ABSTRACT
Although psychological ideas from the West that anticipated the development of modern psychotherapy began to permeate China from the beginning of the Republican era, psychotherapy as both a theory and a practice did not take root until the 1930s. When it did, it was because, it is argued here, of a conjunction of interests involving psychologists, literati and a new generation of doctors sensitive to their patients’ mental health, working symbiotically in the elds of publishing, writing and practicing new ideas about persons caught in states of mental distress. is activity was concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, although it later spread to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese war. On the one hand, many scholars, doctors and psychologists were writing about these new ideas and disseminating them through the popular discourse of a monthly magazine entitled Xi Feng [West Wind]; on the other, several practitioners were taking these ideas and incorporating them into their everyday practices. ese activities then resulted in further publication and dissemination, contributing to, in e ect, the spread of psychotherapy from written ideas in theory to a method for treating patients in a clinic. An overlap was found amongst the names of those who contributed to both activities. ey were Huang Jiayin 哺 ి丩, the chief editor and publisher of West Wind; Su Zonghua ㋕ᇍ㨥, one of the leading psychiatrists of China and an important writer of articles in West Wind; Ding Tsan з⬐, a Communist, but also a passionate analyst and psychotherapist, who co-founded the Chinese Psychological Institute and introduced medical psychology to China; and Cheng Yulin ぁ⦿哕, one of the earliest Chinese psychiatrists who set up the rst public psychiatric hospital in Nanjing and who also contributed articles for West Wind. ese scholar-practitioners had a twofold aim: to educate the public and their fellow professionals into accepting new ideas about self-improvement culled from Western sources and, through
144 Psychiatry and Chinese History
their experiences of treating clients coming for help, advance an understanding of what possibilities there were for helping people deal with problems they couldn’t solve for themselves.
