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

From Psychotherapy to Psycho-Boom: A Historical Overview of Psychotherapy in China

Discussion of the role of modern psychology in the developing world has prompted commentators from both east and west to urge the establishment of a branch of psychology devoted to the examination of fundamental theoretical issues. Such a discussion should both inform and be informed by an historical analysis of the spread of western psychology in Asian countries. The historiography of psychology, itself a rapidly expanding field in the west, would likewise benefit from an extension of its present scope to include the history of the relationship between the spread of psychology and colonialism, and that between traditional Asian and western (whether traditional or modern) psychological concepts, and from adopting the fresh perspective on the perennial questions of the basic truth structure in psychological science to which such an enlargement of scope will lead.

Psychologising Asia or Asianising Psychology: A New Prescription for Dr. Watson?

This paper summarizes briefly the development of clinical psychology in the past thirty years. The work in the fields of psychotherapy, the psychological causes and traits in neurosis, the psychopathological traits in psychosis, the psychological problems in acupuncture anaesthesia, and the psychological diagnosis in children with mental deficiency is reviewed.

Lin Xintian

Papers

Thirty Years of Clinical Psychology in China