Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of self-boundary making among Chinese psychotherapists. Although they often use a 'China/West' dichotomy as a framing, they are more likely to look at it as a process that is effected by other distinctions, such as inter-generational or class differences.

Paper long abstract:

Taking Winnicott's famous statement concerning ' the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related', as its starting point, this paper builds on ethnographic field research with trainee psychoanalysts and their clients in contemporary urban China to explore the dynamics of self-boundary making and maintenance today. I argue that attempts to demonstrate cultural sensitivity on the part of the European and North American analysts who provide training often backfire due to their appropriation of an essentialised vision of cultural difference. The psychoanalytic literature often veers between those who reject any discussion of 'culture' as a means by which patients avoid difficult material on the one hand and those who present a potentially Orientalist division, as can be seen in psychoanalytic writings that attempt to draw a distinction between 'the Chinese mind' and 'the Western mind'. Such polarisation is mirrored in the perspective of training analysts who veer between abstract self-critique as to whether or not their training is 'colonising the Chinese mind' and their discussion of specific case material that often pathologises Chinese trainee analysts and their patients from an orthodox analytic perspective in terms such as 'incomplete individuation/separation'. My discussions with Chinese trainees suggests that although they often use a 'China/West' dichotomy as a framing for understanding clinical work, they are more likely than their trainers to look at the boundary between self and other as a shifting a fluid process that is effected by other distinctions, such as inter-generational or class differences.