TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “China on the Mind” written by Christopher Bollas has been released in the book market across Iran.

Qoqnoos Publishing House has published the book in 208 pages with a translation by Sahar Alaee, Mehr reported.

Several thousand years ago Indo-European culture diverged into two ways of thinking; one went West, the other East. Tracing their differences, Christopher Bollas examines how these mentalities are now converging once again, notably in the practice of psychoanalysis, in this book, originally published in 2013.

Creating a freely associated comparison between Western psychoanalysts and Eastern philosophers, Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. 

On the one hand, he links this tradition to the psychoanalytic praxes of Winnicott and Khan, which he relates to Daoism in their privileging of solitude and non-verbal forms of communicating. On the other hand, Bollas examines how Jung, Bion, and Rosenfeld, assimilate the Confucian ethic that sees the individual and group mind as a collective, while Freudian psychoanalysis he argues has provided an unconscious meeting place of both viewpoints.

The first part of the book considers the mentality of the Eastern people from the perspective of psychoanalysis by centering on “The Book of Songs,” “The Book of Rites,” and “The Book of Changes”; in the second part, the author lets go his imagination to explore connections between the classics of Lao Zi, Zhuangzi and Confucius and the modern psychoanalytical thoughts; the third part discusses the social mentality of individuals and community to understand China and the far east interest in psychoanalysis.

Bollas’s intriguing book will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, Orientalists, and those concerned with cultural studies.

Christopher Bollas, 80, is a British psychoanalyst and novelist. He is a leading figure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.

He is most widely known for his psychoanalytical writings and some of his ideas have had a wide dissemination; indeed, he is one of the most widely read authors in the field of psychoanalysis. 

Aside from his clinical writings, Bollas is also a cultural critic, and his writings have earned the interest of people outside the world of psychoanalysis. He has also written three comic novels and five plays.

SS/SAB