24,350 --> 00:29:28,280 they were there and what they hope to achieve through this program so I 299 00:29:28,280 --> 00:29:33,290 quickly learned that most of them sought psyche-training as a form of self-development 300 00:29:33,290 --> 00:29:40,450 to improve their life quality and the chance to succeed. 301 00:29:40,450 --> 00:29:45,890 Xiao Wang, a female middle school teacher, put it this way: "For me, studying 302 00:29:45,890 --> 00:29:50,000 psychology and counseling is a way of understanding myself and my own 303 00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:57,530 issues better so that I can understand the social world around me and of 304 00:29:57,530 --> 00:30:03,530 course financial consideration was also another factor so even though the fees 305 00:30:03,530 --> 00:30:08,300 for enrolling in the classes and exams are not small generally- it costs about 306 00:30:08,300 --> 00:30:12,710 three to four thousand yuan - so the exchange rate is about one to six with 307 00:30:12,710 --> 00:30:17,660 US dollars and for Chinese people that's a lot of money. That's about a 308 00:30:17,660 --> 00:30:23,179 highschool teacher's monthly salary, right. They reason that they could master 309 00:30:23,179 --> 00:30:27,620 the tool of solving one's own problem and gain a deeper understanding of oneself 310 00:30:27,620 --> 00:30:32,800 through systematic learning better and this is cheaper than going for 311 00:30:32,800 --> 00:30:38,570 professional counseling which costs about 300 to 400 yuan per session so if 312 00:30:38,570 --> 00:30:44,179 you need ten sessions that's there right. So then our conversation turn to the 313 00:30:44,179 --> 00:30:48,260 question of Zi Wo - the self. I asked them to explain what this concept 314 00:30:48,260 --> 00:30:52,580 meant to them and whether and how their understanding of it had changed over 315 00:30:52,580 --> 00:31:01,100 time. Here I will briefly discuss three cases for you. The first one is a woman 316 00:31:01,100 --> 00:31:07,520 Wan Ting. She is a divorced mother in her thirties with an 8 year old daughter. She 317 00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:11,870 used to work for real estate firm selling housing units. Although the 318 00:31:11,870 --> 00:31:17,510 income was not bad the work was highly demanding so after she got divorced she 319 00:31:17,510 --> 00:31:20,840 decided to quit the real estates job so she could spend more time 320 00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:25,760 with her daughter. She implied that she had saved enough money and got some 321 00:31:25,760 --> 00:31:31,010 money from the divorce. Two years ago she started an after-school care program at 322 00:31:31,010 --> 00:31:37,400 home helping eight children with their lunch and homework. This is a popular 323 00:31:37,400 --> 00:31:43,730 practice in China due to parents' busy work schedule so this homecare 324 00:31:43,730 --> 00:31:49,070 brought in enough income for her while allowing her to spend more time to take 325 00:31:49,070 --> 00:31:53,120 care of her daughter. The reason why she was studying psychology in the 326 00:31:53,120 --> 00:31:57,050 counseling she said is to help myself and guide my child to grow 327 00:31:57,050 --> 00:32:03,410 better and she was quite confident in articulating her understanding of the 328 00:32:03,410 --> 00:32:09,020 self so you listen to her view - it's very different from the next two so she 329 00:32:09,020 --> 00:32:13,400 said that Zi Wo is like a circle demarcating the boundary between one's 330 00:32:13,400 --> 00:32:19,340 own self and others. I try to teach my eight-year-old daughter how to draw this 331 00:32:19,340 --> 00:32:24,080 line and respect the boundary. For example she likes to go through my purse 332 00:32:24,080 --> 00:32:29,960 for fun, she said so I'll tell her that a purse is a private belonging and she 333 00:32:29,960 --> 00:32:34,730 must get my approval before handling it. She must know the boundary between to 334 00:32:34,730 --> 00:32:39,560 the world herself and others