Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
Li Zhang
University of California Press: 2020
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There is no branch of medicine or the social sciences more entangled with political control than psychology. From the early treatments of female ‘hysterics’ by Jean Charcot in France in the late nineteenth century to the drugs, lobotomies and shock therapies of the conformity-obsessed 1940s and 1950s, ‘conversion therapy’ for gay people and juvenile boot camps, many of the psychological therapies directed at sufferers below the threshold of hospitalisation are focused on bringing individuals into compliance with social norms. This has been even truer in China than in the West, whether it is the confinement in mental institutions for political dissidents or intensive treatment of adolescents for internet or gaming ‘addiction’. Robin Munro, in Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era, describes the wielding of psychiatry as a political weapon for the purpose of silencing dissidents.

As social norms, political goals and social expectations shift, so do methods of treatment. Identifying the seam of that change is the concern of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy by Li Zhang.

• Tags: Anne Stevenson-Yang, China, Issue 22, Li Zhang