China on the Mind

Christopher Bollas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415669764
• eBook ISBN: 9781136182570
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Several thousand years ago Indo-European culture diverged into two ways of thinking; one went West, the other East. Tracing their differences, Christopher Bollas examines how these mentalities are now converging once again, notably in the practice of psychoanalysis.

Creating a freely associated comparison between western psychoanalysts and eastern philosophers, Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. On one hand he links this tradition to the psychoanalytic praxes of Winnicott and Khan, which he relates to Daoism in their privileging of solitude and non verbal forms of communicating. On the other, Bollas examines how Jung, Bion and Rosenfeld, assimilate the Confucian ethic that sees the individual and group mind as a collective, while Freudian psychoanalysis he argues has provided an unconscious meeting place of both viewpoints.

Bollas's intriguing book will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, Orientalists, and those concerned with cultural studies.

Part One

Preconceptions

Chapter 1

Moments

‘The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching’, writes Jung, ‘seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspects of events.’¹ In his analysis of the differences between the Chinese and Western minds, Jung finds the Chinese to be interested less in causal logic than in the overdeterminations of life: ‘The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurrent causal chains’. According to Jung, the Chinese concept of the moment necessitates portrayal of the ‘minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.’

The I Ching is not the work of a single person but the effort of a civilization to conceive its view of mankind. China sustained this collective thinking through the figure of Confucius, whose Analects become the work of hundreds of commentators over thousands of years.

Legend has it that the I Ching began with Fu Xi who ruled in about 2500 BCE. It was then reworked by Yu (2194–2149 BCE), who added 52 hexagrams to Fu Xi’s original eight.² The text lives in the realm of a game. Each throw of the stalks gives chance a meaning. There are eight horizontal columns, each with a different trigram figure and eleven vertical columns: the trigram figure, the binary value, the name, translations, image in nature, family relationship, body part, attribute, state and animal. The first three lines of the hexagram are viewed as the inner aspect of change while the last three lines are viewed as the outer aspect of change. The change that is described through the actions of the I Ching plays the inner or personal aspect of the human being against the group situation.

Sixty four hexagrams constitute the modern I Ching, each accompanied by a commentary articulated over the ages. Each represents a distinct aspect of lived experience: the creative, the receptive, difficulty at the beginning, youthful folly, waiting, conflict, the army, holding together, small taming, treading³ – to name the first ten.

We journey through these experiences that characterize life. Inner states of mind and outer features of the world converge because such moments move us then leave us. ‘We the living, we’re passing travellers’ writes Li Po (701–762 CE) in ‘After an Ancient Poem’.⁴ He is expressing the view of the self-as-traveller that had existed at least for a thousand years before him and would still be recognized as a theme in China today.

The I Ching is the universe in miniature, governed by three principles: Simplicity, Variability and Persistency. The world we live in, and by which we are changed, is very simple: it is always moving and yet it is invariant.

As mentioned in the introduction, the I Ching is one of five surviving ancient foundational texts that constitute the background of the Chinese literary tradition and distil the fundamental axioms of Chinese thought. These serve as the points of embarkation for the origin, evolution, and structuralization of the Chinese mind.

To explain what I mean, let us return in more detail to the I Ching.

The reeds (later lines) of the I Ching were either straight or broken. To embody an image or an idea reeds would vary in the composition of these lines in what to a Western eye would be three-line stanzas: a trigram.

Eventually two trigrams would be combined into hexagrams.

As Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm illustrate in their seminal work Understanding the I Ching,⁵ the first trigram, called Ch’en – eldest son – looks like this:

— —

— —

——

However, as with all trigrams it stands for a lot more than the literal eldest son. It also signifies ‘evoking’, thunder and the wish of the female element (Kun) to be impregnated and to give birth to a son. It has a colour: dark yellow. It is also associated with ideas of power, speed and being outstanding, and with images such as a white horse, a person’s foot, the spring, and a road that leads to some intended point.

We can see how this one trigram is a cluster of ideas or associations. At no time when it is constituted (out of stalks) or written down could it ever possibly mean just one thing. What it means will be determined partly by the context in which it is composed and partly by the way anyone interprets it. From a psychoanalytical perspective a trigram is an ‘overdetermined’ presentation that has condensed many diverse ideas into a single image. Why they belong together is purely a matter of an individual self’s encounter with the chances delivered to him or her within the real.

A trigram is a form of thought or – thought as form. Within the realm of these images that overlay one another, a person utilizing it will be thinking his or her own unique thoughts through the trigram’s intrinsically poetic structure. It bears striking resemblance to Freud’s theory of unconscious contents as a mental organization composed of ‘clusters of ideas’. Chance, or change, is built into this system of symbolization as its meaning is open both to the moment in which it is constituted and to the mental idiom of the interpreter.

When trigrams were put together to form hexagrams the meaning became even more radically changeable. ‘A combination of trigrams determines the image belonging to the hexagram in question’ write the Wilhelms, ‘the image being made up of the meanings and inner dynamisms of the two trigrams’.⁶

Although a hexagram would seem to be composed of two separate sets of clusters (two trigrams), in fact lines 2, 3 and 4 would constitute a separate, new trigram, as would lines 3, 4 and 5. This system of meaning is a cluster of ideas and images that is always changing as it is combined into hexagrams.

