Ep 15: Interview on the invention of “Madness” in Modern China
About the Book
“Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.”
—University of Chicago Press
About the Book
“The 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 anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has 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.”
—University of California Press
In this episode, I am honored to have my graduate school friend Justin Xuting Zhang with us to discuss his recently published article/book review on professor Emily Baum’s book “The invention of Madness” and Professor Li Zhang’s book “Anxious China”. We discussed the idea of “insane” throughout most of Chinese history, how it was kept within the bounds of household, then how in the 20th century it was given new meaning after psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment of the mentally ill. Justin recounts the genealogy of insanity from pre-modern China to the onset of World War 2 in 1937, and offers his views on the formation and progression of contemporary belief systems surrounding “madness”.
Read Justin’s article @ WeChat
Buy the Books @ “The Invention of Madness” + “Anxious China”