The Sinosphere, The New York Times
Fifty years after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Mao Zedong and the Communist Party called on young people to “beat, smash, loot and burn” in a rebellion against authority and tradition that left millions dead, Chinese today are living with the psychic consequences of that tumultuous decade, says Tomas Plänkers, a psychoanalyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt.
For unlike in Germany after World War II or Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, free public debate is impossible. The party that unleashed the Cultural Revolution continues to rule China, leaving many people with buried personal and intergenerational trauma, and an “inner totalitarian object,” said Dr. Plänkers, who with Western and Chinese colleagues conducted a multiyear research project in the 1990s on the psychological legacy of those years. One result of that research is his edited volume, “Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution.” In an interview, he discussed his findings.
Q. It’s been half a century since the Cultural Revolution began. Many of the perpetrators are elderly or have died. Is it really still important?
A. Indeed, the topic really could disappear from individual memory and public discourse. Which doesn’t change the fact that it will carry on in the unconscious. These are themes that aren’t tied to time. It has been well demonstrated with the Holocaust in Germany that the psychic consequences don’t stop with one generation. They go into the second, third, fourth. They stay around somewhere in the culture.
Q. In 1981, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.” Didn’t that put an end to the question by admitting that Mao and the party made mistakes?
A. The resolution also offered defense mechanisms for the people. “Don’t continue to look into this. It’s over. Let’s look to the future.” It calls it a great catastrophe but doesn’t deal with the causes of it. But we know — not only from German history — that abandoning effective controls on the public enables a small group of people to commit atrocities.
Q. What is your experience discussing this in China?
A. Cultures have intensive denial mechanisms to deal with such things, something we also know from Germany. Fortunately in Germany today we have a very vigorous intellectual culture and can say what we want in order to resist this affective moment of denial. But the culture of the critical intellectual is not very vigorous in China. And that has to do with the political situation. Such commentary is unwelcome. Under such conditions people think three times about saying anything.
Q. What about Chinese psychologists?
A. In Shanghai last year I talked to about 200 Chinese mental health professionals about the Mitscherlichs’ book [Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, “The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior”] about Germany’s experiences with trauma after World War II.
I only talked about Germany, but afterwards there was stormy discussion of the Chinese situation. It’s amazing to see the reactions even when the topic was only discussed indirectly. Many people were very critical about China’s media and politics. So I asked them, “Do you talk about this honestly in your own families?” And silence fell.
It’s very similar to us in Germany. Children didn’t ask their parents about their experiences during the Nazi time. They could feel that it was a difficult subject. I didn’t ask my father what he did in the army. But we should be asking, “Do you talk about it in your family? What do you know? Do you have questions?”
Q. What are some of the consequences?
A. Michael Sebek [a Czech psychoanalyst] wrote about the “internal totalitarian object” in Eastern European Communist societies. There’s a diffuse feeling, a sense that there is an inner totalitarian power that can threaten one, and one has to submit to it. And it produces an intellectual atmosphere that orders people not to ask questions. I think something very similar is going on in China.
Q. What are some results of this?
A. You can sense the hang-ups people have internalized. For example, the pressure to succeed is enormously high. They hope that with success they can protect themselves from the arbitrariness of the rulers. They strive like this to avoid becoming helpless objects. Basically this obsession with success is a fearful way to live.
Q. Is there hope for change in China?
A. Society is starting to be more sensitive to psychology. There’s a psychology boom in China today. What people don’t quite realize is that investigating internal psychic conditions also means investigating social conditions. But all we can do is let fall a few drops in the sea of silence. Our book is out in German and English, but we still can’t find a Chinese publisher.
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Half a century has passed since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval that left millions dead and many more traumatized. Was your family affected during that decade and beyond? A Times reporter may follow up with you to learn more about your story.
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