Normal and Abnormal Behavior in Chinese Culture

441 Pages·1981·13.28 MB·English

by  Thomas A. Metzger (auth.)

NORMAL AND ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR IN CHINESE CULTURE
CULTURE, ILLNESS, AND HEALING
Studies in Comparative Cross-Cultural Research
Editor-in-Chief"
ARTHUR KLEINMAN
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, U.SA.
Editorial Board:
LEON EISENBERG
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
NUR YALMAN
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.SA.
MORRIS CARSTAIRS
Postgraduate Institute ofM edical Education and Resetlrch, Chandigarh, India
VOLUME 2
NORMAL AND
ABNORMAL
BEHAVIOR IN CHINESE
CULTURE
Edited by
ARTHUR KLEINMAN
University of Washington, Seattle
and
TSUNG·YI LIN
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Rev.) CP
Main entry under title:
Normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture.
(Culture, illness, and healing ; v. 2)
Includes bibliographies and index.
1. Psychology, Pathological—China. 2. Personality and
culture—China. 3. National characteristics, Chinese. I. Kleinman,
Arthur. II. Lin, Tsung-yi. III. Series. [DNLM: 1. Cross-cultural
comparison. 2. Anthropology, Cultural—China. 3. Anthropology,
Cultural—Taiwan. 4. Mental disorders. 5. Socioeconomic factors.
WM31 K64n]
RC451.C6N67 616.89'07'0951 80-19489
ISBN 978-90-481-8359-3 ISBN 978-94-017-4986-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-4986-2
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1981
Originally published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland in 1981
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1981
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ix
ARTHUR KLEINMAN and TSUNG-YI LIN / Introduction xiii
SECTION I: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL
BACKGROUND OF BELIEFS AND
NORMS GOVERNING BEHAVIOR
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION I 3
1. THOMAS A. METZGER / Selfhood and Authority in Neo-Confucian
Political Culture 7
2. ANDREW C. K. HSIEH and JONATHAN D. SPENCE / Suicide and
the Family in Pre-modern Chinese Society 29
3. STEVAN HARRELL/Normaland Deviant Drinking in Rural Taiwan 49
4. GARY SEAMAN / In the Presence of Authority: Hierarchical Roles
in Chinese Spirit Medium Cults 61
5. MARTHA LI CHIU / Insanity in Imperial China: A Legal Case Study 75
6. KEH-MING LIN / Traditional Chinese Medical Beliefs and Their
Relevance for Mental Illness and Psychiatry 95
SECTION II: CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND
CHILDHOOD PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION II 115
7. RICHARD W. WILSON / Conformity and Deviance Regarding Moral
Rules in Chinese Society: A Socialization Perspective 117
8. DAVID YAU-FAI HO / Childhood Psychopathology: A Dialogue
with Special Reference to Chinese and American Cultures 137
9. WEI-TSUEN SOONG and KO-PING SOONG / Sex Difference in
School Adjustment in Taiwan 157
SECTION III: FAMILY STUDIES
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION III 169
vi T ABLE OF CONTENTS
10. JAMES P. McGOUGH I Deviant Marriage Patterns in Chinese Society 171
11. WILLIAM L. PARISH I Family and Community in the People's
Republic 203
12. HSIEN RIN I The Effect of Family Pathology on Taipei's Juvenile
Delinquents 213
SECTION IV: PSYCHIATRIC STUDIES:
EPIDEMIOLOGICAL AND CLINICAL
INTRODUCTION TO SECTION IV 233
13. KEH-MING LIN, ARTHUR KLEINMAN, and TSUNG-YI LIN I
Overview of Mental Disorders in Chinese Cultures: Review of
Epidemiological and Clinical Studies 237
14. RANCE P. L. LEE I Sex Roles, Social Status, and Psychiatric Symp-
toms in Urban Hong Kong 273
15. MAVIS TSAI, L. NEAL TENG, and STANLEY SUE I Mental Health
Status of Chinese in the United States 291
16. MARJORIE H. KLEIN, MILTON H. MILLER, and A. A. ALEXAN
DER I The American Experience of the Chinese Student: On Being
Normal in an Abnormal World 311
17. ARTHUR KLEINMAN and DAVID MECHANIC I Mental lllness
and Psychosocial Aspects of Medical Problems in China 331
18. JUNG-KWANG WEN and CHING-LUN WANG I Shen-K'uei Syn-
drome: A Culture-Specific Sexual Neurosis in Taiwan 357
19. ENG-SEONG TAN I Culture-Bound Syndromes among Overseas
Chinese 371
20. TSUNG-YI LIN and MEI-CHEN LIN I Love, Denial and Rejection:
Responses of Chinese Families to Mental Illness 387
ARTHUR KLEINMAN and TSUNG-YI LIN I Epilogue 403
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 411
CIT A TION INDEX 413
SUBJECT INDEX 420
To our families. And to the one
fourth of mankind who are Chinese
about whose individual lives and
emotional problems so much more
remains to be described, compared,
and understood.
PREFACE
Our purpose in assembling the papers in this collection is to introduce readers to
studies of normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture. We want to offer
a sense o/what psychiatrists and social scientists are doing to advance our under
standing of this subject, including what fmdings are being made, what questions
researched, what conundrums worried over. Since our fund of knowledge is
obviously incomplete, we want our readers to be aware of the limits to what
we know and to our acquisition of new knowledge. Although the subject is too
vast and uncharted to support a comprehensive synthesis, in a few areas - e.g.,
psychiatric epidemiology - enough is known for us to be able to present major
reviews. The chapters themselves cover a variety of themes that we regard as
both intrinsically interesting and deserving of more systematic evaluation. Many
