Christopher Bollas - China on the Mind

China on the Mind

Several thousand years ago IndoEuropean 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.

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

Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and novelist.

China on the Mind

Christopher Bollas

First published 2013

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Christopher Bollas

The right of Christopher Bollas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bollas, Christopher.

China on the mind / by Christopher Bollas.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-415-66975-7 (978-0-415-66976-4) 1. Buddhism and

psychoanalysis. 2. China--Civilization. I. Title.

BQ4570.P755B65 2013

150.l95--dc23

2012017870

ISBN: 978-0-415-66975-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-66976-4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-08301-7 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-136-18257-0 (epub)

Typeset in Times

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Arne Jemstedt and Camilla Silfverskild, from Stockholm, for their support with this project and their assistance in guiding me to Li Yawen of Bejing University who is translating the work into Chinese.

I would like to thank Ken Bruder, a philosopher and long-time friend, for reading the text and commenting on it, and Naohiko Tachi, a Japanese colleague, friend and my translator, for reading the text and providing a critique. Also I am grateful to Tachi and his colleagues in Osaka for their generous reception of myself and my work during my weeks visiting and lecturing in their beautiful city. To Sarah Nettleton, psychoanalyst, for her endless patience reading and commenting on repeated drafts and for her skillfull editing, thank you. The ideas presented in this text, however, are solely the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of those who commented on the book.

To Kate Hawes I am deeply grateful for her encouragement and cooperation during her many years as Senior Editor at Routledge in London and for her immediate and enthusiastic support for this somewhat off-beat book.

I would like to thank the following presses for permission to publish excerpts from their publications:

University of California Press for permission to reproduce material from The Poems of Mao Zedong, pp. 656 (1997).

Three poems from The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite (Penguin Books 1964, revised edition 1998, 2009). Translation Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, 1964, 1998, 2009.

Chinese symbol for war cart from China: Empire of Living Symbols, Cecilia Lindquist, Da Capo Press, 1991.

Short extracts of poetry from The Festival of Pain and The Abyss of Sound by Chng Hyonjuong and a short extract of poetry from The Game and the Moon by Kim Su-yng featured in Modern Korean Literature, edited by Peter H. Lee, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1990, pp. 46, 161.

Him Im Thinking Of, in Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres, Wai-Lim Yip, p. 79. Copyright 1997, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu

Extracts from After an Ancient Poem are taken from The Selected Poems of Li Po, translated by David Hinton. Copyright 1996 by David Hinton. Published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1998.

Extracts from The Journey North, Adrift, Song of the War-Carts, The River Village and Two Impromptus are taken from The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, translated by David Hinton. Copyright 1988 by David Hinton. Published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1990.

The Yellow Bicycle (6 lines) from Praise by Robert Hass, copyright 1979 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Short extracts of poetry by O Cham, Myungok, ChOn Km, Chu isik, Pak Hyogwan and Kim Sujang from The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, edited by Peter H. Lee.

Copyright 2002 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Short extracts of poetry by Kim Sowol, from The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, edited by David R. McCann. Copyright 2004 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Short extracts of poetry by Zhuangzi from Zhuangzi: Basic Writings, edited by Burton Watson. Copyright 2003 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Introduction

This work originated as a series of lectures to be given in Korea in 2010, following a tour of Japan in 2009.

To begin with I thought I would base my talks on readings from key philosophical figures whose works have inspired the Eastern world: Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Zhuangzi in particular, and then consider whether their views had significant links to Western thinking.

However, in the course of preparation for this I began to see a relationship between Eastern thinking and psychoanalytical thought, and the project developed into an attempt to link certain aspects of psychoanalytical practice to Eastern ways of being.

In addition, I became fascinated by the extraordinary emotional and ideational implications of Chinese characters, and my reading of Li Po, Wang Wei, Tu Fu and poets from Korea and Japan introduced me to a form of poetry unique to this part of the world. Not only was I learning about how the East thinks; I was also discovering a way in which it invests mind into poetry, so that by reciting poems people are engaged in a type of open dreaming.

The theme of the work then turned into something of a theory of the mind the Eastern mind that seemed to have significant implications for the study of mental processes in the West, and especially for the mental action we term psychoanalysis.