Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China

XU Yin

doi:10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236306

Volume 6 Issue 3

Sep. 2023

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XU Yin. Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(3): 113-125. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236306

Citation:

XU Yin. Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(3): 113-125. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236306

XU Yin. Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(3): 113-125. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236306

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Chinese Emperor, Chinese Characters and Footbinding: Freud's Dialogue over Distance with China

doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236306

XU Yin^,

Renmin University of China

Received Date: 2023-04-30
Accepted Date: 2023-05-15

Abstract

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.
- Sigmund Freud,
- China,
- psychoanalysis,
- orientalism

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References(22)

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