Intimate Relationships in China in the Light of Depth Psychology

A Study of Gender and Integrity

Huan Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000055726
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Index: Psychology

In Intimate Relationships in China in the Light of Depth Psychology: A Study of Gender and Integrity, Huan Wang presents an overview of Jungian ideas as they apply to gender roles and relationships in contemporary Chinese culture. Moving beyond a Western interpretation of key concepts, Wang attempts to understand and deal with the difficulties of contemporary marriages in a rapidly changing society, investigating how young Chinese couples have been affected by traditional values, Westernisation, and the one-child policy. Wang also discusses how depth psychology has developed and been applied in China, highlighting how it differs in Chinese and Western settings and the problems and achievements Chinese people have faced. She concludes that the Chinese psyche today is experiencing a transition from the compliance of collectivism to the awareness of individuation, and that the rediscovery of the notion of integrity will help Chinese therapists to find their way, make young Chinese people independent individuals, and bring a new approach to their marriages.

This is the first time such issues have been profoundly and comprehensively discussed in a Chinese context. It will be an invaluable resource for analytical psychologists, psychotherapists, and marriage and family and couple therapists working in China or with Chinese clients. It will also be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies and to anyone interested in the psyche of contemporary China.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In this introductory chapter, I attempt to establish the basis of this book, which sets out ideas and concepts which are, let us hope, important for understanding masculinity and femininity in intimate relationships in China. This leads to the development of a set of further ideas concerning work with Chinese couples therapeutically. For such understanding and future therapeutic work based on it, this book covers four main themes:

1. Exploring and critiquing some relevant basic Jungian and post-Jungian ideas in the Chinese context;
2. Understanding Chinese culture through a Jungian lens;
3. Developing appropriate and useful Jungian ideas in the clinical realm; and
4. Applying these ideas in both clinical work with patients and other related psychosocial arenas.

The study of national characteristics present in China has a long and controversial history, beginning in 1935 when Lin Yutang published his book My Country and My People to introduce China to the West. Jungian and post-Jungian ideas might be among the most efficacious psychological theories with which to facilitate our understanding of the Chinese psyche. Specifically, I will refer to the collective unconscious and the application of the concept of ‘archetype’, both of which will be discussed later. Further, the Jungian terms ‘anima’, ‘animus’, ‘mother complex’¹, ‘father archetype’, etc., which of course need to be examined and discussed, can facilitate our understanding of men and women and the most basic relationships in both the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms. Based on my observation, Chinese therapists today welcome these concepts and ideas and have started to apply them liberally in their therapeutic work. Hence, exploring the applicability of Jungian psychology in Chinese settings and then developing relative ideas and techniques to work with Chinese people are both necessary and timely. This can deepen the dialogues between China and the West, which is significant for both China and the West’s understanding of China.

In this book, I will focus on the realm of marriage, because couple relationships have become the basis of Chinese families in recent years due to Westernisation and the prevalence of small family structures. Furthermore, in my clinical observations, intimacy always emerges as the main issue raised by patients in therapy.

According to the People’s Daily and the Blue Book of Youth: The Development Report on Chinese Youth in the New Century, since the late 1970s, divorce rates and the number of divorces in China have continued to rise annually. Since 2008, the rate and number have increased markedly, with the divorce rate increasing to 7.65 percent per annum. Most divorcees are between the ages of 22 and 35 (People’s Daily, 2nd July, 2011; Blue Book of Chinese Youth Development, 2012), and it is important to note that the majority were born after 1978. Thus, it seems that young Chinese couples are facing a crisis in their intimate relationships at the current time and this phenomenon requires further examination.

The year 1978 was very important in modern China, marked as it was by the implementation of two major policies: first, The Chinese Economic Reform; and second, the one-child policy. Since then, the economic situation and family structure in China have undergone monumental shifts. The Reform and Opening-up policy brought to Chinese daily life the influences of modernisation and Westernisation. Meanwhile, a consequence of the one-child policy has been the decline of large families made up of grandparents and several siblings; these days, more families are composed of just three individuals (two parents and one child). As a result, intimacy issues seem to differ between the younger and older generations. On the one hand, the Chinese are retaining their old internal expectations and fantasies of intimate relationships, as informed by China’s history and, I suggest, the cultural inheritance of older patterns of relationship; on the other hand, changes in daily life have led to new projections, expectations and dynamics in terms of relationships.