and this is the first step towards personal growth 335 00:32:39,560 --> 00:32:45,020 and I was like well yeah my daughter go through my purse all the 336 00:32:45,020 --> 00:32:51,320 time. Anyway her view of the self as a demarcated entity was intriguing because 337 00:32:51,320 --> 00:32:56,920 most people I met in China did not speak in this term. She also placed great 338 00:32:56,920 --> 00:33:03,650 importance on the notion of boundaries between the self and others. Now her 339 00:33:03,650 --> 00:33:09,350 interpretation of a private self formed a sharp contrast with another trainee there - 340 00:33:09,350 --> 00:33:15,890 Lu Ming Xing - a 25 year old temporary junior high school teacher and 341 00:33:15,890 --> 00:33:21,980 a former Army soldier. Within the workshop Lu was the one most concerned 342 00:33:21,980 --> 00:33:27,290 about social acceptance. He passionately declared to the group 343 00:33:27,290 --> 00:33:32,390 "Anyone who enters the world must be recognized and accepted by 344 00:33:32,390 --> 00:33:38,030 society. Only when the society acknowledges me there can exist the self. 345 00:33:38,030 --> 00:33:42,049 if you are not connected with the society and the people around you how 346 00:33:42,049 --> 00:33:50,150 can you have a true self, true Zi Wo?", but he also admitted that he was 347 00:33:50,150 --> 00:33:56,720 fascinated by the psychological exploration of the self, but focusing on 348 00:33:56,720 --> 00:34:02,960 one's feeling and reflecting one's own inner experiences was very unsettling 349 00:34:02,960 --> 00:34:09,260 and difficult to him. So he told us: "I came from a mountainous village in 350 00:34:09,260 --> 00:34:14,300 Guizhou province. My family was poor and I did not have much education. In the 351 00:34:14,300 --> 00:34:21,020 military I always felt inferior to others so I tried to follow the orders 352 00:34:21,020 --> 00:34:26,030 and win the recognition and the approval of others. When I first began studying 353 00:34:26,030 --> 00:34:30,859 psychological counseling my goal was to obtain the skills to help my students 354 00:34:30,859 --> 00:34:35,750 and improve my teaching but soon I realized that I wanted to understand 355 00:34:35,750 --> 00:34:40,790 myself even though the concept of Zi Wo is quite alien to me and sometimes I 356 00:34:40,790 --> 00:34:46,070 just cannot focus on myself". So he had a lot of difficulty 357 00:34:46,070 --> 00:34:50,810 narrating his feeling during the workshop. He constantly referred to how he 358 00:34:50,810 --> 00:34:56,720 might be viewed and judged by his fellow soldiers and co-workers and 359 00:34:56,720 --> 00:35:02,500 was very disturbed by the fact that he was often uncertain whether his behavior 360 00:35:02,500 --> 00:35:10,670 was acceptable by others. So he reminded me of my parents' generation that grew up 361 00:35:10,670 --> 00:35:15,650 under socialism and largely sought social conformity so conformity was more 362 00:35:15,650 --> 00:35:22,000 important. Yet another part of him also wants to explore this domain 363 00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:30,140 inside him right so he hoped that self work somehow would enable him to craft a 364 00:35:30,140 --> 00:35:37,520 new person, a new kind of person capable of engaging the social world better. Now 365 00:35:37,520 --> 00:35:46,130 the most intriguing case is my encounter with Feng Gang - a 33 year old city 366 00:35:46,130 --> 00:35:53,180 police officer. So he was a bit shy with a touch of melancholia. We met at the 367 00:35:53,180 --> 00:35:58,520 workshop and later became good friends because we shared a special 368 00:35:58,520 --> 00:36:05,570 moment when I was assigned as his therapist and he was the client and we 369 00:36:05,570 --> 00:36:12,580 had to do this role-playing back and forth. So that was a very special moment. 