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Title:
When the Psycho-Boom Meets the Startup Frenzy: Therapist-Entrepreneurs and Their Remaking of the Psychotherapy Scene in China
Speaker:
Dr. Hsuan-Ying Huang (Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date:
September 14, 2016
Time:
4:00 pm
Venue:
Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong (Map)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
(Tel) (852) 3917-5772
(Email) ihss@hku.hk
This presentation explores how and why the recent startup frenzy in China has infiltrated psychotherapy, another burgeoning field born of the “psycho-boom” (xinli re) that roughly began in the early 2000s. I focus on one case: Jiandan Xinli (which literally means “easy psychology”) or My Therapist, a Beijing-based Internet startup founded by a former college counselor Jane Li, alias Jian Lili, in 2014. Drawing on my fieldwork and a variety of her own accounts on the Internet and the media, I examine the trajectory of her rising, her lived experiences of being an entrepreneur, and her vision of Chinese psychotherapy. I show how Jane Li uses her biography as a powerful tool to engage and inspire clients, therapists, and entrepreneurs, and how My Therapist finds a unique niche in the psycho-boom by playing the role of a professional association. I argue that the startup frenzy has sustained or even enhanced the perception of “fever” (re) after the field faced tremendous uncertainty during the final phase (2011 – 2013) of the mental health legislation. I also discuss its potential impacts on the landscape of the psycho-boom and psychotherapy itself in China.
Hsuan-Ying Huang joined the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor at the end of 2015, following a post-doctoral fellowship at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. First trained as a psychiatrist in Taiwan, he received his Ph.D. in medical anthropology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the rise of Western-style psychotherapy in urban China — a trend that he coins as “psycho-boom”. Seeing this boom as a unique constellation in which state interests, middle-class aspirations, and market developments intertwine, he is interested in how its participants grapple with the imported knowledge to explore their subjectivities, and how they work together to construct a new mental health profession.
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