China on the Mind

<p>Several thousand years ago Indo-European culture diverged into two ways of thinking; one went West the other East. Tracing their differences Christopher Bollas examines how these mentalities are now converging once again notably in the practice of psychoanalysis. </p><p>Creating a freely associated comparison between western psychoanalysts and eastern philosophers Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. On one hand he links this tradition to the psychoanalytic praxes of Winnicott and Khan<b> </b>which he relates to Daoism in their privileging of solitude and non verbal forms of communicating. On the other Bollas examines how Jung Bion and Rosenfeld<b> </b>assimilate the Confucian ethic that sees the individual and group mind as a collective while Freudian psychoanalysis he argues has provided an unconscious meeting place of both viewpoints. </p><p>Bollas’s intriguing book will be of interest to psychotherapists psychoanalysts Orientalists and those concerned with cultural studies.</p>