“We are going to do an exercise,” Teacher Jo, an Australian psychologist and spiritual counselor, announces as he distributes pillows to the assembled. “You are going to hold the cushion at the ends, and you are going to express frustration…I want to feel a big wind coming towards me!”

What he gets is a hurricane-force gale: people scream at the top of their lungs and lash out at their pillows like boxers pummeling a punching bag.

“One woman started shivering,” Sonya Pritzker recalls in Learning to Love: Intimacy and the Discourse of Development in China, a new book from the University of Michigan Press that’s part of JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative. (Read Chapter Five: “Wrangling With Ghosts” on JSTOR.) Another woman, Pritzker continues, “held her hand over her mouth as if she was going to vomit. Yet others remained silent and unmoving, some gazing around the room as if in a dream, others staring down at their cushions with an intense glare.”

This class didn’t take place in a Los Angeles loft or on a beach in Thailand, but in a large city in northeastern China, at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth. It’s but one of many mental health centers that have sprung up amid China’s “psychoboom” of the past two decades, as mental illness has transformed from a bourgeois Western taboo into a legitimate public health concern.

The consequences of the psychoboom are both logical and contradictory. As the Chinese economy has expanded and citizens have grown wealthier, the demands of everyday life have grown in number and kind, expanding from physiological and safety concerns to a desire for love, esteem, and self-actualization. At the same time, such desires run counter to traditional Chinese values like the age-old concept of Confucian filial piety and the relatively new  ideology imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both of which place the well-being of the collective above the happiness of the individual.

“When Teacher Jo explicitly noted how participants who struggled to access anger, rage, or grief might feel that they are ‘doing it wrong’ in comparison to others who seemed able to express emotion more readily,” Pritzker explains, he seemed attuned to the salience of the chronotope of competition in Chinese educational contexts. And yet his invitation to express negative emotion “publicly” (or at least among others) arguably constituted an inversion of the more salient cultural chronotopes of harmony and emotional restraint.

Nor could participants openly connect their psychological distress to underlying social, economic, and political causes such as racism, sexism, or bigotry, as doing so would implicate the shortcomings of their government and its belief system. As a result, much of Learning to Love is dedicated to the language Chinese therapy-seekers use to discuss and make sense of their own mental state—a language layered with indirect signifiers (indexicality) and public secrecy. Along the way, Pritzker also asks if the inevitable, albeit coded, scrutiny of private and public life could lead to collective action and political change. Her answer, it turns out, isn’t optimistic.

Tim Brinkhof: How did you connect with the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, and what about it caught your academic interest?

Author Sonya Pritzker: I studied psychology in China as an undergraduate in the nineties and looked at the treatment of mood disorders for my master’s thesis. I was in Beijing around 2008, researching my dissertation on the translation of Chinese medicine, when I had dinner with a couple of friends who had started attending events at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth. This intrigued me, as my study of psychology in China had not yet included group or inner-child therapy. I visited the center and spoke about conducting research there, though I did not receive funding to do so until 2014.

Learning to Love discusses the emergence of a so-called “psychoboom” in China during the late nineties. What was this boom?

During the Mao Zedong years from 1949 through at least 1966, psychology was considered something bourgeois, something Western. It was completely eradicated during the Cultural Revolution because the expression of any sort of psychological distress was seen as a political problem.

It was only in the 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping opened up the economy, that psychology came back and scientific literature on the subject started being translated into Mandarin, though by 1995 people were still very hesitant to talk about mental distress, even with close others.

The early 2000s was when the boom really took off. In 1999, the CCP designated mental health as an important health issue; 2002 marked the first time that psychology was incorporated in a National Mental Health Plan. By 2004, state television channels began airing programs featuring psychological interviews, which were really televised psychotherapy. Finally, you had the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where recovery efforts for the first time involved psychologists among other healthcare professionals.

At the same time, there was a vast expansion of psychology in public life. Bookstores and libraries exploded with psychology-related texts. In Beijing and other large cities, organizations like the New Life Center started offering workshops from foreign authors and teachers like the Australian instructor I write about in the introduction of Learning to Love.

What caused this renewed interest and appreciation for psychology?

Decades of rapid economic growth are thought to have contributed to the boom, as has the increase in living standards. It’s kind of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where, once you’re at a point where you have enough money to buy food and shelter, you start to worry about things like mental well-being and self-improvement.

As far as underlying social, political, and cultural factors go, Chinese citizens had a range of complicated experiences and feelings with regards to the Cultural Revolution, the rapid economic development that began in the 1980s, and the very notion of opening up to the West. Psychological counseling was one outlet for people—many for the first time—to talk honestly about these experiences.

