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Family Imagery in a Passage by Mao Tse-tung: An Essay in Psycho-Cultural Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

John H. Weakland
John H. Weakland
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

This article points out and analyzes some overt and implicit family imagery underlying political and economic discussion in one passage by Mao Tse-tung, and discusses the value of such analysis. Along the way, some methodological questions—the significance of form and content in such “content analysis,” and verification of the findings—are also considered.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , April 1958 , pp. 387 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1958

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References

1 New York, Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, n.d., mimeographed. The text of this edition is stated to be that of the first English translation, by the China Digest Translation Service, Hong Kong. The translation of the passage in question has been compared with the original Chinese (Chung-Kuo Ko-ming yu Chung-Kuo Kung-ch'an-tang, Hsin-hua shu-tien, Ch'a-Chi branch, September 1945) and found generally accurate. However, a few words or phrases have been retranslated more literally, as noted below, in order to make the basic imagery used in the original more evident.

2 Ibid., pp. 4–5. Part of the final paragraph above has been retranslated more literally, and differs slighdy from die source cited.

3 Such an orientation, of course, is prominent throughout Freud's psychological work. Cf. also Ruth Benedict's statement: “I read this literature [on Japan] as Darwin says he read when he was working out his dieories on the origin of species, noting what I had not the means to understand. … I read, asking the ever-present question: What is ‘wrong with this picture’? What would I need to know to understand it?” (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Boston, 1946, p. 7.)

4 Lewin, Bertram D., The Psychoanalysis of Elation, New York, 1950, p. 13.Google Scholar This passage, however, considers only one of several possible significant treatments of form; others are mentioned below.

5 E.g., Balken, Eva R. and Masserman, Jules H., “The Language of Phantasy,” in Contemporary Psychopathology, ed. by Tomkins, S. S., Cambridge, Mass., 1943, pp. 244–53.Google Scholar

6 Cf. Weakland, John H., “The Organization of Action in Chinese Culture,” Psychiatry, XIII (August 1950), pp. 361–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Obscurities of this sort may exist mainly for the recipients of a communication—perhaps calculatedly—but also for its creators as well.

8 The paragraphs beginning and ending die main sections of “The Chinese Revolution. …” are similarly organized on a broader scale; they summarize the content of an entire section and also make a link with the preceding or following section.

9 Weakland, John H., “An Analysis of Seven Cantonese Films,” in The Study of Culture at a Distance, ed. by Mead, Margaret and Metraux, Rhoda, Chicago, 1953, pp. 292–95.Google Scholar

10 Weakland, , “The Organization of Action …,” op. cit., esp. pp. 366–67.Google Scholar

11 In other parts of “The Chinese Revolution …” there is considerable repetitive and cyclical emphasis in die subject matter also—even on the topic of revolutionary activity!—so that bom form and content express something similar.

12 The conception of two opposite but complementary elements, which fit together to form a whole, is old and pervasive in Chinese thinking. Perhaps the best-known example is the pair yin and yang, the female and male, negative and positive, etc., principles by which a complementary dualistic view of the universe is expressed.

13 The distinction of older and younger as between proletariat and bourgeoisie does not clash with the “twins” idea in Chinese thinking, which customarily distinguishes between the elder and younger of twins. This carries to a logical extreme the Chinese feeling and principle of social organization that no two persons should have exactly equal status—age, of course, being a major basis of status ascription.

14 I am indebted to Robert C. North for the suggestion that some reflections of family and sexual conceptions can also be discerned in die classical Marxist writings on dialectical materialism—for example, in Engels’; Anti-Dühring. A study comparing the extent and specific nature of such imagery in the original Marxist works with that employed by Mao would be of great interest.

There are many possible levels at which the present sort of examination can be pitched; many different areas of prior experience probably are relatable to anyone's system of viewing experience currently. This study aims only at examining one such area—though one generally important–at some length, though undoubtedly not exhaustively; other more or less abstract levels of message and family structure could be paralleled also.

15 It must be admitted that some prior study of the Chinese family, and some general ideas about the relevance of the family to patterns of thought, were probably important in the genesis of the interpretation in the first place, so that the interpretation and its examination and support cannot be entirely separated in this instance. How-ever, the recognition of family themes in this particular passage came as a surprise. and some of the supporting evidence, and much of its organization, were discovered or developed subsequent to the interpretation.