370 00:36:12,580 --> 00:36:17,450 The sandbox - you have to make arrangement, free play, whatever you want 371 00:36:17,450 --> 00:36:23,120 to do - so the sandbox arrangement he created was remarkably telling. It was a 372 00:36:23,120 --> 00:36:30,760 desert scene with a red snake right here stranded the kind of like in Scent 373 00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:36,890 nearby there was a cluster of green some kind of a green he said cactus and a 374 00:36:36,890 --> 00:36:43,580 jade horn it's a jade horn. It took me a long time like 22 minutes you know to 375 00:36:43,580 --> 00:36:49,580 put this very simple scene together and then there was dead silence. For five 376 00:36:49,580 --> 00:36:51,910 minutes we were sitting there face-to-face. 377 00:36:51,910 --> 00:37:00,040 Finally he murmured: "I feel that the snake is very lonely and stuck there. 378 00:37:00,040 --> 00:37:06,500 He is trying to move forward towards the green plants perhaps an oasis in the 379 00:37:06,500 --> 00:37:16,460 desert but it's very dry but he's very tired and will probably never get there." 380 00:37:16,460 --> 00:37:20,270 So at that time I did not know much about his personal circumstance but 381 00:37:20,270 --> 00:37:27,290 I could sense a great deal of emotion and tension so I asked: "Does this scene 382 00:37:27,290 --> 00:37:33,230 speak to your current situation?" He nodded and tears came rolling down so 383 00:37:33,230 --> 00:37:36,800 it was the first time I played in this role it was very shocking and I didn't 384 00:37:36,800 --> 00:37:39,320 know what to do that's part of the training is you don't know how to do 385 00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:45,380 when people actually open up to you and then cry and he said: "This snake is 386 00:37:45,380 --> 00:37:50,510 just like me. I never had a chance to look at myself like this before." 387 00:37:50,510 --> 00:37:58,329 I learned later that he was a plain-clothed policeman catching pocket-pickers 388 00:37:58,329 --> 00:38:03,699 on city buses. This work was highly demanding and sometimes dangerous yet 389 00:38:03,699 --> 00:38:09,549 his supervisor did not trust him and accused him of slacking off. He was under 390 00:38:09,549 --> 00:38:13,869 a great deal of stress and felt resentful and when he began to take 391 00:38:13,869 --> 00:38:19,089 counseling classes in his spare time, his parents in-law who also lived with 392 00:38:19,089 --> 00:38:24,910 his family could not understand why a man like him - a policeman - would need to 393 00:38:24,910 --> 00:38:31,209 study psychology and complained frequently. His wife, a full-time office 394 00:38:31,209 --> 00:38:36,009 worker, was supportive of his study but also needed his help in taking care of 395 00:38:36,009 --> 00:38:41,349 their infant baby so he said: "I come home after work feeling exhausted but I'm 396 00:38:41,349 --> 00:38:46,150 expected to help my wife wash baby diapers and do housework. My 397 00:38:46,150 --> 00:38:51,429 parents-in-law think I'm just lazy if I needed some rest. They also believed that 398 00:38:51,429 --> 00:38:56,589 studying psychological counseling was impractical, a waste of time. I was under 399 00:38:56,589 --> 00:39:00,999 so much pressure at work and home and I do not have a moment for myself. I'm 400 00:39:00,999 --> 00:39:07,719 stuck and feeling very lonely." So he then commented on how much he 401 00:39:07,719 --> 00:39:14,079 cherished the moment he had recently crafted for himself to look deeper into 402 00:39:14,079 --> 00:39:22,029 his own psyche through all the counseling training and attending to his 403 00:39:22,029 --> 00:39:28,689 anguish and opening up his feelings to others in this kind of a therapeutic 404 00:39:28,689 --> 00:39:33,549 setting was the first step towards healing for him even though this was 405 00:39:33,549 --> 00:39:40,299 often a very painful experience as a police officer he was often expected to 406 00:39:40,299 --> 00:39:45,369 be strong and not to talk about his feeling but the therapy training gave 407 00:39:45,369 --> 00:39:51,579 him a safe space to explore his inner fear and desire so he was able to look 408 00:39:51,579 --> 00:39:58,420 into himself deeply while reaching out for help from the mentor