From Erikson to Lacan in Chinese History

When I was a student from 1971 to 1984 at the University of Minnesota and Stanford University, Erik Erikson was in vogue among a number of scholars who applied his psychobiographical approach to the study of prominent Chinese figures from Wang Yangming (1472-1529) to Liang Shuming (1893-1988). But psychohistory soon fell out of favor. Some professors said that the field was discredited by the works of the political scientists Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, theorized that the Chinese were an “oral” type of people upgraded to the “anal” stage by the Maoist revolution. However, the decline seemed to have most to do with psychohistory in general going out of fashion within the American historical profession.

When I wrote “Beloved China: The Imagery of ‘Mother China’ in Modern Chinese Political Thinking,” in Vamik D. Volkan, et al, eds., The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, vol. 1 (1990), it was for the field of political psychology. I sometimes adopted a different approach, such as synthesizing, within a framework of my own, the behavioral testings done on the Chinese in the last 30 years, in order to study their modal personality in my “Contemporary Chinese Culture: Structure and Emotionality,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (July, 1991). For my fellow historians I simply did the conventional type of history of psychology such as in “Social Psychology in the Late Qing Period,” Modern China (July, 1992). Lately, I have paid more attention to the semiotics, or the study of language and signs, of self and identity.

In my opinion, psychohistory has not so much gone out of fashion as it has been subsumed under the rising tide of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Today it is politically incorrect to call an entire people, especially not one’s own, “oral” or “anal.” In deconstructionist terms, this is called “over-determining,” and it is believed that the narrator harbors a power motive — to dominate the other. On the other hand, today’s identity politics puts a premium on “self-fashioning.” Postmodernism also downplays elite culture and the intellectual hero, so the Eriksonian psychobiography is definitely out of fashion. It invariably sets up the intellectual hero in a crisis

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scenario as the center of a drama of tension-resolving, which he did by making rational and existential choices. This superior act presupposes an integral and free agent which postmodernism attempts to eliminate. The postmodernist assertion of the illusory nature of subjectivity needs to be further argued, but it does open up a new range of possibilities. Now we may experiment with the idea of identity as a narrative woven from a hybrid of incongruous fragments.

Ironically, with all of the hullabaloo involved in resisting and deconstructing a dominant discourse, the poststructuralist “self” is, after all, other-determined. Knowing we are inevitably embedded in a narrative — like Total Recall’s interplanetary hero in a mental implant — the important thing today is that one should also have some say about one’s identity and should not let other people, especially the dominant party, have the last words in the discourse. Yet, with the downplaying of the agent — or the “death of the author,” so to speak — this “self” can only be fashioned out of the parts or fragments that are ready-made. In this spirit, the new “femininity” of America, in order to define itself — to come into “presence,” so to speak — has to beat down traditional “masculinity” which was in its turn defined by beating down traditional “femininity.”

This is my understanding of psychohistory as it should be today — wedded to semiotics, or carried out with an emphasis on language and the study of signs — and not exactly a description of its reception by contemporary academia. Lacan is better known in gay and lesbian studies, and not nearly so much within the historical profession, but I think he might shed some light on identity politics. Lacanian psychoanalysis is immensely useful in demonstrating the thesis of the “other-determining” of self. Unfortunately, if I try to explain this approach to some of my colleagues the response is quite often, “Who is Lacan?”

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