As a Chinese woman from a one-child family who grew up during this period of immense change, I have personally witnessed the effects of these great shifts. My main interest is to understand marriage issues in China from my cultural exploration and clinical observations and to interpret these issues from both Jungian and post-Jungian perspectives. I argue that the notions of femininity and masculinity, which are accompanied by particular fantasies of the ‘other’ and are constellated in Chinese marriages, are ambivalent. By adopting Jungian and post-Jungian lenses, I study traditional ways of viewing feminine, masculine and contemporary images that have been affected by both Westernisation and interventions from the political establishment in modern China. To sum up, my aims are to address the concepts and characteristics of the feminine and masculine by referring to intimacy in Chinese cultural and clinical settings and to decipher how Chinese society may cope with the difficulties encountered in its marital relationships today.

No doubt, there are a number of controversies here. China today is in a very complex situation: There have been tremendous collisions and fusions between older Chinese values based on its long history and new values that have been immensely affected by Westernisation and modernisation since 1911.² Meanwhile, marriage and intimacy issues are never simple. As Guggenbuhl-Craig argues, ‘marriage is not a private matter’ (1977, p.103). According to him, parents and relatives influence marriage and divorce and this is particularly the case in China where marriage is always affected by family, society and politics (Croll, 1978, p.26; 1981, p.83). The one-child policy has changed China’s family structure, however, and accordingly, family dynamics have been modified. Chinese intimate relationships have been influenced by cultural factors, not only referring to rational factors but also including those which integrate the unconscious. Clinical psychological perspectives, particularly from the depth psychological perspective, are typically Western and are based on the study of individual cases. That being the case, we may query whether it is appropriate to apply these perspectives to the study of the Chinese psyche and Chinese relationships. Further, is it possible to figure out and deal with the shifts that have occurred in Chinese relationships? I would say that it is possible, and in the three following chapters, by critically reviewing the notion of femininity and masculinity from depth psychological perspectives and assessing the application of analytical psychology in China, I will show a) the complicity between the notions of femininity and masculinity and how they can be categorised at three different levels; b) how psychoanalysis and analytical psychology were imported and have developed in China, a non-Western context; and c) why the utilisation of a Western psychological lens to understand the ‘East’ is both timely and necessary.

Analytical psychology and the Eastern psyche

In The Secret of the Golden Flower, the Chinese Taoist classic, Jung wrote, ‘it must be mentioned that just as the human body shows a common anatomy above all racial differences, so too, does the psyche possess a common substratum. I have called the latter the collective unconscious’ (1931, para 88). According to Jung, human beings from different cultures have highly consistent inner worlds. The archetypes, the structures of the collective unconscious, are defined as being linked with instincts and also refer to a pattern of behaviour (CW18, para. 1228). It seems that the collective unconscious affects all peoples, irrespective of race and cultural difference. Further, a post-Jungian, Colman (2016), notes that behavioural and relational patterns included in archetypes have been revised by culture (pp.49–51). Thus, studying archetypes is a valid, universal approach to understanding and working on the psyche in different cultural settings.

Nevertheless, differences do exist between the Western and Eastern psychological worlds. As Jung said, ‘Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted’ (MDR, pp.348–349). To this, Clarke adds that, ‘the East’s emphasis on inwardness, self-awareness, self-analysis, was perhaps as one-sided as the West’s predominantly extraverted attitude’ (1994, p.72). Jung and Clarke assume that Eastern introversion and Western extraversion, typical human characteristics, are both crucial for the development of an individual’s psyche. However, these assertions in relation to the differences between East and West are divided and polarised and are not unproblematic. The difference between the East and West, and the validity of using Jungian and post-Jungian perspectives to understand issues arising from different contexts, in this case China, will be discussed in Chapter 4.