The dynamism of the trigrams is further determined by the intrinsic meaning of a broken or a straight line. A straight line means ‘yes’, a broken line means ‘no.’ A straight line means ‘creative’, a broken line means ‘receptive.’ And so it goes, with each aspect carrying with it a dynamic associative set in a binary system that partly organizes the clusters of images and ideas.

If the trigram is one form for thinking about lived experience, the hexagram becomes far too complex for conscious thinking alone. It will inevitably be open to unconscious lines of thought; indeed, the hexagram objectifies unconscious thought. It is a part of the mental function of the self so that anyone turning to the hexagram is contacting a culturally founded part of the human mind. This is rather like considering a dream: another mental event derived from the chance events of a single day.

It would be quite easy for our interests in the I Ching to take up the remainder of this text. We will limit ourselves, however, to musing on its psychic meaning. It is a work that identifies the foundations and qualities of lived experience, identifying the actual (such as the earth, air, fire, water, fields, etc.) as well as the emotional (such as yearning, longing, fleeing). It is, in effect, a representation of the world, and the game – of throwing the stalks to see what meaning might derive – mirrors the aleatory nature of human life, composed of a series of disconnected chance moments.

For Jung, the hexagram ‘was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast … an indicator of the essential situation prevailing at the moment of its origin.’ This feature of the I Ching reminds him of his theory of ‘synchronicity’. This is Jung’s ‘concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality [in that it] … takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.’⁷

Jung’s insights are thought-provoking. Western and Eastern minds would appear to represent opposite traditions of thought, to be incompatible. Eastern thinking is invested in the liminal power of the single moment, in the temporality of transience. The Western mind is founded on linear continuity; temporality is seen as the passage of time necessary for accomplishments. Just as the spiritual potential of life in the moment seems lost to the Western mind, the Eastern mind would appear to have little interest in the sequential logic of Western discourse.

If the human mind has split into two dominant traditions (Western and Eastern), each performing vital functions specific to their tasks but ultimately capable of complementarities, then the Eastern mind is invested in thinking about life in one way while the Western mind thinks of it differently.

One of the ironies of the Chinese mental evolution is that emphasis on the moment rather than upon duration evolved over a thousand years of major upheaval, from the Age of the Warring States (5^th century to 3^rd century BCE)⁸ through the Han Empire and beyond, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese were relocated to the North and elsewhere, either to defend the country against the Mongols or to redistribute the population.⁹ However, throughout these disruptions the mother texts were referred to and updated as philosophers, including those whose writing appeared in the name of Confucius, Lao Tzu, or Zhuangzi and poets such as Li Po, Wang Wei and Tu Fu, used them as axioms of thought.

Few poets evoke the naked helplessness of the self in the face of traumatic social disruption (war, dislocation, poverty) as well as the great Chinese poet Tu Fu (712–770 CE).

‘The Journey North’ begins: ‘Heaven and earth are racked with ruin, / sorrow and sorrow, no end in sight’.¹⁰ Tu Fu’s poems congeal the extreme mental pain of lives determined by forces of dislocation resulting in long periods of time away from one’s family. In ‘Adrift’ he writes: ‘Each departure like any other, where is / my life going in these isolate outlands?’¹¹ In his harrowing poem ‘Song of the War Carts’ he conjures the imagery of war that defines lives: ‘War carts clatter and creak, / horses stomp and splutter – / each wearing quiver and bow, the war-bound men pass.’¹² Set against the unrelenting grimness of daily life, Tu Fu takes solace in single moments arriving from a different frame of mind. He alludes to this in ‘The Journey North’ referring to ‘my Peach Blossom nostalgia’,¹³ or in ‘The River Village’ when he writes ‘On long summer days, the business of solitude / fills this river village’,¹⁴ or in ‘Two Impromptus’ when he speaks from deep within all of us: ‘in idleness, I become real’.¹⁵

Tu Fu, like other poets and philosophers, is tenacious in his determination to hold on to the integrity of the single blissful moment of being at one with nature and within oneself. Without such moments the din of mass movements, of social upheavals and the daily grind of poverty threatens to eradicate spiritual being.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Oriental poetry is this concentration on vivid transient experiences: an autumn leaf falling from a tree, a white egret standing still in the water, a cloud passing in the sky. If man is the corrupt force destroying the natural world, such not-man objects allow people to find and to project their need for love and care into the landscape. A stream, a bird, a leaf are not simply objects; they are storehouses for the self’s soul.

Twenty-two centuries after Tu Fu’s work, in the ironic and moving text of Lu Xun’s¹⁶ The True Story of Ah Q, we find the Chinese still absorbed in the pathos of human transience. Ah Q, the absurdist protagonist of Lu Xun’s work, lives a life of serial chances governed apparently by the mind of a simpleton – until his tragic death awakens the reader to the fact that Ah Q is everyman. We are all simpletons, enduring the pathos of our beginning, our middle and our end.

From a psychoanalytical perspective, to play the I Ching is to enact the transient nature of our common lives. Yet, it allows us to feel that we are part of a structure that preceded us, will endure after our death, and of which we have been a constituen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Preconceptions
• Part Two Realizations
• Part Three Conceptualizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index