Abstract
This chapter examines the notion of therapy and its growing significance in the social, political, and affective life in China during the last four decades. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the languages, ideas, and practices of psychology have been applied to various domains for different purposes and imperatives including addressing the current mental health epidemic. This therapeutic ethos acts as both a mode of thinking and imagination. Since therapy suggests an illness or disease and it encompasses a dual process that both diagnoses (identifies an issue) and prescribes (offers solutions), this understanding can thus be easily appended to governance, problematizing (pathologizing, thus individualizing) social issues, and then proposing solutions. This mode of therapeutic governing involves a unique mode of psychologization in China, in which psychological expertise can be dispensed by non-experts with real consequences. It centers on the management of subjectivity. This mode of therapeutic governing accesses people’s subjectivity through “care” and “permissive empathy” that renews the government’s role as the “guardian of the people”. This chapter contends that the ways this therapeutic ethos involved in Chinese society manifest the implicit complicity among therapy, the state, and market.
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Yang, J. (2021). The Rise of the Therapeutic in Contemporary China. In: Minas, H. (eds) Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65161-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65161-9_10
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