The importance of Jungian ideas has been increasing since the 1990s in China. The prevalence of such ideas and their growing influence in China merit, in part, the utility and application of a Western psychological lens to explore Eastern phenomena. However, how to use these Western concepts in non-Western contexts raises an important question, and what modifications must be made requires more discussion and research. These concerns have led to my own research – exploring the archetypal feminine and masculine in intimate realms in China through Jungian and post-Jungian lenses.

Femininity and masculinity in intimate relationships

According to Jung, feminine and masculine aspects are opposite yet equally important elements of the human psyche. He referred to the archetypal feminine in males as the anima, and the archetypal masculine in females as the animus (CW7, para. 296–340). They each have different psychological functions. Usually, ‘the archetypal feminine is the province of relating and care giving [ … ] [it] concerns joining, attachment and involvement’ (Young-Eisendrath, 1984, p.12). It carries ‘nurturing, vulnerable and care taking qualities’ (Zweig & Wolf, 1997, p.26). The basic feature of the archetypal feminine is always considered to be involved with, and connected to, others. However, this description has over-emphasised the positive functions of feminine archetypes in contributing to human relationships and has assigned the possibility of relations between humans solely to the feminine province; consequently, it does not provide a whole picture of either femininity or of human relationships. If we explore archetypal images in a different setting, female images carry different characteristics and consequently have different functions. Even so, I admit that such images are not only an inner aspect of ourselves, but also contribute to the base of our relationships. Studying feminine images helps us to understand the intrapsychic structure, and further, to understand interpersonal relationships. In sum, these images play a crucial role in structuring the ‘intersubjective space’³ in intimate relationships.

From a classical Jungian perspective, the archetypal feminine plays an important role in a man’s development. (Jung depicted the integration of anima/animus as the bridge to the Self.) As von Franz argues, ‘if a single man or if a whole civilization loses contact with the feminine element, that usually implies a too rational, too ordered, too organized attitude’ (1970b, p.70). On the other hand, ‘if a man neglects relatedness, she (his anima) at once regresses’ (1970b, p.89). It is said that the feminine element works on a man’s emotional and irrational life and is expressed in intimate relationships while his relatedness in turn affects his archetypal feminine. When he fails to connect internally with his femininity, it will harm his external relationships. However, there is no mention of women’s femininity in the work of classical Jungians, implying that, for them, women’s femininity is obvious and a woman must be born with knowledge thereof; hence, there is no need to explore it further. However, this is not the case.

As the post-Jungian scholar, Samuels, argues, ‘[w]omen and men also express an unconscious femininity and masculinity respectively’ (1985b, p.215). The feminine archetype (the anima) is carried by both men and women. When I identify the importance of femininity in the clinical field, the couple therapist Young-Eisendrath emphasises the importance of ‘understanding the repressed feminine’⁴ in both men and women (1984, pp.91–100). A woman is not born familiar with feminine qualities; she also needs to learn how to relate to her archetypal feminine. Conflicts between women and their archetypal feminine also cause intimacy problems and produce psychological symptoms. Becoming more conscious of the feminine aspects of oneself is important and helpful for both men and women in clinical work.

Alternatively, when we refer to the archetypal masculine, Young-Eisendrath noted that Jung has a rather negative attitude to the woman’s animus, emphasising the effects of ‘a badly flawed masculinity’ and highlighting that ‘the strength of the animus … was often overshadowed by its weakness’. Young-Eisendrath critiques this statement as essentialist and says that, among the first generation of Jungians, ‘theorizing of anima and animus had all the problems of sexual stereotyping’ (1998, pp.202–203). For example, according to von Franz, ‘man in his primitive capacity as hunter and warrior is accustomed to kill’, and the animus ‘shares this propensity’ (von Franz, 1970b/1996, p.169). From the perspective of classical Jungians, the archetypal masculine includes shadow, flaws, aggression, etc. and all these negative aspects are damaging to relationships. Positive animus perspectives are mentioned far less often than the negative animus experience, which was entangled with the unconscious tendency toward male chauvinism and stereotyping. Post-Jungians thus criticised the essentialist assignment of femininity and masculinity but share almost an identical attitude in relation to the archetypal masculine, which is held by both men and women, as ‘the domain of distancing and separating’, and characterised as ‘binding off, separating from, and aggression toward nature and human beings’ (Young-Eisendrath, 1984, p.12). Giegerich noted that the animus ‘changes the direction’ of marriage ‘in a logically different status’. Both the man and woman in the marriage become inaccessible to each other; they are disconnected (2008, p.120). Based on these descriptions and assertions, the masculine has little to do with intimate relationships and when it is involved, there are negative effects. Completely contrary to the archetypal feminine, the archetypal masculine harms and destroys intimacy and marriage. However, these assertions are based on the divided and binary positions of masculinity and femininity that are rooted in Western culture and need to be expanded.