and the fellow 409 00:39:58,420 --> 00:40:03,039 trainees so this provides a nice social space for him. At the end of our 410 00:40:03,039 --> 00:40:08,650 session he told me that the green plants he placed there represented hope and 411 00:40:08,650 --> 00:40:15,850 the faith: "I'm not sure where it is yet but I have a feeling 412 00:40:15,850 --> 00:40:22,150 that I have begun to see sparks of faith in this rather despairing situation 413 00:40:22,150 --> 00:40:29,410 and that's why I keep crawling like the snake." So later on Feng Gang also 414 00:40:29,410 --> 00:40:35,260 articulated his view of the self in this way to me so he said: "Zi Wo-the self- 415 00:40:35,260 --> 00:40:40,960 has two layers of meaning: one is a Dang Xia - the self that's 416 00:40:40,960 --> 00:40:47,560 living in this moment and it's deeply embedded in the complex nexus of the 417 00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:53,680 family, kinship and society. The other is the primeval self detached from the 418 00:40:53,680 --> 00:40:59,680 reality and can only emerge from time to time when I'm alone in meditation. I'm 419 00:40:59,680 --> 00:41:05,110 longing for the disentangled self but at the same time cannot abandon the 420 00:41:05,110 --> 00:41:11,800 socially embedded self because both together make me human". I thought 421 00:41:11,800 --> 00:41:19,690 it was a really powerful statement there. So this statement that highlights, this 422 00:41:19,690 --> 00:41:24,460 statement highlights the complexity of the self as a relational and dynamic 423 00:41:24,460 --> 00:41:29,920 process constantly being constituted and reconstituted through different 424 00:41:29,920 --> 00:41:37,240 layers of sociality and desire. So two years later I revisited him and found 425 00:41:37,240 --> 00:41:43,120 his personal situation improved greatly. He continued to study psychological 426 00:41:43,120 --> 00:41:48,580 counseling in spare time and engaged in the self project. So he said: "I have 427 00:41:48,580 --> 00:41:53,980 learned to adjust my mindset constantly which helped enhance my family and work 428 00:41:53,980 --> 00:41:59,920 relations. Even though I cannot change the reality, I'm much better at seeing 429 00:41:59,920 --> 00:42:04,870 different options and deciding how to respond". So he was also at that 430 00:42:04,870 --> 00:42:11,230 time volunteering at a small private counseling firm to offer free service to 431 00:42:11,230 --> 00:42:16,090 students with psychological troubles and he find their work very fulfilling. 432 00:42:16,090 --> 00:42:22,480 So these three cases illustrate the heterogeneous ways of conceiving the 433 00:42:22,480 --> 00:42:24,730 self through therapeutic work in urban 434 00:42:24,730 --> 00:42:29,320 China so the first one Wanting stressed the importance of the private self and 435 00:42:29,320 --> 00:42:34,570 maintaining the boundary yet she was also aware that the formation of this 436 00:42:34,570 --> 00:42:39,580 private self was relational and thus could not be isolated from the social 437 00:42:39,580 --> 00:42:44,170 world. The second, Lu Ming Xin, had advocated a 438 00:42:44,170 --> 00:42:50,350 model of selfhood as one deeply rooted in and shaped by interpersonal dynamics 439 00:42:50,350 --> 00:42:56,050 and social norms. Disentangling the self from others even for a moment was 440 00:42:56,050 --> 00:43:00,670 unsettling to him. The third one, Feng Gang's notion of self work, is more 441 00:43:00,670 --> 00:43:07,930 sophisticated. First it requires the act of disentanglement so that the inner 442 00:43:07,930 --> 00:43:13,030 self can find a space of healing and regain clarity. Yet the work does not 443 00:43:13,030 --> 00:43:20,800 stop there. The new self cultivated by psychotherapy needs to be re-embedded 444 00:43:20,800 --> 00:43:26,680 back into the social world. So from this perspective the social and the self, the 445 00:43:26,680 --> 00:43:33,070 inner and outer, constitute a dialogic relationship that strengthens one 446 00:43:33,070 --> 00:43:38,110 another rather