16 This fact has appeared over and over again in anthropological work on the family, not only for various times and places, but also for very varied levels of study—from the organization of kinship systems, first studied a hundred years ago, through study of family customs, up to recent study of child-rearing practices in various cultures, practices which may be recurrent and systematic even when the participants are not consciously aware of them.

17 This development is discussed and examined at some length in Leites, Nathan, “Psycho-Cultural Hypotheses About Political Acts,” World Politics, I, No. 1 (October 1948), pp. 102–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. by Brill, A. A., New York, 1938, pp. 807–930.Google Scholar

19 A similar principle holds for the economic sphere, but the “economy” of infancy and childhood has received little attention compared with their “politics,” and has been related to adult economics only to a limited degree, though there has recendy been some anthropological interest in mis matter. A good deal of attention has been paid to the “political” problems of ordering the rights and disciplines of even the very young child, but only very recendy has mere been even much psychological interest in such a primary “economy” as the maternal-infant relationship in feeding.

20 John H. Weakland, “Chinese Family Images in International Affairs,” in Mead, and Metraux, , eds., op. cit., pp. 421–26.Google Scholar

21 Kai-shek, Chiang, China's Destiny, New York, 1947.Google Scholar

22 Kwang-tan, Pan, “A Diagnosis of American Psychosis,” translated in Chinese Press Survey, x, No. 4 (1950), pp. 88–95Google Scholar (from Kwancha, Peking, May 15, 1950).

23 This stereotype seems to be both an “official” view of the Chinese family, as pronounced by experts from Confucius on down, and also the sort of description an thropological informants give as “real.” But it is in fact an ideal, not an account of actual behavior. This tendency of the Chinese to present an ideal as real—apparently to themselves also—has caused much confusion in Western studies of China. Cf. Levy, Marion J., The Family Revolution in Modern China, Cambridge, Mass., 1949, p. 46, n. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Much of the view presented here was developed by the author and other members of the Chinese Group of Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, under the general direction of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and the specific leadership of Ruth Bunzel. See Bunzel, Ruth, “Explorations in Chinese Culture,” New York, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, 1950Google Scholar, mimeographed.

Some materials are also available in ordinary published sources that document some aspects of the view of the family given here. See, for example, Levy, op. cit.; Muensterberger, Warner, “Orality and Dependence: Characteristics of Soumern Chinese,” in Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, Vol. III, New York, 1951Google Scholar; Yang, Martin C., A Chinese Village, New York, 1945.Google Scholar

25 The importance of the mother-son relationship appears especially in stories of the careers of outstanding Chinese men, whose success is recurrently ascribed to maternal care and education, the father being dead or absent from the picture. Examples of this are Confucius and Mencius (Latourette, K. S., The Chinese: Their History and Culture, 3rd ed., New York, 1950, pp. 70, 71)Google Scholar, Yo Fei, a famous Sung Dynasty general (a common historical legend told me by a Chinese informant), and, in modern times, Dr. Hu Shih (Tsiang, Meng, “Herald of a New China,” in Ling, Ting, Our Children and Others, Hong Kong, 1947, p. 57).Google Scholar

There are also some corresponding traditional stories of fathers and daughters, especially women warriors whose skill was learned from their fathers (e.g., Mu Lan, Shih-San-Mei).

26 It might be objected that such a viewing of the Chinese family situation involves an extensive psychological interpretation of the basic information and is therefore of uncertain validity. It may be pointed out in reply that all, or nearly all, of our data on the Chinese family consist of communications received. These, like any communication, must be interpreted. To take at “face value” is an interpretation, not an avoidance of interpretation, and the simplicity of this sort of interpretation is no guarantee of accuracy in a complex situation.

27 Tsiang, Meng, “Herald of a New China,” in Ting Ling, op. cit., p. 57.Google Scholar

28 Snow, Edgar, Red Star over China, New York, 1938, p. 113.Google Scholar Here Mao himself relates the political and family spheres explicitly, though laughingly, according to Snow.

Rather similarly, a popular Chinese Communist biographical work (Chung-kuo Kung-ch'an-tang ti chung-yao jen wu [Important Persons in the Chinese Communist Party], Peiping, Min-chien Publishing Co., 1949) states that Mao's father disliked him and called him the “rebel” of the family, while his mother was agreeable and kind.

29 Snow, , op. cit., p. 130.Google Scholar

30 Belden, Jack, China Shakes the World, New York, 1949, pp. 242ff.Google Scholar