Description
Book SynopsisThe breathless pace of China's economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people's inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding inner revolution is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxietybroadly construed in both medical and social termshas become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.
Trade Review"While grounded in the ethnographic specificities of middle-class Chinese urbanites,
Anxious China offers powerful insights to scholars working on similar questions in diverse regions of the world." * Somatosphere *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Psy Fever
2.
Bentuhua: Culturing Psychotherapy
3. Therapeutic Relationships with Chinese Characteristics?
4. Branding the Satir Model
5. Crafting a Therapeutic Self
6. Cultivating Happiness
7. Therapeutic Governing
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
