New Yorker's Man in China

I spent time this afternoon reading an extraordinary article in the New Yorker for January 20, 2011, about Freud in China, "Meet Dr. Freud," by a most extraordinary man, it seems to me, Evan Osnos. When in my loser youth I would dream of holding a staff job at the New Yorker, it never, never, occurred to me you could hold a staff job at the NYorker AND live in such an exotic and unheard of place as Beijing. But Osnos does just that. He is the great-nephew of a Polish psychiatrist, Gustav Bychowski, who relocated to the U.S. when WW II started, and he is himself an expert on matters psychiatric and Chinese. I won't precis the article I mention. It's worth reading as a window on China's ghastly history since WWII and especially on current American efforts to introduce Freudian "therapy" to that forward-leaping land.


Here is a link to Osnos's blog on the New Yorker web site, newyorker.com. Check his postings and see if you agree with me that he is altogether something else. Beyond saying that I—for the time being—reserve comment.


As to Freud in China I'll say that I agree with Dr. Freud himself, who is reported to have said to Carl Jung as their steamship approached the U.S. for their first visit to America in 1909: "They don't realize that we are bringing them the plague." Indeed they were, although among other things Osnos reports is the loss of "Freudian Fever" in America over recent decades. Freud's "substitute religion" has proved ultimately unsatisfactory here, and I would guess also in Europe. I note that it has never accumulated miraculous elements around Freud's origins, which is an inescapably necessary accompaniment in the human environment to a genuine religion, that is, a proof of truth not of falsehood, as it has been taken to be by so many critics of the Lord Jesus Christ.