of the issues they address we believe to be valid concerns for comparative cross
cultural studies. No attempt is made to artificially integrate these chapters, since
the editors wish to highlight their distinctive interpretive frameworks as evidence
of the rich variety of approaches that scholars take to this subject.
'We see this volume as a modest and self-consciously limited exploration. Here
are some accounts and interpretations (but by no means all) of normal and ab
normal behavior in the context of Chinese culture that we believe fashion a more
discriminating understanding of at least a few important aspects of that subject.
We ask our readers to join us in thinking through the tough questions they raise,
such as what are the universal and what are the culture-specific dimensions of
pathology and deviance among Chinese. We recognize that certain readers may
discover that we have omitted contributions that they regard as essential. While
others may decide that some of our choices for inclusion are idiosyncratic. But
on the whole we do believe we have represented in this book examples of much
of the major work that is presently being conducted. Of course, being psychia
trists we have tipped the balance in favor of studies of abnormality. But this
emphasis also reflects the particular way the field has developed.
Compared with research on Western cultures and even certain non-Western
ones, China studies have paid remarkably little attention to individual behavior.
Kinship, community organization, large scale sociopolitical and economic change
have dominated the interest of scholars. While the Chinese family has been an
abiding focus of concern, only infrequently has it been studied in terms of its
crucial influences on individual development and the genesis and control of
deviance. Studies of Chinese cultural influences on cognition, affects, coping
processes, and other psychological issues, though admittedly in an early stage,
have already generated considerable data, but this information has not enjoyed
a wide circulation. In fact it is the editors' experience that "China scholars"
ix
x PREFACE
often disparage psychological findings and the theories developed to explain
them, making use in their stead of common sense assumptions about human
nature that are naive, ethnocentric, and sometimes downright mistaken. This
bias may reflect Chinese culture's own reticence about psychological and espe
cially psychiatric matters. It also smacks of the "orientalism" manufactured by
Western scholars to render Chinese and other Asian cultures simultaneously
"different" and "exotic" yet "understandable" (cf. E. W. Said: Orientalism.
New York: Pantheon, 1978). Such scholars have maintained both that there is
no individuality (in the Western sense), or mentally ill persons, in Asian cultures
and that Asian individuals and the mentally ill are exactly the same as in the
West. Each position, readers of this volume will soon discover, is wrong. It is
our intention, then, to correct this distortion by contributing substantially to
the advancement of psycho cultural analyses and comparisons in the China field.
We believe many of the chapters in this volume will be of direct interest to
students of Chinese culture. But we also hope that they will be read by psychia
trists and psychologists who are more generally concerned with elaborating a
comparative science of human behavior and psychopathology. For most of what
we know about these subjects has come from studies of Western populations,
and thereby can only be generalized at great risk. Research on Chinese and other
non-Western groups is absolutely essential if psychiatry and psychology are to
become universal sciences. Finally, certain of the contributions to this volume
should be of practical significance to clinicians who treat Chinese patients and
plan services for Chinese communities. Clinical work among Chinese has lacked
just the kind of research foundation to which this book hopes to contribute.
Much of the data presented in the chapters in this collection comes from
research in Chinese communities outside of China. The editors are keenly aware
of this imbalance, but there was nothing that could be done to correct it since
it reflects reality. Up to the present, only a very limited amount of psychiatric
and behavioral science research on Chinese has been reported for the People's
Republic of China. We hope that this volume will be of use to our colleagues
in the People's Republic as an outline of the present status of research in this
field and that some of the chapters may even be of practical help in their own
research and clinical work. We also hope that it will foster further communica
tion and possibly future collaboration. We want our colleagues in China as well
as other readers to understand why we are not using the pinyin Romanization
system for rendering Chinese terms into English. These chapters were written
and collected before the widespread changeover to pinyin in North America
occurred and the editors decided after carefully reviewing the issues to retain the
Wade-Giles Romanization system in this volume.
The editors wish to acknowledge help from many sources: the Department
of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington; the Depart
ment of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia; the World Federation of
Mental Health; the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry; the National
Institute of Mental Health; to mention just a few. Specific individuals who have