Transcultural Freud: Psychoanalysis and Chinese Culture Across the Pacific
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Transcultural Freud: Psychoanalysis and Chinese Culture Across the Pacific
Organizer: Silvia Posocco
Speaker: Howard Chiang (University of California, Davis)
This lecture explores the history of knowledge production about the cultural underpinnings of mental illness, using the intellectual biography of the Chinese psychoanalyst Bingham Dai (1899–1996) as a focal point. Howard Chiang situates the complex interaction between psychodynamic science and Chinese culture in a transpacific milieu—from the era of medical modernization to the rise of international mental health. He traces the crystallization of a new style of science, transcultural reasoning, over time. This epistemic style debunks the assumption that Western biomedical categories are universally applicable, treats thinking across geographical and disciplinary borders as the basis of evidence, generates new categories and parameters of scientific inquiry, and repositions its practitioners from the margin to the center of scholarly discourses. Whereas the engagement of Western psychoanalysts with “China” is typically understood to have peaked in the Cold War era, this talk unveils a longer and more intricate historical trajectory in which such a thought collective has been nested.
Contact name:
Psychosocial Studies