Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China
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摘要: 弗洛伊德晚年对中国艺术表现出浓厚的兴趣,并刻意将中国元素融入到工作与生活之中,但其著述却鲜少提及中国。本文梳理其中与中国相关的几处论述,总结出以下三个特征:首先,弗氏对中国的了解间接来自19世纪西方汉学家的文字记述。作为服务于西方政治霸权的东方学体系的一部分,中国在其中被想象成一个有待被征服的异域世界。这种带有殖民主义色彩的失真话语,也间接渗透到弗洛伊德涉及中国的论述之中。因其独特的犹太人身份,弗氏虽对东方思想表现出一定兴趣,但对泛东方道路持保守态度。他刻意与东方保持若即若离的关系,也没有对中国文明作深入研究。其次,弗氏重视语言的心理载荷,推崇文字考古。在前人古文字学研究的影响下,他认为原始的象形文字蕴含内在的心理规律,并试图借助中文避免语义模糊的内在法则说明梦的心理机制,论证模糊的梦境仍然可被阐释,且具有唯一解。但因其对中文了解有限,这番努力并不成功。第三,弗氏关注古老民族的传统风俗,并将其视作具有普遍心理学意义的文化遗迹。在这一背景下,他将中国女子的缠足风俗解读为阉割情结的替代形式;这一说法看似充满矛盾,实则与其对性别、器官和图腾崇拜的认知一脉相承,也是他从个体心理研究转向社会文化研究的必然结果。总之,弗洛伊德取中国文化为己用,但也因其认知的局限而留下遗憾。Abstract: Sigmund Freud shows a keen interest in Chinese art in his later years and makes deliberate efforts to include Chinese elements in his working and daily life, but China is rarely mentioned in his writings. By examining several of his China-related discourses, this article summarizes three features as follows: Firstly, Freud's knowledge of China comes indirectly from the written narratives of nineteenth-century Western sinologists. As part of the Orientalist system serving Western hegemony, China is imagined therein as an exotic world to be conquered. This distorted articulation with colonialist overtones also enters indirectly into Freud's writings about China. Due to his unique Jewish identity, though Freud shows a certain interest in Eastern thought, he is conservative about the pan-Oriental path. For this reason, he intentionally keeps his relationship with the Orient aloof and fails to make an in-depth study of Chinese civilization. Secondly, Freud emphasizes the psychological value of words and conducts textual archaeology in his work. Influenced by previous studies on paleography, he believes that primitive hieroglyphs contain intrinsic psychological patterns and tries to illustrate the psychological mechanism of dreams by exploring the way how the Chinese language avoids semantic ambiguity. He argues that the ambiguous dreams can be interpreted and carry a singular explanation. However, this attempt remains unsuccessful as his knowledge of Chinese is quite limited. Thirdly, Freud focuses on the traditional rites and customs of archaic peoples and regards them as cultural relics of universal psychological significance. Within this context, he interprets the footbinding custom for Chinese women as an alternative form of castration complex. This statement, seemingly full of contradictions, is in fact in line with his perception of gender, organ and totem worship, and serves as an inevitable result of his paradigm shift from individual psychological studies to socio-cultural studies. In conclusion, Freud appropriates Chinese culture for his own purpose, which also left regrets due to his cognitive limitations.
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Key words:
- Sigmund Freud /
- China /
- psychoanalysis /
- orientalism
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