than opposes one another. Yet all three of them have faith in 447 00:43:38,110 --> 00:43:44,740 psychological work, seeing it as am effective tool for reforming 448 00:43:44,740 --> 00:43:50,740 yourself. Thus self-efficacy and social efficacy 449 00:43:50,740 --> 00:43:56,140 here become one and the same project that promises to bring happiness, 450 00:43:56,140 --> 00:44:02,680 success and fulfillment. So many of my informants echo this view as they 451 00:44:02,680 --> 00:44:09,280 witnessed the therapeutic work on the self producing positive effects on 452 00:44:09,280 --> 00:44:18,250 their family and social lives. So let me offer a few final remarks, kind of a 453 00:44:18,250 --> 00:44:24,190 concluding remarks here. So for many urban Chinese, Zi Wo is becoming an 454 00:44:24,190 --> 00:44:29,530 object that one can adjust and improve with the psychotherapeutic technologies. 455 00:44:29,530 --> 00:44:34,350 The relationship between the self and the social nexus remains a key 456 00:44:34,350 --> 00:44:37,960 problematic one must tackle. It's not easy to negotiate 457 00:44:37,960 --> 00:44:43,359 this relationship. I have identified that distinctive dual-process here, 458 00:44:43,359 --> 00:44:47,770 I call it disentangling and re-embedding as central to the working of this new 459 00:44:47,770 --> 00:44:54,760 therapeutic self in China but here let me just briefly mention three important 460 00:44:54,760 --> 00:45:01,540 features about this new emerging therapeutic culture in China. First there 461 00:45:01,540 --> 00:45:04,809 exists multiple notions of the self here right - 462 00:45:04,809 --> 00:45:09,099 traditional, socialist, neoliberal - whatever you want to term them but you 463 00:45:09,099 --> 00:45:14,250 can see clearly there are different orientations here and they are very much 464 00:45:14,250 --> 00:45:20,500 co-existent and entangled with one another so individuals in China today must 465 00:45:20,500 --> 00:45:25,059 navigate through this plurality and try to make sense of all these different 466 00:45:25,059 --> 00:45:29,859 forms of the self that coexist so people often have get very confused actually 467 00:45:29,859 --> 00:45:33,670 especially young people there. Moreover therapeutic engagement with 468 00:45:33,670 --> 00:45:40,359 self-work is becoming an important tool for enhancing one's self-worth and 469 00:45:40,359 --> 00:45:45,579 well-being as well as a promise for living the good life so while in the 470 00:45:45,579 --> 00:45:54,369 early reform years 1980s to 1990s material wealth was the prominent marker 471 00:45:54,369 --> 00:46:02,530 of status today I say health and well-being are becoming much more 472 00:46:02,530 --> 00:46:08,290 important register now second personal narratives of feelings and life 473 00:46:08,290 --> 00:46:12,760 histories also essential in cultivating the new self 474 00:46:12,760 --> 00:46:21,190 here as Bradley Lewis the psychiatrist actually puts it the quote these 475 00:46:21,190 --> 00:46:27,940 culturally located stories, self- stories and their priorities within these 476 00:46:27,940 --> 00:46:34,410 stories combined with other cultural stories to scaffold our 477 00:46:34,410 --> 00:46:38,890 narrative identity and provide us with a compass for living so these 478 00:46:38,890 --> 00:46:44,369 narratives here, I'm telling you, people's stories are actually a very important 479 00:46:44,369 --> 00:46:50,580 part of their compass for living. A common theme that emerges 480 00:46:50,580 --> 00:46:54,180 in all these narratives is that individuals often started to engage in 481 00:46:54,180 --> 00:47:00,120 psychotherapeutic work out of curiosity or the need to help others right but 482 00:47:00,120 --> 00:47:05,730 then discovered that they themselves need to do self-work so talk-therapy 483 00:47:05,730 --> 00:47:10,290 training is conducted in China mostly in this kind of a small group fashions 484 00:47:10,290 --> 00:47:15,590 offer a unique opportunity for participants to share self-stories and 485 00:47:15,590 --> 00:47:22,050 experiment