a Department of Anthropology , University of California at Davis, Davis , California , USA.
Med Anthropol. 2018 Jan;37(1):45-58. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2017.1317769. Epub 2017 May 9.
Facing intensified market competition and rapid social change, many Chinese are experiencing increased mental distress. In this article, I examine how psychological training and interventions play a vital part in cultivating a new self among urban middle-classes. I ask how the Chinese notion, ziwo (self), is turned into an object of intense inquiry and how therapeutic techniques are deployed for self-development. The new forms of the self, however, continue to intersect with and complicate the existing social nexus, cultural sensibilities, and notions of personhood. My ethnography explores how this therapeutic work contributes to intricate forms of subject-making that challenge such conceptual binaries as the private versus social self, the inner versus outer life, and psychological versus social problems. Thus, what is emerging is not a usual "neoliberalism" story of self-advancement, but a more complicated picture based on assemblages.
面对日益激烈的市场竞争和快速的社会变革，许多中国人正经历着越来越多的精神困扰。本文探讨了心理训练和干预在培养城市中产阶级新自我方面所起的重要作用。我询问了中国人的“自我”概念是如何成为一个深入探究的对象，以及治疗技术是如何被用于自我发展的。然而，新的自我形式继续与现有的社会关系、文化敏感性和人格观念交织在一起，使情况变得更加复杂。我的民族志探讨了这种治疗工作如何促成复杂的主体塑造形式，这些形式挑战了诸如私人与社会自我、内在与外在生活、心理与社会问题等概念二分法。因此，出现的不是一个通常的“新自由主义”自我提升的故事，而是一个基于组合的更复杂的图景。
