Strategic Occidentalism: The Geopolitics of Relational Authority in Chinese Psychoanalysis

• In Event: Science, Knowledge, and Technology Open Call Paper Session (Co-Sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

The “relational turn” in American psychoanalysis explicitly champions the dismantling of clinical hierarchy, replacing the detached authority of the expert with a democratic ethos of mutuality and shared vulnerability. Yet, as this egalitarian script travels to the Global South, it often produces unexpected forms of stratification. This article investigates a striking puzzle within the "transnational psychoanalytic guild" of contemporary Chinese psychoanalysis: Why does a community explicitly predicated on an anti-authoritarian ethos reproduce steep hierarchies, where proximity to Western bodies functions as a rigorous form of totemic capital? Following the abrupt deregulation of the mental health field by the Chinese state in 2017, an institutional vacuum emerged which was quickly filled by Western analysts and therapists who began teaching Chinese practitioners across geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography of transnational psychoanalytic training programs since 2024, I argue that emerging local elites engage in Strategic Occidentalism. These actors actively weaponize a specific US-centric imaginary of "relationality" to contest the "acultural" bureaucracy of the local state. I demonstrate how this strategy is operationalized through the tactical deployment of relational expertise. Through four mechanisms—interpretive judgment, affective attunement, moral distinction, and boundary work—elites transform the "soft" skills of warmth and flexibility into a mechanism of exclusion. Ultimately, this study challenges binary narratives of global diffusion. It demonstrates that the democratization of expertise does not eliminate hierarchy but reconfigures it. By capturing the "West" not as a colonial imposer but as a scarce moral resource, local elites construct a "North in the South," redefining the boundaries of the modern subject in the process.

Author

• Xi Wang, Northwestern University