on self-remaking but the overall emphasis here as you can see I 486 00:47:22,050 --> 00:47:26,700 think those very interesting to China's is not to treat mental illness here but 487 00:47:26,700 --> 00:47:31,380 to enhance well-being and the quality of life although you know some people do 488 00:47:31,380 --> 00:47:34,980 use their to treat mental illness but that's actually not the majority of what 489 00:47:34,980 --> 00:47:40,230 people are doing there with psychology and the counseling and the third this 490 00:47:40,230 --> 00:47:44,610 regime of self work has a clear class and gender character. The primary 491 00:47:44,610 --> 00:47:49,890 consumers of this new industry are members of the urban middle classes and 492 00:47:49,890 --> 00:47:54,630 a large portion of them are women. The working class, the poor, all those on 493 00:47:54,630 --> 00:47:59,340 the margin of the society are largely left out because they either do not have 494 00:47:59,340 --> 00:48:06,840 time or money to embrace this new experiment. It's striking, you know, that 495 00:48:06,840 --> 00:48:13,830 women take up nearly 80% of the participants at the self-worth 496 00:48:13,830 --> 00:48:18,570 workshop and training classes I've attended and many Chinese therapists I 497 00:48:18,570 --> 00:48:26,960 interviewed also reported a very very high percentage of female presence 498 00:48:26,960 --> 00:48:32,010 perhaps this is partly due to the lasting gender expectation that women 499 00:48:32,010 --> 00:48:37,230 are primarily responsible for taking care of the emotional and the family 500 00:48:37,230 --> 00:48:42,810 life and family relations. So what's new here is that urban Chinese women 501 00:48:42,810 --> 00:48:47,700 today somehow have the possibility of a acquiring professional almost like a 502 00:48:47,700 --> 00:48:53,040 toolbox they are learning in a toolbox here and not just their instinct to take 503 00:48:53,040 --> 00:48:58,920 charge of their own emotion and their family life. While the new therapeutic 504 00:48:58,920 --> 00:49:04,200 culture provides a unique and safe space for self exploration its impact 505 00:49:04,200 --> 00:49:09,450 goes far beyond the personal realm. I don't have time to go into that but it 506 00:49:09,450 --> 00:49:18,210 certainly has very very important political implications here too so while 507 00:49:18,210 --> 00:49:23,819 my research shows that this culture of self engagement is emerging outside your 508 00:49:23,819 --> 00:49:30,059 American societies. It takes a distinct form in a context that has its own 509 00:49:30,059 --> 00:49:33,930 deep cultural and historical understanding here so they don't 510 00:49:33,930 --> 00:49:38,579 just embrace the psychotherapy, Western psychotherapy, wholeheartedly but really 511 00:49:38,579 --> 00:49:43,770 try to integrate them adapt them to the Chinese cultural context and finally 512 00:49:43,770 --> 00:49:48,750 this new self work dovetail I mentioned with the party-state project of 513 00:49:48,750 --> 00:49:54,510 building a socialist, a harmonious society so in this context government 514 00:49:54,510 --> 00:49:58,349 officials and social scientists have also come to embrace what's called the 515 00:49:58,349 --> 00:50:02,460 positive psychology I don't know where they yeah some of you have heard of that 516 00:50:02,460 --> 00:50:08,220 positive psychology. Despite the critique of its lack of some moral map 517 00:50:08,220 --> 00:50:13,950 and reluctance to tackle structural problems such self work regarded by many 518 00:50:13,950 --> 00:50:21,180 Chinese experts to have the potential to broaden social interventions by 519 00:50:21,180 --> 00:50:28,049 improving citizens emotional outlook and fostering a sense of satisfaction so 520 00:50:28,049 --> 00:50:34,829 with the help of psych experts, Chinese people today are told it is possible to 521 00:50:34,829 --> 00:50:40,680 turn their social problems and suffering into a technical matter of sound 522 00:50:40,680 --> 00:50:48,079 personal choice and self-management so yeah, thank you.