How do the ways differ in which the Chinese and we in the West discuss mental illness?

The way they describe anxiety as feeling out-of-balance, out-of-alignment, is not that different. If conceptions of these experiences differ from East to West, I am hesitant to attribute that to culture, partly because there are so many factors to consider, including urban versus rural environments, class, and gender.

That said, medical anthropologists have noted that Chinese people during the late twentieth century frequently expressed psychological distress in somatic, physiological terms, like dizziness. In retrospect we can understand why. In a time and place where psychological problems were politically sensitive, it was better to tell people you had a stomach-ache than to admit you were feeling anxious or depressed.

Are there any other unique characteristics of Chinese mental health discourse worth noting?

Both the Chinese state and media have a very uniform voice—a single source of authority you’re supposed to listen to—and when people have thoughts or feelings that don’t match that voice, it leads to a unique kind of distress we don’t exactly see in the West.

This is especially true for cisgender, heteronormative middle-class Han Chinese people who would otherwise fit perfectly into the slots provided by state discourse. Those are the folks that are jolted the most when their own inner voice doesn’t align with that of the government.

Is this apolitical approach to psychotherapy particular to Communist China, or is it somehow inherent in the discipline and thus seen in the West also?

Although Sigmund Freud, who originally developed psychoanalysis, arguably connected observations of personal experiences to social and political conditions, his work was increasingly packaged—as it was marketed in the West—as an individualized form of therapy that had nothing to do with society at large; that is, I am the way I am because my mother or father had this or that issue, not because of, say, patriarchy or the ways in which men are encouraged to express (or not express) their emotions.

And yet, you found that several people undergoing therapy at the New Life Center did end up scrutinizing the shortcomings of Chinese society.

I should reiterate, as I do in the book, that the New Life Center did not engage in any explicit political action or education. It was not a pedagogy of the oppressed—a therapeutic intervention that leads directly to collective action. Yet while the Center did not engage directly with political issues, it’s not uncommon for folks undergoing psychoanalysis to look outward and inward to see that their personal experiences have a lot to do with their social environment.

There appeared to be a great uniformity of experience in the New Life space. People who grew up in China during the 1970s struggled with similar problems, and whenever one person did an exercise in front of the group, others were able relate to what they went through: they saw something of their past and, as a result, couldn’t help but jump to a kind of social analysis.

But social analysis does not necessarily lead to social change, right?

When ruptures occur in people’s lives, when things don’t go well—that’s when they become more capable of scrutinizing. When their marriage isn’t what it turned out to be, or parenthood doesn’t work out, they step back and view their lives and their social political context in a different light.

Now, does the CCP allow them to have these thoughts? Yes, one can have whatever thoughts they want. The Chinese government does not practice thought control. Are they allowed to then do anything about it? No (at least most of the time). People are nevertheless making these connections all the time. What’s not allowed is publication of one’s insights in a way that would spark collective action.

Does the New Life Center at least appear to help people on an individual level?

I think so, even if it can make life more difficult. Understanding the status quo makes it harder to accept it, after all. Still, I think that—on an individual level—the workshops help people seek out relationships, career assistance, and living situations that are more supportive and uplifting, as opposed to making them fit into a certain mold.

The people attending the New Life Center are an extremely heteronormative group, but I do know there are alternative communities in large urban centers in China for people who are, say, struggling with a queer identity. These communities can help them recognize that they are valued and that there’s nothing wrong with them, which can change their lives.

Does it also change the conditions and politics of being queer in China, the pressures they feel from their family? Not necessarily. But while Chinese citizens may not have the same level of political agency that we enjoy in the US or Europe, the communities are there.

In your book, you mention that you didn’t have the opportunity to conduct a longitudinal study. Could such a study answer questions about psychology in China that Learning to Love could not?

In scientific terms, a longitudinal study would yield more insight into what the workshops offered at the New Life Center do for people over an extended period. Do these people go on to change their living situations? Does one of the women I talked about in Learning to Love, who said she wanted to leave her family for a year, do so? If so, how does that turn out? Does another woman get divorced like she said she would? Do people who stop attending the workshops continue to interrogate their lives and circumstances?

I was scheduled to go back to Beijing during summer of 2020 to do some follow-up, but obviously that didn’t happen. While I did not officially conduct a longitudinal study though, I did keep in touch with some of the people I met at the center, one of whom actually ended up becoming politically conservative, ceasing self-scrutinization altogether.

It’s tempting to be hopeful about the social impact of psychotherapy, but ultimately, I think a longitudinal study would validate my conclusion, which is that we don’t know. This isn’t about predicting interventions that would change China for the better. Having lived in the country for ten years, I just don’t think it is.

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