ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case materials from a young male patient, who came from a poor Chinese family and suffered from severe depression. It aims to use these materials to demonstrate how poverty and low social and economic status become a cumulative trauma, and the negative impact this might have on psychological development and the process of separation-individuation. The chapter compares the effect of the author’s patient’s struggle for his mother with the account of the effect of his mother on Mo Yan, a famous Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It discusses how an individual’s psychological development and process of individuation have been affected by poverty and hardship in different periods of time in Chinese history. The chapter draws comparisons between two men, Mo Yan and the author's patient, both of whom came from poor Chinese families.
