Excerpt from paper presented at the 13th International Congress for Analytical Psychology,
August, 1995, Zurich, Switzerland
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In most Western societies, the body is a discrete entity, separate from thought and emotion. Modern Western medicine views the body as made up of nuts and bolts; the doctor is a mechanic who fixes the body as if it were a machine. In China and other Asian societies, the body is an open system linking social relations to the self; emotion and cognition are integrated into bodily processes. The traditional Chinese view treats the body as a garden; the doctor is a gardener who cultivates the garden according to the cosmic forces in the universe.
In Chinese symbolic thinking, the psychic and material aspects of a person are not differentiated. To the traditional Chinese doctor, a change effected on the physical plane automatically has a corresponding effect on the psychic plane, and vice versa.
Chinese medicine as it has been practiced through the centuries takes the emotions into account when treating illness. Emotions can disturb the internal organs and consequently the harmony and movement of Ch'i and Blood. Each organ is believed to produce a certain energy which resonates with specific emotions. Anger resonates with the Liver, joy with the Heart and Liver, worry with the Lung and Spleen, fear with the Kidneys, and shock with the Kidneys and Heart.
Psychological symptoms are explained in terms of the disturbance of Ch'i associated with the various organs. This approach has given Chinese medicine the advantage of psychosomatic integration.
The search for the tao from both Confucian and Taoist perspectives has encouraged the development of psyche-body training via meditative breathing exercises as a form of psychological intervention.
Chinese spirituality is rooted in life and in nature, and grounded in the organic unity of psyche and body. Once this unity is experienced, it becomes a way of life that can be cultivated consciously and lived.
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