For example, one can question the extent to which it is possible to distinguish between psychological femininity and masculinity. Are their effects on intimate relationships different and contrary? Samuels states that ‘anima and animus have certain characteristics in common’ (1986, p.23) and they might also share common functions in relationships. According to Samuels, both men and women possess an anima and animus and, as Waddell points out, they ‘offer the possibility for personal and culture gender expansion’ (2006, p.161). Therefore, anima and animus might be better understood as comprising gender possibility and potential, not necessarily as carrying certain characteristics and facilitating certain functions. It seems unwise to define femininity and masculinity in a split and opposite way: The lines that separate the two are more fluid and permeable than Jung originally hypothesised. This topic will be discussed further in Chapter 2.

Moreover, Young-Eisendrath points out that ‘gender varies from context, both between groups and within individuals over time’ (1998, p.203). If this is the case, in different cultures and times, the contents and functions of the feminine and masculine would change; the images of anima and animus depend on one’s environment, culture and historical context and their effects on intimate relationships might be interchangeable. In China in particular, due to the political and historical factors, the contents of femininity and masculinity are very complicated and ambivalent, as I will illustrate in the following chapters.

Feminine and masculine images in the imperial⁵ Chinese context

In ancient China, feminine and masculine images can be divided into innocent and virtuous figures and sensual yet vile figures. This polarised and split phenomenon is quite common in Chinese legends, literature and history.

There are at least two typical Chinese feminine images of romantic relationships in traditional Chinese narratives. The first is the ‘fairy ladies’, who play a leading role in Chinese love stories. They are often from heaven or the water, or appear as flower spirits. These fairy ladies are attracted to decent, ordinary men who are usually vulnerable intellectuals. The fairy ladies actively court these men, helping them to overcome their troubles and assisting them to pass the examinations to become government officials. The second typical Chinese feminine image governing romantic relationships is the ‘female ghost’. Sometimes, such ghosts could be another form of the ‘fairy lady’, who falls in love with a young graduate and offers him assistance. However, most of these characters are ‘real’ ghosts with grievances, and some are even devils or monsters, such as a snake or fox spirit. Crossing the path of a female ghost is usually dangerous, and they actively court, seduce, sleep with and suck the spirit of men. This may then result in the exhaustion or even death of the man.

In old Chinese love stories, most of the principal masculine characters are vulnerable intellectuals facing financial crisis. In such tales, being poor and weak is equated to being nice and considerate. On the other hand, in these love stories, warriors are rarely depicted and rich men who have sexual desires are depicted as villains. The former only value their friendships with other men and have no interest in intimate relationships with women. They believe that indulging in women and sex will harm their heroism. The latter are usually portrayed as negative characters – those who come into conflict with the dominant value...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The notions of femininity and masculinity and men and women in China
• 3. The history of developing psychoanalysis and analytical psychology in China
• 4. The applicability of analytical psychology in China: how a Western psychological lens might be adapted in the East
• 5. Experiences, disappointments and expectations: interviews with young urban Chinese couples
• 6. The Peony Pavilion as a picture of sexual individuation
• 7. Unresolved Oedipal conflicts and narcissism-typical difficulties for marriage and individuation for young Chinese today: Two clinical case studies
• 8. Some concluding reflections Marriage as a psychological relationship in China
• References
• Index